Page 80 of Sweet Venom

Unceremoniously.

Scratch that. Preston kind of carved him the fuck up. He’s a mess of cut flesh and rotten insides spilling out on the ground of the forest.

His face is disfigured, and a knife is lodged in his right eye while the other one hangs out of its socket, dangling against the exposed bone of his cheek.

“What a fucking mess.” Kane looks at the body slumped on the ground as he sheathes his gun with a silencer in the holster strapped to his side.

The three of us are dressed in black, but Kane is the only one without any splashes of blood on his face or hands.

I’m wearing gloves, but I felt the warmth splattering my neck when I stabbed the scum earlier.

Preston kneels by his handiwork and pokes the corpse on the forehead as if checking for any sign of the life he snuffed out with his bare hands.

When the dead man doesn’t even flinch, Preston grins maniacally, blood streaking his hair like red highlights, staining his teeth, forming rivulets down his face and dripping from his chin.

“You mean a masterpiece.” He flicks the handle of his knife that’s lodged in the man’s eye, making it wobble, then taps his scraped cheek. “You were a good sport, number ten.”

I cross my arms, standing beside Kane and looking down at him. “I remember telling you not to kill my targets, Pres.”

“Finders killers.”

“It’s finders keepers.”

“I meant it the other way. Shut it.” He jumps up, stretching and cracking his neck, still wearing his manic expression like a second skin.

He’s high.

While Preston does love the chase and the high of killing, he doesn’t usually carve them the fuck up as if he has a personal issue with them.

The last time he did this was with that scum teacher we killed at twelve at the boarding school after Kane and I found him sexually assaulting Pres.

Kane punched the teacher, and I held him down, then gave Preston a knife to take his own revenge. He stabbed him in the eyes. Over and over again. Then in the throat.

It was a bloody mess and the three of us looked like extras in a cheap snuff film afterward.

However, the huge smile on Pres’s face was worth it. Especially compared to the dead look in his eyes when we first found him.

Naturally, Kane and I got punished by our dads.

Preston, however, started his unconventional journey with mental illness diagnoses, ranging from antisocial personality disorder to bipolar, psychosis, and a basket full of issues in between.

He was ping-ponged between several clinical psychiatrists who worked for Vencor and was given several experimentalmedications, courtesy of my father and Julian, until he finally, only recently—and by recently, I mean since we started college—got himself under control for the most part.

I sayfor the most partbecause he relapses sometimes.

Kane and I always make sure he’s not alone, because his depressive episodes are brutal, and the last time he went through one, the last year of high school, he threw himself off the roof of the Armstrong mansion and fractured multiple bones. He was lucky he didn’t hit his head and die.

He also tends to be excessively violent and unpredictable, which is why I prefer he joins me on my personal vendetta hunts than go and stab a random person on the street just because they got in his way. Or supervise Vencor members on their missions, then become theatrical and put them and himself in danger.

It happened last week, when he chopped up the mayor’s aide into tiny pieces, then sent them to the mayor. Yes, the aide did betray Vencor, but the mayor was the one who reported him.

In Preston’s words, “He needs the visual so he doesn’t think of doing anything funny.”

He got punished for that by the organization by being whipped seventy-five times. Kane and I volunteered to take twenty-five each despite Pres’s objections. Not only because he would have become a drama king during the recovery period, but, really, we needed to remind him of the consequences of his actions, because they truly seem to fly over his head most of the time.

Despite his constant threats to go find new friends, Kane and I know we’re the most important people in Pres’s life, and as his friends, we have to keep him in check. Which is why I’ve been shadowing him ever since that incident.

I still don’t like that he kills my victims, but tonight’s particular scum was an elementary school teacher who’s facing allegations of sexually assaulting his students. And while nothing was official, the accusations were enough for Pres to go all out.