Page 4 of Captive

I give the blood-covered, knife-wielding, mask-wearing man my most charming smile, which, granted, probably isn’t too charming right now as I feel like I want to puke, but that’s beside the point. I still try. I grin up at him like a complete madwoman and give an awkward point to the door he currently blocks.

“If I could just, uh, squeeze through,” I say, but it’s clear the guy isn’t listening to me.

Oh, no. They’re not going to let me leave. Why would they? I saw too much. I know too much. Crap.

My luck is legendary, but not in a good way.

Chapter Two – Ezra

I stand with Royal in the kitchen. We’re making a right mess of the place, but that’s what the cleanup crew is for. Not once have we ever been this messy, though, and I don’t mean that because of the blood we’re trailing all over the place.

No, I mean it because of the girl. The girl who is currently tied up to a chair we lugged into the bedroom. We had to untie Brock’s body so that we could restrain her and make it so that she couldn’t just stroll out of here like nothing happened.

Blind with memory loss? Right. She tried pulling everything she could from her ass, anything that might let her leave.

If things weren’t so messed up, her falling out of the closet and freaking out over a spider on her forehead would actually be kind of funny, but on a night like tonight, the last thing I’m in the mood to do is laugh.

Tonight had a purpose, and that purpose was not having a girl watch us kill and dismember Brock Hard.

Royal stands a few feet away from me, tapping his blood-soaked knife on the counter. “Who the fuck is she?” he asks in a huff. He still wears his mask, as do I; it’s part of the process. We are simply cogs in the machine, cogs that do our part. Some people might know us as the Downtown Dismemberer, but there’s so much more to us than they could ever know.

So many more, too, which now that girls knows all about.

“I don’t know,” I mutter. We searched her before we tied her up, and we didn’t find any identification anywhere. The girl was wearing all black, like us. She even had gloves on. She wore a black beanie over her hair, too. She looked like a thief.

But what about that bag beneath the bed?

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I say again. “We could call Hawthorne and see what he thinks.” The first rule is to get in and get out, don’t take our time. Do what we must so the rest of the machine can get to work. Second rule is not to get caught by anyone, so the girl being here in the first place fucks that right up.

But we don’t kill women and girls. That’s not a rule, but it is unspoken. It’s why we’re all here doing what we do in the first place. The world has enough shit-eating men who hurt women and girls everywhere.

Royal shakes his head. “We don’t have time. We’ve already been here too long. We need to finish up with Brock and get the fuck out of here.”

He’s right. We need to get out of this place ASAP, but that still leaves the girl and her fate in question.

I suggest the only thing that comes to mind in this particular scenario: “Then we finish up and take her with us.” I don’t like the suggestion; what we do isn’t exactly family-friendly, but there is something different about her. She had some balls to try to leave after what she saw, after seeing us cut through Brock like it was nothing.

“We take her with us,” Royal repeats, “and then figure out where to go from there, with Hawthorne’s help. Yeah, what the fuck could go wrong?”

All I can do is shrug. This isn’t a situation either of us have been in before, so it isn’t like we have previous experience dealing with a woman who’s seen too much. “What else can we do?”

He’s quiet for a moment. “Fuck, I don’t know. I guess you’re right. We take her with us, but first thing’s first: we need to finish cutting up Brock.”

I nod, and together we return to the bedroom, where we find the girl still tied to the chair in the corner of the room, a good ten feet away from the bed, where Brock’s half-mutilated body lays. The moment she sees us, she perks up.

What a strange girl.

“I don’t mean to be a bother,” she says, flashing us a smile, “but could one of you please loosen the rope around my wrist and let me go? I’m getting some rug burn, I think. Or would it be considered rope burn since it’s rope? Either way, it’s starting to burn a bit—”

Royal and I exchange a glance, but we don’t respond to her. We return to our places on either side of the bed, and Royal picks up the forearm he had to set down earlier, when we went to the kitchen.

The sight of Brock half-dismembered would fill most people with unease, be the stuff of nightmares. To us? It’s nothing. We’ve done this before, and we’ll do it again.

And again, and again, and again.

I bring my saw to his knee, using my other hand to brace the lower part of his leg, but across from me, Royal doesn’t do anything other than set down the arm and glance over his shoulder, at the girl watching us with wide, silvery eyes.