Page 14 of The Player
A dark, wet stain appeared on the front of the guy’s jeans as he pissed himself, and Devon sneered and stepped back. “You filthy fucker,” he said, screwing his nose up.
“I already told you, I don’t know anything. It doesn’t matter what you do. I don’t have anything to give you.”
“I believe him,” Adam stated. “He looks like a spineless twat, and he is one. A useless one. And you know what we do to spineless cunts like him.”
Adam stalked over to the altar, picked up one of Devon’s hunting knives and strode back to the guy.
“Any last requests?” Adam asked, but before the guy could respond, he stabbed the knife into his chest, and holding it with both hands, he pulled it down to his groin, yanking and tugging through his flesh until the guy’s intestines fell out with a sloppy thud onto the floor at Adam’s feet.
Adam stared down at the mess as the guy’s body slumped in his chains, blood and guts pouring onto the flagstones of our chapel floor.
“We really need to stop using this place for our kills,” Adam tutted. “The warehouse is better. Easier to clean up and less people around to smell the stench of death. We’ll dump these bodies back at their house. Leave a message for whoever finds them from their fucked-up operation. They might not have had anything to give us, but we can still use them as a message. Let the others know we’re onto them.”
He wrinkled his nose in disgust and threw the knife on the floor.
“Do you think you can manage the clean up?” he asked us, and we nodded.
“Good, because I’ve had enough for one night.” Adam charged away, slamming the door behind him as he left us alone with the two corpses.
But no sooner had he left, he came bursting back in again.
“Fuck it,” he snapped. “I can’t leave you guys to clean this up. I’m not that much of an asshole. Tyler, grab the tarpaulin. Will, can you find me a shovel?”
He started to bark orders, and we did what he said. I passed him a shovel, and he started to pick up the guy’s intestines, shovelling them onto the tarpaulin as Colton began to spray the flagstones down with a hose. When the guts were all piled up, I pulled the tarpaulin across the floor to the doorway, ready to take outside. Tyler got to work getting the corpses off the wall, and Devon picked up the bloody knives and threw them into a bucket, ready to clean.
“See?” I said to Devon as I went past him. “I can do teamwork.”
“It’s what we do best,” he retorted. “We work together, or we don’t work at all.”
And he was right. Hurt one, hurt all, that’s what we’d always said.
I was lucky to have my brothers, because when all was said and done, any game worth playing was always played better when other people were involved.
And we were the best.
ChapterFive
BRYONY
It was the night of the masked ball, and I shivered as I approached The Sanctuary, pulling my jacket tighter around my body to try and fight off the chill in the air. Glancing up at the eerie dark building, I huffed out a low breath. This place was so much more than a club. It was home to the soldiers of Brinton Manor. Their base. Smoke and mirrors were the first things they’d installed when they moved in here. Not that they needed to hide their other business, everyone knew what they were.
Want someone to disappear?
They’ll do it.
Need to fix what the police can’t?
They were the men for the job.
They had a knack of rooting out the scum of the earth, torturing and maiming them until they were ready to be planted back into the soil. Those fuckers had to be good for something, right? And worms need food too, even if it was from the filthy trash the soldiers took out.
Justice and retribution were their forte, and looking up at the foreboding exterior, I could see the building mirrored its inhabitants perfectly. It was haunting, imposing, a monument that’d stood in this town as a warning since eighteen-eighty-two. It said so on the keystone over the entrance that had the year it was built carved into it.
Tonight, we were all excited to go in. Years ago, they’d be fighting, spitting, clawing to get out. If walls could talk, these grey old bricks would probably wither away and die just so they didn’t have to repeat or relive all the trauma they’d seen. That was probably true today for some parts of The Sanctuary. I’d heard about the chapel and its unholy practises. If you found yourself in there, you’d still pray to God, but you’d be shackled to the wall, waiting on a medieval torture device to relieve you of your sins.
A paradox.
An oxymoron.
