Page 42 of The Butcher's Wife

He crashes into me, throwing me into the car and pressing his body against mine. My head bounces off the hood, and a flash of pain blinds me.

“Got you, bitch,” a strange man says.

Fear plunges me into cold shock, freezing me to the spot. The man has my whole body pinned to the car like a bug. I can’t move. I cry out in a weak voice.

“This is for Frederico.”

My heart stops. The stranger’s hot breath ghosts over my cheek, and he slides me across the car door. I scrabble at the metal, barely able to gain purchase in a seam of the door with my acrylic nails.

His hands jerk away from me, and the weight of his body disappears. He spits out a curse.

I don’t do anything brave. I don’t even beg. I tuck into myself against the car door and cower, anticipating more pain.

A familiar, booming laugh sounds behind me. “Of all the stupid motherfuckers they could’ve sent. Are you fucking kidding me, Mikey?”

Dom?

I hold my breath and turn.

Dom, looking like an angry grizzly bear in his brown fur-trimmed coat, pins a smaller man I don’t recognize onto the road. The other man—Mikey—struggles, and Dom laughs cruelly as Mikey’s cheek grinds into the asphalt.

A huge, ugly gash rides up Dom’s swollen left eye to his hairline. His face is covered in blood, but that doesn’t stop him from grinning at the man underneath him.

Red flushes Mikey’s face, and dark blood streams from his nose as he fights against Dom. The parking lot’s empty. Carlo and his friends are nowhere to be found.

A few feet away, a knife glistens in the streetlights.

“This has nothing to do with you,” Mikey spits.

He cries out as Dom scrapes the side of his face into the road. I glimpse Mikey’s scarlet cheek—raw like ground beef. Dom’s palm is cut and smears more blood onto Mikey’s face.

My stomach churns, but I can’t look away from Dom’s brutality.

He’s doing this for me.

“Is that what they told you?” Dom laughs like Mikey told him a great joke. “You wanna know why they picked you? Because you’re the only man fucking stupid enough to go after the Butcher’s wife.”

Dom glances up at me, his one open eye dark and hard like flint, and his grin falters a little. My breath catches.

“Let me go,” Mikey says. “I didn’t know!”

Dom’s grin grows wider as he looks back down at him. “Of course you didn’t. Now, Mikey, where am I starting? Your fingers? Nose? How about a foot? Maybe I cut off your dick and call it a day, huh?”

Mikey’s eyes go wide, and he flounders against Dom with renewed effort. “No, no! Come on, Dom! Please, I’m sorry! I didn’t know!”

With some effort, Mikey scrapes his face against the road to look up at me. The look he gives me freezes me in place—the Hail Mary of an evil man.

But I don’t want to save him. He was going to kill me.

Dom pulls out a wicked-looking knife from a holster on his leg.

“You’re dying tonight, Mikey, make no bones about it. But you can do one useful fucking thing in your life and tell me who gave you this job. You know who I work for. I’ll find out either way, but I sure will be grateful to get a faster answer from you. Maybe you can make it to hell with all your parts intact.”

Mikey groans through gritted teeth, his facial features squeezing together in agony.

“Time’s up, Mikey.”

“Wait! Wait,” Mikey screams. “The Chiarellis. The Chiarellis have a hit out on her.”