Page 57 of Pretty Ruthless Monsters: Complete Series

KILLIAN

It’s early enough in the morning that it’s still dark and quiet out. The perfect time of morning for finishing up a project undisturbed.

Well, mostly undisturbed.

The sniveling cries of the two men left alive in the shipping container I’m working in break the peace a bit. But that’s a part of the job right now.

There were five of them that I went after late last night, catching them unawares. I knocked them each out and brought them here, bound and gagged and helpless. Just the way they seem to like their victims.

Then I waited patiently for them to wake up, wanting each of them to be awake when they realized what was happening—wanted them to see me standing over them, ready to strike.

The one in front of me now trembles as I stand in front of him.

His hands are bound with rough rope, pulled forward over the metal table placed conveniently inside the shipping container.

I brought it here before I got started, wanting the space set up just how I like.

There’s a gag stuffed in his mouth, but it’s not doing much to muffle the whimpers coming from him.

With precision, I lift the cleaver in my hand and then bring it down, sharp and hard, hacking through the man’s wrists and severing his hands.

Blood spills over the table, joining the pool of red that’s already coating the surface, and the man howls through the gag, the sound echoing around us.

I don’t flinch from it, and I barely hesitate as I scoop up his severed hands and set them aside. Then I pull my gun, silencer on, and put a bullet right between the man’s eyes.

It’s quicker than he deserves, but time is running short.

His body slumps down to the floor, no longer bound by the rope now that his hands are gone, and I kick him over to the small pile his comrades make in the corner.

Three of them are already dead, their hands removed and tucked away.

They’re bleeding in their pile, still bound at the feet and gagged like they were when I dragged them in here.

Among them, there’s one man left alive.

His eyes are wild, and he tries to scoot away from the growing mound of his dead friends.

He screams behind the gag, shaking his head, wrenching his arms to try to get them free.

The rope cuts into his skin, and it’s already stained with blood from how he’s pulling and twisting his wrists in the binds.

I frown, unmoved by his clear panic.

There’s nothing special about him.

There wasn’t anything special about any of them. They were all average men with unremarkable features. Members of a small gang that never amounted to anything much, who felt the need to throw their weight around and hurt someone else.

Just because they could.

None of them seem to be enjoying getting a taste of their own medicine now.

I walk closer to the man I’ve left for last, and he flinches—hard.

He’s terrified, and the smell of blood and rank sweat is thick in the shipping container.

There’s another scent too, acrid and sharp.

The coward has pissed himself in his fear, apparently.

There’s not much airflow to wash the smell away, but this far out from any potential witnesses, it doesn’t matter.

And it doesn’t bother me.

I lean down and use the tip of the cleaver to lift the man’s chin up so he can meet my eyes. He flinches again, trying to jerk away, but the cleaver is razor sharp, and just that movement nicks his chin, setting blood flowing.

He breathes hard, his nostrils flared and his chest heaving as he garbles out something that sounds like, “Please…”

I just hold his gaze, my face impassive.

“Did she say please when you grabbed her?” I ask in a quiet voice. “Did she beg you to let her go?”

Confusion flashes through his eyes, which are still wide and afraid. He tries to speak, maybe attempting to ask who I mean, and I press the cleaver harder against his skin.

“There was a girl with teal hair,” I tell him. “You and your friends violated her in an alley. She would have fought like hell to get away, but there were more of you and only one of her.”

There’s recognition in his gaze now, and I nod.

“Good. You remember. Then you should know that this isn’t a random attack.

This isn’t about gang posturing or anything like that.

This is about that girl. You never should have touched her.

If I’d known about it sooner, I would have taken care of all of you sooner.

I hope you enjoyed those extra years. I hope you made the most of them.

” I pause, then shake my head. “But you probably wasted them. Because that’s all you are. A fucking waste.”

I stand back up and grab his bound hands, yanking him to his feet and dragging him over to the table.

He tries to resist, digging his heels in, but it’s not much use.

He isn’t strong, isn’t powerful. The only reason he and his friends were able to take on Quinn was because she was badly outnumbered.

Their numbers didn’t help them this time.

I slam his hands down on the table and hold them down. He fights me as best he can, which isn’t very well at all. He gains no ground and gets nowhere.

I raise the cleaver with my other hand, and he screams again, begging wetly through the gag. It’s soaked with spit and tears, snot running down his face.

Pathetic.

In one smooth stroke, I bring the cleaver down, cutting through his wrists and the ropes.

His scream of agony is shrill and piercing. He heaves broken sobs, jerking back and trying to cradle the stumps of his bleeding wrists against his chest, like that will keep me from hurting him more.

In his thrashing, he manages to spit the gag out, the wad of material sliding down around his neck.

“Please,” he sobs. “Please, don’t kill me. We didn’t know. We didn’t know who she was or that she was—please!”

My jaw clenches, and for the first time since I stepped into this container, emotion flashes through me.

I felt nothing while killing the others, nothing while they screamed and begged and tried to shout threats through the fabric stuffed into their mouths.

Killing them was just another thing on my to-do list for the night, and it was no less than they deserved.

But now there’s… irritation. A bit of anger sparking inside me at the audacity of this fucker to beg me for his life.

“I can pay you,” he continues. “Anything you want! I’ve… I’ve got access to money. Drugs, guns, whatever you want! Just, please. Please let me?—”

“I asked you a question before,” I say, cutting him off, my voice low and intent. “Did she beg too?”

