Maybe she was on his middle finger now. He thought she might be. Because it felt like she stopped halfway down. Because one of her own fingers pressed down at the base of that finger, which was partly how she’d paralyzed him, and maybe she was going to finish off the hand and slice off the tops of his fingers and put them in a little Ziploc baggie for later and ask him again about the Omega Project on the way to the ER….
“I guess you don’t know anything after all,” she said, or maybe Jamie fantasized it.
Molly let him collapse to the carpet again.
He could move again, if he wanted.
He didn’t want.
“I’m proud of you,” she whispered. He watched her stockinged feet walk around his body, trying to avoid stepping in the blood.
He didn’t want to listen to her voice anymore.
“But we’re going to do just a little more,” she continued. “Try not to pass out.”
He heard Molly’s words but tried not to extract any meaning from them. But that was difficult. Words were everything to him. He had been a writer—was still a writer, even if it was toiling over meaningless press releases for financial services that made absolutely no sense to him.
It was impossible to deny her words had meaning.
Try not to pass out.
Which was an incredibly frightening statement. Because “Try not to pass out” meant there was more pain coming. Probably a great deal of it. And that didn’t sound good. Jamie thought they’d explored his personal threshold for pain quite thoroughly. It was exactly one thumb, one index finger, and half of a middle finger.
So when Molly lifted him to his feet again, wrapped a well-muscled arm around his torso, and rested his weight on her own body, he thought:
I’m in for more pain.
And we’re going to work on that together.
But then the blade was in her other hand, and this time she had a fist curled around the taped-up part, and the blade was pointed down like a dagger. Her supporting arm loosened, and Jamie slipped down a bit. Her arm caught him under his right armpit and extended around his neck—tight. Almost choking him.
The blade touched Jamie’s chest, right through his shirt. Pierced the skin like it had pierced his thumb.
And then the blade whisked down his chest.
Oh God.
This time she was going to kill him.
“Ugh,” Keene said. “Not sure I’m in the mood for an evisceration. It’s almost supper.”
“Shhh,” McCoy said.
“What is she doing?”
“Don’t know.”
“She’s not cutting his chest. Not that I can see.”
“No, she’s not.”
“What, is she pretending?”
“Hang on a sec.”
McCoy had the Girlfriend file on his lap. Which showed how much he was engrossed in this operation. Usually, he’d store his can of Caley between his legs. He flipped through a few pages.
“She flashed me a seven, right?”
“I believe so, mate. I can roll back the recording if you like.”
“No, no. We both saw it. Seven is this guy. Jamie DeBroux. Media relations director. Formerly, a journalist. He received the lowest risk assessment.”
“Which explains the fingers.”
“Yeah … hey, you’re right. I didn’t think of that. That’s brilliant.”
“Look. She’s still slicing at him.”
“Still no blood?” McCoy asked, but slid himself closer to the laptop nearest him and punched in a few numbers. The same scene popped up on his monitor.
“No,” said Keene. “Either she’s playing around with him, or she has the worst aim I’ve ever seen.”
“What the devil is she …”
Then McCoy smiled. He was like a kid at a birthday party who’d blasted apart the piñata with one whack of the stick. Candy and toys rained down all around him.
“I love this girl! Oh, man, I want to be her baby daddy.”
Keene looked at him. There was no way he was asking “What?” again. He stone refused.
“When we meet, I will fall to my knees and worship her blood-caked feet. Oh man, I am crushing so hard right now!”
Keene wasn’t going to do it. Not dignified.
On screen, Girlfriend continued to feign stabs at her quarry. Only now she had him on his knees, and was swiping her hooked blade across the space directly in front of his throat. His eyes. His abdomen. His genitals. Vicious, sharp little movements, leaving little margin for error. If the quarry were to so much as sneeze, he’d be ripped open in a flash.
The quarry, this DeBroux guy, was trembling. Hard to tell if it was fear or spasms of pain. His injured hand hung limply at his side, and blood dripped from his savaged fingertips in a Jackson Pollock pattern.
McCoy slapped Keene on the arm. “You know what she’s doing?”
No, I don’t, Keene thought. He’s waiting for me to say it. He wants me to say it. He needs me to say it.
Oh, this is childish.
“What?” Keene asked.
McCoy said, “She’s running us through her résumé.”
Jamie was in the strange position of being close to death, expecting death, and slowly coming to terms with death, but unable to actually die.
The moment he saw the blade again, he knew it was going to enter his chest. An atom bomb of fear detonated in his heart.
He thought of Chase.
Chase and that cartoon duck in little boy pants.
Although he imagined it did, the blade didn’t seem to be cutting his chest. It whipped over the surface of his shirt above ever so slightly, then slipped away and plunged toward another spot on his chest. This failed to enter his body, too.
A flurry of motion followed, almost too quick for Jamie to comprehend, but with every stroke he expected that this would be the one, the blade would penetrate his flesh and his life would rapidly come to an end.
Even on his knees a few moments later, the blade dancing across his throat and face now, so fast, he actually felt the wind from Molly’s frenzied movements.
But the blade never penetrated.
This, more than anything else that had happened this morning—the gunshot, the sliced fingers—broke Jamie De-Broux’s mind a bit.
McCoy pointed out what he could. Keene was still a little mystified.
“That’s right out of the Solthurner Fechtbuch,” McCoy said. “And oooh. A little jung gum in there, too.”
“Why isn’t she taking him out?”
“Because he’s number seven. She doesn’t need to.”
“So why go after him at all?”
“To show off. She already lost one of her targets—number five, that McCrane guy. The one with the champagne?”
“Right.”
“That means she needs to make it up somehow. She promised that she’d demonstrate a full array of her techniques. She promised they’d be surprising yet economical. Wants us to know she could tear people apart any countless number of ways, from the undetectable to the flashy. First, she did a straight-on interrogation. Now, she’s being flashy.”
They continued watching the monitors for a while.
“Won’t they find evidence of these … mutilations?”
“Nah. Bodies were to be burned up anyway. Doesn’t matter.”
Keene sighed, then turned away from the screen. “Aye, she’s overdoing it.”
“Maybe, but I like to watch her work.”
“She should just kill him.”
Jamie DeBroux wished she’d just kill him already.
And then a funny thing happened.