Page 70 of Death Kiss

‘More than I’ve loved anything.’

‘Fine,’ he says at last, ‘I’ll call my lawyer. But whatever you guys are involved in, if you get caught, you keep us out of it.’

My heart leaps. It’s ours.

‘I promise.’

THIRTY-TWO

LIAM

Taking two of them together was Kat’s idea. With her picture in her mask circulating, we need to move our timeline forward. I don’t think there’s much chance of anyone jumping to the conclusion that it’s her, but there aren’t many petite pocket-rocket blondes with a killer streak locally.

Thankfully, Martin Green and Jimmy Cleeve haven’t had the brains to stop hanging out together despite their horrific group having mostly kicked the bucket or disappeared into thin air.

They’re about to be on team vanish without a trace.

Then we’ll be down to the biggest thorn in our side. Ashworth.

Kat and I stand by the well, watching the two wriggling tarps.

‘They look like two giant maggots,’ Kat says, shifting her curved knife in her hand, tracing her fingers over the carved ivy on the blade.

‘They are fucking maggots.’ I give the one closest to me a harsh kick in the side. Wiping these abusers from the earth is so satisfying, yet I’m so ready to be done with them. To move past this and be with my girl and our growing menagerie of rescued pets. Too much of this year has been spent steeped in the horrors of my past, and I’m more than ready to look forward.

One of the maggots is whimpering, the plastic tarp fluttering in and out with each sobbing breath.

I suppose I ought to feel some level of pity for him. After seeing the tiny fingers in the mud at the judge’s cottage, there isn’t an ounce of it for these fuckers.

‘Ready?’ Kat says, turning to face me and grinning.

‘Always.’

We haul the tarped men top to toe, then fold them upward so they face each other before unwrapping their heads to the shoulders. The one Kat holds has big, watery eyes, the tape covering his mouth flexing as he tried to scream.

‘Now, now, gentlemen,’ Kat croons, ‘don’t you want to be reunited with some of your buddies? You’re going to spend eternity stuck in our well with those thundercunts.’

Hearing her say our well sends shivers of pleasure through me. Ours. We own the estate. I’ve gone from the poor boy in the ramshackle cottage to the co-owner of the house. These woods, whose memories carried me through the darkest times, are ours. Forever.

I have a home.

A love.

A family.

Kat’s knife rises to press against Jimmy’s throat, and I mirror her with Martin, who I’m pretty sure has just pissed himself from the vapour rising as he struggles in his tarp.

‘This is for everyone you thought you could take just because you were bigger. Better connected. Grown. The kids like me who have carried your torment into adulthood, and the ones who never made it. We spill your blood for them, and beg the earth to guide you straight to the arms of satan himself.’ Both men struggle in earnest as I speak, fear settling in and making them have the last panic of dying men.

Martin writhes until I dig my knife a little deeper. That stills him plenty. Meeting Kat’s eyes, I nod.

We drag our knives in unison, hands steady and gazes locked on one another. I feel the gush of wet heat cascading over my fingers while watching Jimmy’s blood wash over Kat’s. It’s like a twisted out-of-body experience to feel a man’s death throes in your hands while watching another experience it a few inches away.

The men give the same wet, ruined death rattle as they try to scream through torn throats. A death duet that both deserve a hundred times over. Any man who can listen to the screams of the innocent deserves to have his own screams dying on deaf ears.

‘Almost there,’ Kat says when Jimmy’s head lolls forward, the life leaking out of him and onto the forest floor

‘Just Ashworth to go.’