Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 81994 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 273(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81994 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 273(@300wpm)
“Just making sure,” he says, and I see his lips twitch.
I shake my head and listen as he makes a call to have someone come clean up my mess.
*
“Do you feel like we’ve been here before?” Sven asks Kai from behind me.
I ignore them and pull the blade out of Carlo’s leg. I tilt my head back and forth, working out the kinks in my neck.
“I told you I don’t know where he is!” he shouts and then starts to cry.
“When the hell did men start all this crying bullshit?” Kai asks, stepping forward. “Your man has no loyalty to you. Tell us where he is and this will be over,” he says, getting down to Carlo’s level.
“So you can kill me? Fuck you!”
“You’re going to die one way or another, but think of it this way: you do the right thing and, when you get to the other side, God may have mercy on you,” Kai says, but I disagree with him. This guy here is as bad as his friends. He has a history of beating women that goes back ages. His last girlfriend was in the hospital for a month after what he had done to her.
“I haven’t spoken to him,” he swears.
“Bullshit.” I lift the blade I pulled from his thigh and slam it through his chest. He gasps for air, and I can almost visualize his lungs filling up with blood. “Tell me!” I roar, losing patience.
He starts coughing and his body begins to convulse out of control in the chair.
“Now you killed him and he didn’t even tell us anything,” I hear Sven say, but my eyes are locked on Carlo’s mouth as I lip-read the word ‘slaughterhouse.’
“Where’s the slaughterhouse?” I ask Sven.
His eyebrows come together and his hand goes to his suit’s pants pocket. He pulls out his phone and types something in it before looking at me again. “There’s a club named The Slaughterhouse downtown.”
I pull the blade from Carlo’s chest and watch as his body fights for air, hearing Sven ask, “You gonna end him?”
“He’ll die.” I wrap my knife up in a thick piece of cloth and tuck it into my bag.
“Remind me not to piss you off, Mayson,” Kai mutters as Sven laughs.
*
“What kind of fucked-up place is this?” I shout over the music as we walk into the club.
The room is dark, with an eerie, red glow. Hanging from the rafters, acrobats of both sexes are naked and dripping blood onto the crowd below them. Around the room, there are spotlights that shine down on different BDSM scenes being played out.
“Well, we now know where they got the name from,” Kai says as we make our way through the groupings of people in various states of undress.
After the cleanup crew came and got rid of Carlo’s lifeless body, I sent Justin a message and had him look into The Slaughterhouse. His search turned up the name of a woman named Abigail Soscia. She’s a twenty-six-year-old woman who has a police record as a prostitute but has been clean for the last ten years. How she got the money to open this place is the information I’m interested in.
We make our way to the bar and Sven leans across, talking to the bartender. Then his eyes come to me and he lifts his chin towards the door at the side of the room. As soon as we make it through the door and head down the hall leading to the bottom of a set of stairs, a guy who I’m assuming is a bouncer comes down the stairs and blocks my path, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Move,” I tell him, not in the mood for bullshit. I need to get home to my woman, and the only way I can do that is to get this shit handled.
“No one goes upstairs.” He glares. “Go back to where you came from. This part of the building is off-limits.”
“Look, I know you got a job to do, but you do not want to piss me off right now.”
He raises an eyebrow, obviously finding me lacking.
“A word of advice—move,” Sven says, and the bouncer’s eyes go to Sven and then Kai before coming back to me.
“Fuck this,” Kai says, and his arm swings around my head and coldcocks the guy right in the jaw. I watch in slow motion as his eyes roll back in his head and his body folds to the floor.
“That’s one way to do it,” Sven mumbles.
I step over the guy. When we reach the top of the stairs, we see that there are three doors, one on each side of the hall, and a set of blood-red double doors at the end face us. I head straight for them while Sven and Kai stay behind, blocking the first two doors.