Chapter 14

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

NEO

I 'm on Carl before he can reach his desk phone, pressing against his back as my blade sinks into his throat.

"That won't help you now," I snarl, my lips dusting over his ear.

Pushing against my blade, he slides his hand over his desk as Lyla clicks on the small desk lamp. His cell phone dangles from her hand as she swivels in his chair, her feet perched atop all the evidence we've compiled and laid on the top of the desk.

"Looking for this?" she asks.

There's usually instability in her eyes that I'm fucking addicted to, but not today.

Something about the Hatt's case has woken a portion of my stupid girl I thought I'd never see again.

She's aware.

Awake.

Even though she will still kill for me—with me—I know there's a shift within her that'll never leave her after London.

And I love it.

It's as if she's witnessed the darkness beyond the cloud of neurosis that we reside in and realized she's a bit more sane than she gave herself credit for.

"Who are you people?"

I sigh, turning my blade on its side and letting it slip over Carl's throat. The tip presses in firmly once over his Adam's apple, and he stiffens.

"It's always the same shit," I complain.

"Who are you?" Lyla muses.

"How did you get in here?" I add.

The taunting before the kill has never been my thing. It's Lyla's, but it seems she's bred something in me unwittingly because now it's become what livens my soul before I paint my skin with blood.

"I'll give you whatever you want. Is it money? I have money!" Carl pleads.

I remove my blade, and something in his eyes grows confident before Lyla stands and trains her gun on him, a sick grin on her face.

His hands slowly raise in defense as I tap my blade on my shoulder, moving toward the windowsill to lean against it.

I pull one booted foot up to press against the wall.

Lyla motions for him to sit in the office chair behind his desk as she moves to the front of the desk.

"Go on. You wanted to see what this is about, so we've compiled a bit of a project presentation for you," she teases, her grin deepening as the dimples in her cheeks sink inward.

Her dark hair is askew tonight, some of it tumbling out of a messy bun on her head, and as a glint of contentment moves through her eyes, my cock stiffens behind my dark jeans.

Carl slowly moves and sits in the chair, always watching Lyla and her weapon.

Wise of him, she can be a loose cannon when no one has eyes on her.

"What is this?!" he whispers, and we allow him the space to look over the case we've made against him.

Lyla had done so well for me, arranging an array of evidence against the man. She knew I needed it.

While the inkier side of me has killed for thrills without reason before, I need this when it comes to my baser motivations.

I need to know I've rid the world of infirmity.

And Carl is the very definition.

"This isn't what it looks like," Carl starts as he realizes we know what he's been up to.

Lyla laughs, and my eyes snap to her, forgetting all about my prey as the malaise I placed inside her rises to the surface.

"So, you didn't poison your children all those years you were supposed to protect and love them?" she asks, and I can't take my eyes off her nor add a word edgewise.

There's an indication in her tone that has the hairs raised on my body. She's not questioning Carl for the Hatt children.

She's here to spill blood for me.

The one she's here to defend is me.

She can't have her revenge on my mother; I've already dealt with that. But she can have her revenge on Carl.

This is my kill, but even knowing that I want to sit back and watch someone else protect me, kill for me.

Even while I've witnessed her kill on command—my command—it's wholly different from her slaughtering in my name.

To defend the innocent I once was.

The damaged little boy in my psyche wants to cling to her leg as she spills Carl's blood in my defense, worshiping the ground she walks on like she's the angel of death.

I created her, but she invoked this in me.

This love that now drives me to look at her over all else.

Even while my prey sits before me, I can only focus on her.

"I did it for Anne. She's the one you want."

I scoff, returning to reality as I push off the sill. "So you're still going to let your wife take the blame? I came here to kill her. I'll not deny it, but she's not the blood I'll end up slathering on my skin tonight, Carl."

My words have tears springing from the man's eyes. They roll over his flushed cheeks, and the blood pooling in them calls to me.

It's like a morning songbird calling to the rising sun, this twisted need in my gut.

And tonight, I'll answer it.

"I would've never done it if Anne didn't need to always feel loved so often. She wanted her kids to need her more, so I made that happen."

His defense is weak, and it only makes anger unfurl through the cords of muscle in my neck as I roll it.

Lyla looks at me, never dropping her gun away from Carl; in fact, I hear the moment she squeezes the trigger harder, and so does Carl because he straightens in his chair. "Want me to bring her in?"

"Bring who in?" Carl panics.

I smile, lifting my hand and tucking some of Lyla's hair behind her ear. "You're so beautiful tonight, stupid girl."

She preens, closing her eyes and allowing my touch to ground her.

"Bring her in," I answer, giving my command as I take her gun and point it at Carl.

Lyla steps into the hall, grabbing Ada—who's strapped to a rolling desk chair we'd found in her bedroom.

She's gagged, but the screams behind the gag are incessant once she's in the room with us.

Lyla pulls a blade, brushing it over her face. "Quiet, toy. Too much screaming makes me giddy. When I'm excited, I can't be trusted to keep my cool," she tells the Hatt girl, and my cock twitches as I groan.

"Fucking her daughter. Was that for Anne's benefit, too?" I ask him, and he grips the arms of the chair in his hands, knuckles turning white.

He's a fit man—in his forties—with a full head of blond hair and a sculpted body. I can see the appeal his stepdaughter had for him.

Even if I still find the game these two have been playing sick.

How Ada could turn the other cheek and allow her siblings to be continually abused is the thing that Lyla couldn't let go of. So, we captured, tortured, and questioned the little beast.

Our findings were that the girl had no soul, likely because of whatever the concoction of cleaners and poisons had done to her gray matter over the years.

"That wasn't my fault!"

