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SEEDS OF INIQUITY – Book #4 In the Company of Killers

J.A. Redmerski

Something inside of me snaps, and my eyes spring open wildly in my face. I scream out something I can’t even decipher and finally get my fingers between the chain and my throat. I pull it away with everything in me, spurred on by rage and vengeance and the will to live, until I overpower her and set my neck free, slamming her legs down against the floor.

She starts to crawl away on her hands and knees in the direction of my overturned chair. I leap to my feet, pulling Pearlfrom my boot before I’m fully upright, and I’m standing over her with the blade against her throat and the back of her hair in my fist, pulling her neck back as far as it’ll go without snapping.

“I’ll cut off more than your finger, bitch!”

She freezes; her hips and pelvis and legs pressed against the floor; the whites of her eyes visible to me as I stand over her from behind.

“Where is Dina?!” I yank on her scalp, pulling her neck back even farther; if she even flinches the wrong way the blade will break the skin and she knows it. “Fuck these games of yours! Tell me where you took her!”

“Come closer and I’ll tell you,” she says with difficulty, her voice strained.

Without even thinking about it I do, but I keep the blade against her throat as I sit down on her back.

“Try anything and I’ll kill you,” I growl, my lips next to her ear.

She doesn’t try to fight back, but I’m not feeling defeat from her. It’s something else. That confidence about her that I’ve grown to despise. Even though I’m the one sitting on top of her, the one with the knife pressed to her throat, I can’t help feel like she’s still the one in control.

“Where is she?” I whisper harshly against the side of her face.

“If you want Dina Gregory to live,” she says, still in a whisper too low for the audio to pick up, “then you and I need to have a talk about the specifics of the relationship you had with Javier Ruiz.”

It feels like an eternity that I sit on top of her, straddling her back, lost in some kind of stunned submission. I can’t find words. Or my heartbeat. And my mind is running away from me.

Then my knife hand begins to tremble and my breathing becomes unsteady.

I slide the knife away from her throat, push her head down forcibly against the tile with the other hand, shoving myself angrily to my feet and off of her. I don’t look at her when she gets up, struggling into a stand with her ankles bound. And I look only at the floor when she shuffles right past me, picking up her black heels along the way, and goes back over to her seat on the other side of the table.

I keep my back to her, unable to move; my eyes beginning to burn from the angry tears pushing their way to the surface. My knife is gripped within my hand firmly, resting down at my side. I feel like using it on myself.

“Shall we begin?” Nora says as calmly as ever, waiting for me at the table.