His face is swollen with the force of his crying, snotty and bloody and foul. He shakes his head, trying to drag his body away from me.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” I huff a humorless laugh. “Because she’s braver than you’ll ever be.”

“We—”

Whatever he was going to say is cut off by me shooting him in the kneecap.

He screams in pain, going down hard on the metal floor of the shipping container. Without hands, he can’t really get very far, and he flops around like a worm, trying to use whatever momentum he can get to put distance between us.

But there’s nowhere for him to go. It’s not a large shipping container, and there’s a pile of his friends’ dead bodies behind him.

I don’t even advance on him that quickly as I follow, cleaver in one hand, gun in the other.

I roll him over onto his back with my foot and then shoot him again, this time in the stomach—low enough that he’s guaranteed to die from it, but not quickly.

He twitches, gurgling blood as he bleeds out from all of his wounds, his horrified eyes dimming more and more as he gasps for air.

While I wait, I gather up my things, cleaning up the scene as best I can. I wipe down the blade of the cleaver, then scoop all the hands up into a waterproof bag and tie off the top of it, tucking that and my weapons back into my work bag.

The man finally dies, going still on the floor. I glance around to make sure there’s nothing left behind, then pull out the accelerant I brought with me, dousing the shipping container in it.

Once I step out of the small space, I toss a match in behind me, and the whole thing is ablaze in a matter of seconds.

The flames snap and crackle as the shipping container goes up in smoke. I don’t turn back to look at it as I leave, striding away with purpose with the bag in my hand as I go.

The sky is just starting to lighten, the smell of morning dew hanging in the air. I was out all night collecting my prey, going after each of the men who attacked Quinn.

Thinking about her makes me think about last night, when I walked into the living room to see her being fucked by Nico and Atlas.

She was so fucking beautiful, her eyes hazy, her body trembling as they overloaded her with pleasure.

There was something wild about her in that moment.

Something I’ve never seen before, even in all the times I fucked her at Le Bal Masque.

She was wild and ravenous, taking all the pleasure she wanted. Everything she deserved.

More than anything, I wanted to stride into the room and let her know I was there. That I was watching. Even if she hadn’t let me touch her, it would have been enough for her to know that I was there.

I didn’t do any of that, though.

There was something I had to do that was more important. It’s been gnawing at me ever since she told me about what happened to her, knowing those men who hurt her were still out there. So I decided to do something about it.

I know she’s still pissed at me about the stalking and not telling her who I was at the beginning of all of this, when she and Nico agreed to marry each other. I also know that she might never forgive me for it. But I won’t apologize, because I’m not fucking sorry.

It’s a long trip back home, and by the time I get there, it’s later in the morning. The sun is fully up, and there are lights on in the house.

Quinn is in the kitchen when I walk inside, sitting at the table with a bowl in front of her, eating cereal absentmindedly as she looks at something on her phone.

I walk in, and she glances up at the sound of my footsteps. Our gazes meet, and a flurry of emotions flash in her eyes. Anger, heat, distrust. She doesn’t say anything, but it’s all there to see if you know how to read her. And I do.

I don’t say anything either, but she’s used to that by now. Instead, I just put the bag on the table in front of her.

“What’s this?” she asks, frowning.

I don’t answer, just nod to the bag for her to open it.

She sighs, rolling her eyes before opening the bag and peering inside. She sucks in a sharp breath as she sees the contents, and when she looks back up at me, her eyes are wide.

“What is this?” she asks again. “What did you…”

“It’s the hands of everyone who touched you that night,” I tell her simply. “I know it won’t banish the darkness of what happened—nothing can do that. But I thought it might help to know that they’re in an even darker place now.”

My tone stays even, but I can tell from the way Quinn leans back in her chair that she gets my meaning.

Her gray eyes don’t move away from me as she stares at my face, clearly caught off guard by my actions.

She licks her lips, but before she can say anything, Nico and Atlas stride into the kitchen, speaking in quiet voices as they finish up whatever conversation they were having on the way downstairs.

Atlas glances at Quinn’s bowl and nods approvingly. “Is there more milk?” he asks, and Quinn just nods back, clearly still at a loss for words.

Nico frowns at her and comes over to the table.

“What’s this?” he asks, unknowingly echoing her question from a moment ago.

She doesn’t answer, and neither do I, so he peers down into the open bag himself. He reels back when he sees the contents, his eyes flicking between Quinn and me. Of the two of us, it’s probably not hard to determine who brought a bag of hands into the house.

“What the fuck , Killian?” Nico grimaces. “On the table?”

“What?” Atlas comes over and looks into the bag as well, then makes a disgusted face. “I didn’t think I was ever going to have to say that disembodied hands don’t belong in the kitchen, but here we fucking are.”

“We eat at this table,” Nico continues. “Who the fuck knows where these hands have been?”

“Killian knows,” Atlas says. “Not that that makes it better. I don’t think anything is going to make ‘bag of hands for breakfast’ better.”

“Do we need to have a designated place in the house for miscellaneous body parts?” Nico asks. “Is this going to be a thing?”

“Please, no. I don’t think I can handle that,” Atlas groans. “I’m all for chopping someone’s hands off if they deserve it, but can we leave them outside?”

I’m barely listening to them as they bitch about it, my focus only on Quinn.

She looks like she’s trying to process this, and I can’t tell if she’s pleased by the gift or just confused.

“Why?” she finally asks, her voice soft.

“I did what your father would have done if he had known,” I tell her. “I gave them what they deserved.”