Owen Minor punched Dianna in the stomach with shocking speed and strength. She was not prepared for it and it folded her, buckling her knees. Before she could fall he shoved her roughly backward. She crumpled to the ground, face purple, gagging and gasping.
“You fucking witch,” he snarled and spat full in her face. He back-kicked the door shut and stepped over her. Gayle and Patty shot to their feet, but Gayle immediately lost her balance and sat back down with a thump. Patty instantly hurled her glass at Owen, but it was a long throw and he dodged easily. He was not a powerful or fit man, but he was filled with a towering rage. Adrenaline coursed through him, making him strong, giving him a total belief in his strength. He was a man and these were three women. Three whores. Three witches.
They were no better than his whore of a mother.
No better than the witches on the block where he grew up. So much for it taking a village to raise a child. They never gave a flying fuck about him. Not at her funeral and not after. None of them offered to take him in. They stood and watched and Child Protective Services took him away and fed him to the foster care system.
He hated them all for that, and hated them even more for what they were doing to him. Conspiring against him. Trying to spoil everything.
He had been at the hospital when they brought in Monk and Crow. Those pricks. God, how he’d wanted to slit their throats. Or, better yet, inject something nasty into their IVs. Hydrochloric acid. Bleach. Something fun. But they were both still in the ER when he went off shift. The funny thing was that neither of them—not the bounty hunter or the chief of police—knew that the person taking their vitals was him. The Lord of the Flies.
They looked at his name tag and stopped fucking thinking. Nurse Oeznik Mäsiarka. Ozzie to the staff. A nice Slovak name—a country Owen had to look up on the map after he found the name on one of those baby name sites. The site even gave the meaning.
Oeznik.
Butcher.
He grinned a butcher’s smile at the women. Flies buzzed around him and on his skin. One crawled across his face, in one nostril and out the other. It tickled. It made him smile.
Gayle struggled to her feet and grabbed an unopened wine bottle. Patty just stood there with her hands opening and closing. The hatred on her face and in her eyes was so fucking delicious. Owen felt himself growing hard. Maybe he’d do more than kill them. Maybe he could do a lot more.
“You stole her,” said Patty in a voice so choked, so raw that it came out as a whisper. “You stole my daughter. You stole my baby.”
“Yes,” he said, grinning.
“You’re just as bad as those men who killed her.”
“Oh, no,” he said, “I’m ten times worse. She lives in my head, you stupid cunt. I get to fuck her over and over and over again every time I close my eyes. I’m going to fuck her every day for the rest of my life.”
Patty’s scream was a towering shriek of unbearable rage and hurt and horror and she launched herself at Owen.
His grin never wavered. He was expecting this, hoping for exactly this kind of delicious drama and even before she took a single step he reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a gun.
And then he screamed.
He spun and looked down in absolute shock at the screwdriver sticking out of his calf. Blood—his blood—pumped out over the bright-yellow handle. The pain was immense, bigger than anything he had ever felt in his real life. It was memory pain. Dream pain. Stolen pain. But it wasn’t fun. It wasn’t delicious.
It was awful.
It was so big that he was lost in that pain for two very long seconds.
Long enough for Patty Cakes to hurl herself like a panther at him. Long enough for Gayle, drunk as she was, to race over with the wine bottle held high. Long enough for Dianna to claw her way up the bookcase by the door and grab the knife she’d hidden there.
Two seconds was all the time in the world. His finger jerked on the trigger and the gun barked, but the barrel was pointing nowhere useful. He screamed louder than Patty had. He screamed so loud it tore blood from his throat.
He screamed for a long, long time.