Page 37 of Vallaverse: Twist
I am going to kill Kris. That is a truth. He has no bond with her, and even if he did, I am a Valla. My claim would cancel out any previous claim made on him. Any mark he might have had previously is null because I will it so. He is mine, and that woman tried to kill him. She would have succeeded if I had beena minute too late. It was intentional and cruel, and she will suffer for it. And I will enjoy her suffering.
Chapter Seventeen
Brooks
It takes less time than I thought it would to find her.
Maybe she thought Laz would die and that would be that. Maybe she thought I wouldn't care. It's more than obvious that she never did, so that's entirely likely. It's also possible that she genuinely thought she could run from me. Whatever her thought process was is irrelevant.
My original plan for when I found her involved a lot of time and a lot of blood. I've had several fantasies involving pliers and drill bits, but now that I'm standing in front of her, I've discovered that she simply isn't worth the effort or the additional time away from Laz. I believe that's what they call growth. I'm sure it would be different if I had found her the night I found Laz dying on that rough hotel carpet, but I didn't, and now I'm much more interested in knowing she's dead than knowing she suffered.
I'm still going to stand here and watch her bleed out.
“What do you think you’re going to accomplish, big, bad Valla?” She tries to laugh, but it quickly turns into a cough. “Killing me won't bring back that pathetic Omega.”
I smile down at her inverted face. “It will make me feel better.”
“He would have killed himself eventually, anyway,” she says bitterly. “People like him always do.”
I nod. That's entirely possible.
She makes one last feeble attempt at wriggling free, but it's useless, and she gives up quickly. All she manages to do is make a bigger mess. “You're just going to stand there and watch? Is that what gets you off?”
“There's nothing you could ever do that would get me off, but I am enjoying this. It's taking a little longer than I expected, though.”
Once I decided I wanted a front seat for her death, I thought about ways to drag it out without dragging it out. Hanging her upside down and letting her bleed seemed like just the thing, but I've never been patient. And she just keeps talking. I wanted her to know death was coming; I wanted to watch that knowledge crawl over her face like a devastating blush, but, good god, this really is taking too long. I have to get back to Laz. At this point, I'm beginning to think she's doing it on purpose.
“I'll try to hurry it along,” she rasps. “He wanted it. He wanted everything.”
“He wanted you to leave him to die, alone, after whatever you did to him before?”
“He wanted it. That's why he came to me.”
I squat down so that I'm closer to being eye-level with her. “He tried to leave you. And you tried to kill him for it.”
A slow smile pulls at her lips. “So he made it.”
“He did.”
“And now you'll take care of him, hmm?”
“I will.”
She laughs, weak and wheezing. “He'll never be a real Omega again. He's broken. Useless. You'll see. And then you'll wish he'd died so you could be free of him.”
And with that, I've had enough. Laz isn't broken. He's a little twisted up, but so is everyone else. I'm not giving this woman any more of my time, and she doesn't get any more of my words.
I stand back up and go to fetch the bucket of water from the corner of the room. I let her watch me carry it over and position it right under her head. Then she struggles. So much that she starts spinning and swinging from the hook her ankles are tied to.
I pull the remote control from my pocket.
“Wait,” she says. “I can—“
I push the button and watch her slowly sink until her head is submerged in the bucket. She's lucky, really. My first thought was to fill the bucket with gasoline instead of water; I was going to light it while she was drowning, but I didn't want to deal with the smell.
She thrashes and I put my hands on her hips to keep her from overturning the bucket. It takes about eleven minutes, but she finally stops struggling and just dies. Back when I did this kind of thing regularly, this was one of my favorite methods of getting information and getting rid of people. All the fun of drowning without needing to have my suit dry-cleaned.
I empty the bucket in the utility sink and dial a number I haven't dialed in years.
