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Klaas grunts from his side, “Quite the man of the moment.”
“They say you’re the best, eh?” Georg continues with a faint smirk, “The most loyal. The most ruthless. They say you’ve never failed a hit.”
“I haven’t.”
He cocks his head. “So we say you’re the only man for the job.”
If compliments were dollars I’d be shitting all over Bezos. What comes out of their mouths in a syrupy South African twang isn’t news to me. It’s cold, hard fact.
Iamthe best. And I’ve been working on that reputation for eight years.
As I open my mouth to lay out my conditions, there’s a noise. A loudclunk,like heavy metal being dragged across tiles. It’s a sound I know—I’ve tortured enough men in basements around the world to know what shackles sound like—but it doesn’t belong here. Not among the polished wood and sparkling diamonds.
It’s instinctive to reach for the .45 tucked into my waistband. My head snaps to the left to follow the sound. “Easy there, eh?” Georg says, leaning back in his armchair, cigar between his thumb and forefinger. “She doesn’t bite.”
“Hard,” Klaas says with a raspy chuckle into his liquor.
They chortle together but I’m not listening. Instead, I look through the crack in the door, past the armed guards. Across the marble floor, there’s a Japanese sliding door, crafted from light wood and paneled with translucent paper. It’s open, just enough to reveal an eye.
Wide, bloodshot. The color of sea glass. It’s staring right at me.
“Don’t worry about her. She’s a little bitch who needs to be taught a lesson.”
I swallow. I tend not to ask questions I don’t need the answers to. But I can’t tear my gaze away from that eye. It’s still, unblinking. Penetrating me with a laser-like stare.
Georg says, “You like what you see, eh?”
My feet betray me, and I rise from the chair.
Klaas chuckles, draining the rest of his drink and slamming the tumbler on the coffee table. “Georg was fucking with you, eh. She doesn’t just bite; she’ll eat your whole fucking fist. Got her in three days ago and she’s a feisty little slut. EvenI’mnot crazy enough to put my dick in her mouth.”
Georg pours himself another glass. “I choked the little cunt ‘till she passed out. She woke up kicking like it was second nature. Cracked her skull with my .22 and she just smiled. Hell, I even sliced her tit open with my Stanley knife and she was still trying to gnaw at my fingers as I stitched it back up.”
Klaas muses, “Mmm. You didn’t want blood on your Japanese rug, eh?”
“Exactly. But when she finally simmers down,” Georg lets out a low whistle, “She’ll be a fucking treat.” His cold eyes twinkle as he watches me. “You fancy trying to ride the bull, eh?”
As humans, we feel twenty-seven basic emotions. I don’t, or can’t, feel ninety percent of them anymore. But curiosity isn’t an emotion, it’s a primal instinct. It’s what drives humans to seek out information. Curiosity can’t be squashed to the pit of your stomach by squeezing your fists and grinding your teeth or pushed to the tiny corner of your brain by closing your eyes and throwing your hands over your head.
Curiosity leads to questions. But I don’t ask questions, I investigate.
“Yes.”
The word leaves my mouth in a voice that doesn’t belong to me. Raspy laughter erupts in the cigar room, but I’m already in the marble hallway, following the sea glass eye. “We want a ten-percent discount if you manage to fuck her,” Georg heckles after me.
“And we’ll give you a ten-percent bonus if she draws blood from you,” Klaas cackles.
As I approach, the eye disappears, followed by scraping and clunking of shackles.
I push open the sliding doors, sending them crashing into the frame.
A bedroom. Oriental style. Futon on the floor, bamboo furniture lining the walls, and a floor-to-ceiling painting of a bonsai tree snaking up the back wall in gold and silver paint.
And then ruining the Feng Shui is a woman, seated at the end of the futon. Bleeding, shackled, and naked, knees pulled to her chest, strands of wet dark hair curling under her chin.
A beautiful, bloodied angel. The Van der Boors clipped her wings.
I look into those green-blue whirlpools and wonder,
