Page 59 of His Queen

“Listen. Listen to me,” the fucker pleads. “I don’t know where he took her, but maybe she knows.”

I narrow my eyes. “She who?”

“Your old girl, man. The one who left.”

“Vera?” I frown.

“Yeah. She’s upstairs.” He points to the VIP lounge we all were in the night I sent Felix to his grave. “She’s up there, as high as a fucking kite, man.”

“Which explains why she hasn’t come out crying and screaming yet,” Maximo remarks. “I’ll go get her.”

Alexius steps in next to me, staring at the fucker beneath my boot. “You think we’ll get anything else out of him?”

“I don’t.”

“Then he’s of no use to us anymore.” He straightens his arm and aims his gun, the bastard on the floor crying and begging, his face a fucking horror show with blood, snot, and tears.

I stop Alexius before he gets to pull the trigger. “This fucker is mine.”

“No, please,” he pleads as I grab a bottle of whiskey off the rack, flipping the lid and taking a long swig, swallowing twice before wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. It stings, but it doesn’t appease.

I grab a second bottle and hurl both of them, one by one, at the fucker’s already messed-up face. The glass shatters, the alcohol soaking him. He moans, and his bloodied eyes twitch, his head rolling from side to side. “Please.”

“You don’t get to beg. All you get is a one-way ticket to the bowels of hell, motherfucker.” I kick him in the face hard enough that the blow crumbles his cheekbones. “You took my wife from me. You took her. And it’ll be a cold day in hell before I’ll let you walk away alive.”

I pull out my Espada, and with a clean, even swoop of my arm, I jab it straight through his cheek. He screams, but the blade lodged in his mouth muffles it.

The knife slides back as I pull it out, leaving a big, gaping hole in the man’s face. The grotesque sight feeds my rage, the way his blood creeps across the floor, seeping through the grout between the tiles.

Just as his eyes start rolling back, his cries dying down, I lean and whisper in his ear, “This is for my Hummingbird,” before slowly, gradually forcing the blade through his eye socket. Little by little, inch by inch, un-fucking-hurried, I slide the knife into his head like a big, giant blob of butter.

He spasms, jerks, life draining from his body. And as he dies, my fury grows.

“Nicoli,” Alexius calls, gesturing toward the stairs, Maximo dragging Vera’s ass down it.

I ease my blade from the bastard’s eye, wiping it clean against my two-thousand-dollar pants.

Even from where I’m standing, I can see she looks like shit. Black mascara stains around her eyes, her lipstick smeared past her lips. I would have felt sorry for her if she didn’t betray us by choosing Nunzio’s empty promises over the life we offered.

Maximo drops her in front of my feet, and she’s on her knees—pathetic and high.

“What did he promise you?” I ask her, not even sure she’s in a state to answer.

She smiles, and it’s fucking creepy with her loopy eyes rolling around in her head. “Freedom.”

I scoff. “Yeah, you look free right now, Vera. Real fucking free.”

“I’m going to be his leading lady,” she continues, enunciating every word rolling from her mouth. “I’m going to run the fucking show.”

I grab her chin and tip her face upward. “I’m sorry to break it to you, but the only thing you’re running is your life straight into the fucking gutter.”

“You think you’re better than me?” she challenges, her expression almost liquid from the drugs in her veins. “You think your new wife is better than me?”

“I never said that, Vera.”

“But you stopped fucking me the moment you put a ring on that bitch’s finger.”

The tip of my knife’s blade is underneath her chin in a split fucking second. “Call her that again, and I’ll end your life,” I warn. “Do you remember where our father dragged your ass out of? You remember the hell you were in, stuck in a cage, sitting in your own piss and shit?”

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