Page 58 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

It wasn’t often I offered a fresh and untainted canvas for them to have fun with.

“Teach the newcomer.” Pulling a chair from underneath the wobbling kitchen table, I plopped down, folding my arms on the backrest before me.

This was becoming boring. I enjoyed playing with those abhorrent servants of Ilasall. But our own people turning against us churned my gut. Betrayal contaminated their blood and sucked all the fun out of it.

From time to time, some idiots would decide living in our compound wasn’t enough. Gedeon had made sure everyone hadenough to live as comfortably as possible, yet fools would pop up here and there, seeking to earn more money at the cost of others.

Disgusting.

This idiot with his friends had been hanging over our heads for months, as none of the shop owners would tell us who extorted them. Thank the gods Ava’s friend had caught one of them in the act and followed him back to this apartment, where he now cried and begged our newcomer to cease carving his face.

Ava was instructing the newcomer woman, barely over twenty or so, how to cut and stab someone to maximize pain without them losing consciousness or leaving us too soon. A peculiar skill. Took time to learn. The man’s wails mixed with her squeaks of joy and Ava’s praise for a job well done.

“Stop, stop! Please, I’ll tell you everything,” he pleaded.

I rose from my seat and stalked to where he’d ceased resisting the restraints, having surrendered to the ropes securing him to the chair. Calculated cuts crisscrossed his cheeks, flaps of his prickly skin exposing the inside of his mouth to the air, the lines as precise as the ones deepening the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes. They hadn’t so much as started on anything below his chin yet.

“Nice job,” I praised our newcomer, a tall woman, her russet hair weaved atop her head like a crown. Obviously, a tip she’d picked up from Ava. “Name?”

“Amari,” she said, wiping her knife on her denim shorts and leaving a stain behind.

“Train her,” I told Ava. “We’re keeping her.”

Ava embraced Amari in a quick hug, whispering something in her ear that made her smile wide.

Amari had passed her trial. All newcomers in my catch-and-play team had to survive one. You couldn’t know how you’d act faced with inflicting pain on others without trying it. Some threwup and had to go work elsewhere, but others, like Amari, were destined to be more than great.

“Talk.” I yanked the man’s head back.

His yelp morphed into a cry as the incisions at the corners of his lips tore apart. His salty tears streaming in rivulets burned his wounds, and his wailing intensified.

If he wished to become his own torturer, who was I to say no?

“Everyone lives in the central district.” His snot trickled into his mouth, and he choked, sniffling. “We meet here once a week before visiting the stores’ owners.”

“Who are they? I need full names. And whereexactlydo they live?” I asked, as Amari returned from the bedroom and secured a strip of the white bedsheet around the stab wound in his thigh to staunch the bleeding.

Couldn’t have him dying on us.

The man choked out the names and locations, spilling additional details even without being asked. What kind of a ring were they hoping to run if they gave up so easily?

“We’ll round them up,” Ava assured me. “Any ideas on punishment?”

“Keep them all alive. Including this one. We’ll go public and use the main square.”

Alive didn’t mean intact.

Leaving my team to handle the mess, I strode out of the building. Red was the most beautiful color, but I wasn’t scrubbing it out of the floors. I wiped my favorite blade clean on my jeans, returned it to its sheath strapped to my right upper arm, and wandered down the streets toward the shops they had extorted.

What wasshedoing right now? Gedeon had forbidden me from taking things further with Kali, understandably, but I was still going to stab him for keeping me away from her. And then paint his chest in crimson pouring out of him and lick?—

Nope.

Not going there.

Yesterday, I’d kept an eye on her from outside the restaurant where she’d eaten and laughed with Eislyn, Ryder, and Jayla. She could sing with her laugh, and I craved to taste the sound of it. Would it be sweet, sour, salty, bitter, or a combination of all?

Eislyn had nagged me to let her take Kali away for the day. I would’ve made my way, but Eislyn was so tiny and yet so feisty. Like a cat after a bowl of milk. She was truly the cutest addition to us, but the snapshot of how she’d looked walking down the Ilasall’s street, adorned by multiple bruises and a green wristband, had compelled me to concede. She deserved to get what she wanted. But this would be her wish for the week.