Page 47

The Omniscient

T hirty minutes later Veronica is still pacing her room, her phone clutched in a white-knuckled grip, teeth gnawing at the raw skin of her fingernails.

Her heart jackhammers, her head swims, and a cold sweat clings to her back. Every call she makes to Ian redirects to voicemail. Every failed attempt feeds her terror. How will she reach him? How does she tell him to run? How will she save him from that monster on a rampage?

Kael.

His name slithers into her thoughts. She has been so fixated on the prey that she forgot to track the predator. If she can locate Kael, she can figure out how much time Ian has left…if he has any at all.

With a swipe of her thumb, she dials.

“H-hey,” she stutters, her voice a breathless tremor. One hand fists the hem of her jean skirt, the other dragging through her hair, nails scraping against her scalp.

“Well, hello.” Kael’s voice is velvet-dipped poison, thick with something rotten. His hand—coated in blood—presses the phone to his ear as his other hand wrenches the dagger from Ian Petrakis’s thigh. His blade exits with a sickening, wet sound, and Ian—too weak to scream—whimpers.

“W-where are you?” Veronica asks, her trembling hand hovering over her mouth, then scrubbing her face before diving into her hair again.

“Good question.” Kael drags a chair closer and sinks into it, his gloved fingers flexing around the dagger’s handle. Blood slithers down the steel, fat crimson drops hitting the floor in rhythmic succession. “Where are we all and where are we heading anyway?”

Frustration coils tight in Veronica’s chest. She peels the phone from her ear, staring at the screen as if it will somehow reveal the truth he is hiding. “Kael,” she grits, pressing the phone back against her ear. “Where are you? No, what are you doing?”

“Currently or…?” He lets the word stretch, teasing.

His gaze drifts to the pack of Marlboro on the table, a discovery from earlier. Mood shifting, he rises, retrieves a cigarette from the nearly empty pack, and slots it between his lips.

“Currently, Kael.” Her voice sharpens, a bite of frustration leaking through.

He notices her tone. Snarky. Demanding.

She will pay for that.

“I’m,” he exhales a slow, deliberate breath, eyes drinking in the sight of Ian—pale, shivering, cradling the mangled leg like a kid clutching a broken toy. “I’m in a house, watching a murder documentary.”

“A murder documentary?” Her brows furrow. She takes the phone from her ear, checks the screen, and then presses it back, confusion knitting tighter around her bones.

“Mhmm.” Kael digs his pocket for his zippo, pulling it out and lighting the end of his cigarette. He sinks back into his seat, legs crossing over the other.

Veronica clings to the possibility that he is being literal. That he is merely watching, not orchestrating. That there is still a chance to stop him.

“I know you are angry, okay?” She forces persuasion into her voice, though it wobbles like a leaf in a storm. “I know but please, don’t hurt him.”

Kael stills. His jaw tightens. His fingers flex. Something dark and festering crawls up his throat, thick and suffocating.

“Can you hear me?” she presses when silence stretches too long.

His grip on the phone tightens. The bitter taste of jealousy seeps into his mouth like bile. His breath turns low and heavy, each one an ember feeding a growing inferno.

“Yes.”

“It’s not him,” she pleads. “It’s me. If you want to punish anyone, it’s me. Please just leave Ian alone. Don’t do anything to him. Don’t hurt him, please don’t, I’m begging you.”

A sound bubbles in Kael’s chest—a grotesque hybrid of laughter and rage. His free hand trembles, a foreign sensation, as his fury thickens into something unbearable.

How dare she? How dare she beg for mercy on his behalf?

The fire in his chest ignites into an unholy blaze. His vision blurs, tinted red, black, red.

This is her fault. She opened her legs for another man. She lets another man’s hand wander where only his should touch. She lets another taste what only belonged to him.

She is his, but another man touched her. And she dares to command him? Tell him what to do? How to handle his rage?

Kael’s fingers dig into the dagger’s hilt until his knuckles turn white. His lips curl, eyes deadened by something bottomless and bleak.

“Kael,” she whispers, her voice cracking under the weight of his silence. He can hear the tears clinging to her throat, and can almost taste her despair.

“Don’t hurt him.”

She is still fucking giving orders.

His lips twitch into something cruel. “Okay,” he murmurs, then ends the call.

The room fills with a sound that is neither scream nor a cry but something primal, something that shouldn’t come from a human’s throat. It’s the sound of flesh parting, of agony, of justice carved into bone.

He drives the dagger into the other thigh, twisting.

The poor bastard sobs, body writhing in agony, his voice raw and strangled.

Kael watches, mesmerized, as blood pools, staining the floorboard and seeping into the cracks.

Next weapon will be the axe, chopping off his legs. He will severe it from the thighs—the fucking thighs she probably strapped as she rode his little cock.

Then his arms, the same ones that held her naked body flushed against him. The next will be his fucking fingers, the same fingers he probably drove into her pussy, or touched her face with, whisking away the wet hair matting to her face due to the sweat from all the fucking locomotive.

Then he will reach into his chest and carve out his heart with his bare hands, feeling its final beat in his palm.