Page 96 of Villains Series

FOUR WEEKS AGO

MERIT SUBURBS

MARCUS Andover Riggins had always been a man of routines.

An espresso in the morning, a bourbon before bed. Every Monday after breakfast, he got a massage, and every Wednesday at lunch, he swam laps, and every Friday night, rain or shine, from dusk until dawn, he played poker. Four or five members of Tony Hutch’s crew all got together weekly at Sam McGuire’s place, since Sam was single—or at least, he wasn’t married. He had a rotation of sorts, a new girl every week, but none of them stuck.

Sam’s was a nice place—they were all nice places—but he had a bad habit of leaving the back door unlocked instead of giving any of his short-term girls a key. Marcella had warned him a dozen times—someone could walk right in. But Sam would just smile, and say that no man would walk in on one of Tony Hutch’s crew.

Perhaps, but Marcella Riggins was no man.

She let herself inside.

The back door gave onto the kitchen, where Marcella found a girl doubled over, ass in the air and head in the freezer, as she rummaged for ice. She wobbled in too-high heels, bangles clanging against the freezer, but the first thing Marcella noticed was the girl’s dress. Dark blue silk, with a short rippling skirt—the same one that had hung for more than a year in Marcella’s own closet at the Heights.

The girl straightened, and turned, her mouth forming a perfect pink circle.

Bethany.

Bethany, who had twice as many tits as thoughts.

Bethany, who asked about Marcus every time they met.

Bethany, who looked like a cheap knockoff of Marcella in those diamond earrings, that stolen dress, which wasn’t stolen, of course, because the apartment in town had also been kept for her.

Bethany’s eyes went wide.

“Marcella?”

“Did you always know,”

she’d asked Marcus once, undoing the buttons on a blood-stained shirt.

“that you had what it took to end a life?”

“Not until the gun was in my hand,”

he’d said.

“I thought it would be hard, but in that moment, nothing was easier.”

He was right.

But there was, it turned out, a crucial difference between destroying things and destroying people.

People screamed.

Or at least they tried. Bethany certainly would have, if Marcella hadn’t already grabbed her by the throat, hadn’t eroded through her vocal cords before anything more than a short, futile gasp could escape.

And even then, the men in the other room might have heard, if they hadn’t been laughing so loudly.

It didn’t take long.

One second Bethany’s mouth was open in a perfect O of surprise and the next her plump skin had shriveled, her face twisting into a rictus grin that quickly pulled away to reveal the skull beneath, and then even that turned to ash, as all that was left of Bethany crumbled to the kitchen floor.

It was over so fast—there was hardly any time for Marcella to savor what she’d done, and no time to think about all the things she should be feeling, given the circumstances, or even to wonder at their peculiar absence.

It was just so easy.

As if everything had wanted to come apart.

There was probably some law about that.

Order giving way to chaos.

Marcella took up a dishcloth and wiped the dust from her fingers as another raucous laugh cut through the house. Then a familiar voice called out.

“Doll, where’s that drink?”

Marcella followed the voice down the short hall that ran between the kitchen and the den where the men were playing.

“Where the fuck is my drink?”

bellowed Marcus, chair scraping back. He was on his feet when she walked in.

“Hello, boys.”

Marcus didn’t have to feign surprise, since he’d expected her to be dead. His face drained of all color—what was the phrase, oh yes: as if he’d just seen a ghost. The other four men squinted through the haze of liquor and cigar smoke.

“Marce?”

said her husband, voice laced with shock.

Oh, how she longed to kill him, but she wanted to use her bare hands, and there was a table between them, and Marcus was holding his ground, looking at her with a mixture of suspicion and worry, and Marcella knew what she had to do. She began to cry. It was easy—all she had to do was think of her life, the one she’d worked so hard for, going up in flames.

“I’ve been so worried,”

she said, breath hitching.

“I woke up in a hospital, and you weren’t there. The cops said there’d been a fire and I thought—I was afraid—they wouldn’t tell me if you’d been hurt in it. They wouldn’t tell me anything.”

His expression flickered, suddenly uncertain. He took a step toward her.

“I thought you were dead.”

A forced stammer, a mockery of emotion.

“The cops wouldn’t let me see your … I thought maybe you … what do you remember, baby?”

Still the pet names.

Marcella shook her head.

“I remember making dinner. Everything after that is a blur.”

She caught a glimpse of hope in his eyes—amazement, that he would get away with it, that he could have the best of both worlds: killing his wife and getting her back.

But instead of coming to her, he sank down into his chair.

“By the time I got home,”

he said.

“the fire trucks were there, the house was up in flames. They wouldn’t let me in.”

Marcus slumped back, as if reliving the trauma. The grief. As if ten minutes earlier he hadn’t been playing poker and waiting for his mistress—her one-time friend—to bring him his drink.

Marcella went to her husband, circled behind his chair, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders.

“I’m just so glad…”

He took up her hand, pressed his lips against her wrist.

“I’m all right, doll.”

She nestled her face into his collar. Felt Marcus actually relax, muscles unwinding as he realized he was in the clear.

“Guys,”

said Marcus.

“game’s over.”

The other men shuffled, about to rise.

“No,”

she whispered in her sweetest voice.

“Stay. This won’t take long.”

Marcus tipped his head back, a furrow between his brows.

Marcella smiled.

“You never were one to dwell on the past, Marcus. I loved that about you, the way things always just rolled off.”

She lifted an empty glass from the table.

“To my husband,”

she said, right before the ruin rushed to her fingers in a blossom of red light. The glass dissolved, sand raining onto the felt poker table. A ripple of shock went through the table, and Marcus jerked forward, as if to rise, but Marcella had no intentions of letting go.

“We’ve had a good run,”

she whispered in his ear as the anger and hurt and hatred rose like heat.

She let it all out.

Her husband had told her a hundred stories about the way men died. No one ever held their tongue, not in the end. In the end, they begged and pleaded, sobbed and screamed.

Marcus was no exception.

It didn’t last long—not out of some sudden mercy, Marcella simply lacked the control to draw it out. She really would have liked to savor it. Would have liked the chance to memorize his horrified face, but alas—that was the first thing to go.

She had to settle instead for the shock and terror on the faces of the other men.

Of course, that didn’t last very long either.

Two of them—Sam, of course, and another man she didn’t recognize—were scrambling to their feet.

Marcella sighed, her husband’s remains collapsing as she knocked them aside and caught Sam’s sleeve.

“Going so soon?”

she asked, ruin surging to her fingers. He staggered, fell, his body breaking by the time it hit the floor. The other man drew a knife from a hidden fold of his coat, but when he lunged toward Marcella, she wrapped one glowing hand around the blade. It decayed and crumbled, ruin spreading in an instant from metal to hilt and then up the man’s arm. He began to scream and pulled away, but the rot was already going through him like a wildfire, his body falling apart even as he tried to escape.

The last two men stayed seated at the card table, their hands up and their faces frozen. All Marcella’s life, men had looked at her with lust, desire. But this was different.

This was fear.

And it felt good.

She took her husband’s seat, settling in among his still-warm ashes. She used a kerchief to clear a streak of him from the poker table.

“Well?”

said Marcella after a long moment.

“Deal me in.”