I roll my eyes. "It seems nothing you do is your fault."

Carl shudders, and I know it's reality bleeding into his diseased brain.

Moving around the desk, I keep the gun on him. When I get behind his chair, I roll him beneath the desk further as I press the Glock to his temple.

"Do you see that blinking light over there in the corner?"

He shakes under my weapon, and the scent of piss permeates the room as he soils himself.

"Answer me!" I shout; my voice is full of incurable insanity.

"Ye—yes!" he stammers.

"That's what will be left behind after your death."

While it's not recording video, it is recording audio for apparent purposes. Anne will know her husband's and daughter's voices better than anyone else in the universe.

The woman has been tormented half her life, and she deserves to know the truth.

It's unlikely he's given it to her all these years. It's more likely he let her think she was the culprit and was slipping into some delusion of grandeur as she poisoned her children.

"She's going to have peace once you're gone, Carl."

He closes his eyes and nods, and the tension in his body subsides beneath my gun.

"Tell her, Carl. Tell her what you did," I prod.

It only takes thirty minutes for all his sins to be laid bare on tape; it takes even less for my blade to slice his throat open, nearly severing his head from his neck.

His lifeless eyes stare at the ceiling as the screams of Ada Hatt have been silenced by my stupid girl's knife. Her head is lolled to the side, blood leaking from her lips and dripping to the floor.

Lyla removes the tape from the recorder, pocketing it to edit and send to Anne Hatt when the time is right.

As I'm cutting off each finger Carl used to poison his children with, I feel a touch on my shoulder before Lyla crouches behind me, and her lips skims my ear.

"Almost done, madman?" her husky tone implies much more than she says, and I groan as the feel of it skims my infected cortex.

"Almost," I tell her as I dislocate the last finger to make removing it easier. The crack of it charges the buzz in my veins, and I shiver against it.

I don't watch Lyla as she moves away from my back. I'm too engrossed in defiling my prey, exposing him to the investigators that'll eventually come.

The evidence is sprawled out on the desk as I lay each finger to point at the main bullet points I want to hit, blood seeping into some of the pages from the severed ends of the appendages.

When I look up, my heart nearly stops.

Lyla is at the door, hand about to turn the handle as if she's going to leave here without giving me what my demented soul needs to finish this job.

As much as I've sated the urge to kill, I haven't appeased another hunger. One that she's deluded me with.

She thinks she's the only one whose coupling has forever transformed, and she's wrong.

Now, when I spill blood, I have also to have release.

With her.

"Where the fuck do you think you're going?" I growl, and she stops and turns back, tossing a sidelong glance at me.

There's a mocking sneer on her lips, and it riles anger in my veins.

"The job is done," she says, and I drop the last finger, not caring where it lands .

"Kneel," I command, my voice harsh, but I know she won't take it to heart.

She doesn't listen, however.

I storm across the room, fisting her hair and yanking her head back. "Do you think it wise to disobey me? I told you early on that you'd need to comply with the Butcher's commands, stupid girl. Now is not the time to test me."

Not when the scent of blood is heavy in the air, and my soul is filled to the brim with malice.

"Make me," she prods, her tone dour.

"You stupid fucking girl," I grind out, using her hair to shove her to the floor.

Her knees buckle under the pressure, and she falls to her knees beneath me.

I pull my blade, running it the length of her cheek as I toy the tip under the lower swell of her eye.

She hisses but doesn't recoil. "What will you do to me?"

"For your disobedience?"

She nods.

My other hand frees my cock from the tight confines of the jeans it's been hard against for hours.

"I'll remind you who the fuck you belong to," I tell her, slapping my dick against her face.

"Suck, you rebellious little whore!" I growl, hissing, as her tongue slinks out and laps at the pre-cum at the tip of my length.

When she sinks me into the swelter of her mouth, my knees nearly buckle.

Murder and mayhem are knotting together in the air surrounding us, and it alone is enough to make me feel unstable .

But the clutch of Lyla's mouth? That's enough to make me fucking feral.

Psychotic, even.

"Harder, suck me harder," I plead, forgetting who's in charge altogether as I press the tip of my blade into the side of her neck.

She moans and does as she's told.

A maniacal laugh makes its way from my throat. "There's my delusional, stupid girl. Suck your husband's cock like the murderous little slut I know you are. Suck it good, and I'll let you come."

She speeds her mouth on my dick, adding a hand to jerk me simultaneously. The action has my body burning, and my knees bend, bowing slightly in surrender.

She knows who's in charge, and it's not me.

It's never been me.

Since she crawled across the floor of that asylum with my pills on her tongue, I've been at her fucking mercy, gobbling up the bits she'd give like a starving man.

"There's my girl, not so fucking stupid after all. Gag on it," I manage, my voice sounding like it's grinding over sandpaper.

She gags, and the noise fills the otherwise silent space, besides the sloppy drags of her mouth on my cock.

"I'm going to come. Fuck, I'm going to come. You'd best swallow it all, stupid love. Don't waste an ounce of the Butcher's cum."

When she doesn't respond, I use my one empty hand to backhand her cheek the best I can from my angle above. "Do you fucking hear me?"

She moans in answer, and I know she's still with me.

Ready to taste my spunk on her hungry tongue .

"Oh fuck, Lyla!" My body bows forward, knees bending as I come in long thrums in her mouth.

She swallows each one, fighting for air.

"Good fucking girl," I tell her, placing my blade beneath her chin and tipping her face up to me as I straighten, cock still hard and ready to sink into her murderous little body.

Tears streak down her face, and there's spit glistening on her chin as she breathes heavily, looking up at me from below like I'm her god and she's here to worship at my altar.

"Fuck, you cry so pretty for me."