TIGER LILY- THE BRAVO BOYS [book two]

Chapter THIRTY THREE

River O'riley

... THE NIGHT OF THE FULL MOON ...

"Now, I don't care what the weatherman says, When the weatherman says it's rainin'
Yeh'll never hear me complainin', I'm certain the sun will shine!" I sing the odd, upbeat melody aloud, patiently laying out my toolkit on the basement bench.. "I don't care how the weather vane points, When the weather vane points to gloomy, It's gotta be sunny to me, when ye' eyes look into mine!"

Picking up a stirling ice pick with a carved ivory handle in one hand and a sharpened hunting blade in the other.. I take my selected implements with me to circle the groggy Triad hostage.. Li Jun sits saggy like a sack of shite, still stripped to his underwhites, chained to the chair in the basement of Nessa's southside apartment complex.. "Jeepers Creepers, where'd ya get those peepers? Jeepers Creepers, where'd ya get those eyes?!"

He glares at me through a tight, triangular gaze, coal-black and cruel.. His jet black hair is fashioned into a mullet-inspired style.. Long on top and long in the back, It sweeps across his pockmarked face to shadow his crooked nose..

Covered in ink from toe to throat, the man has been a stone wall so far and dismantling him brick by brick will prove difficult.. But not impossible..

I tilt my head to stare at him sideways with a sadistic smile.. "Hmm.. No, that's not rite' isitt'-- Cus if I cut out ye' eyes first.. How will ye' watch while I carve ye' up?"

Jun says nothing, his thin lips pressed together in a filthy sneer.. The stoic, silent type.. Something I am all too familiar with.
No problem, Li Jun doesn't need to talk for this, he just needs to bleed..

There is nothing he could say that would convince me to spare him, so he doesn't need to beg..
I'm not looking for a confession , or an admission of guilt.. I don't need intel, since he'd never give me it up anyway.. I figure there is nothing he has done that I can't learn from Lilly or Lucy and pretty soon, Deyton will be calling me with confirmation of his securing the Chinatown dollhouse where The Mountain Master kept his private collection.

His silence suits me just fine, but we'll see how tough he is once I really get started.
If I can inflict just a fraction of the pain he's caused Frankie, I'll be satisfied.

There is a tipping point, where torture becomes justified and Jun weighs so heavily on the side of guilt, so condemned by his sins, that there really is no other alternative.. I have no choice.

This was always going to happen.. I knew I couldn't put this moment off, from the day I discovered the truth, I knew this was the only outcome..

My actions tonight have set in motion the very chain of events I have been procrastinating over.. Because now that I have acquired The Mountain Master, it's only a matter of time before The Red Dragon himself comes to find me..

I tried to warn the Wallflower.. I've been trying to tell the sweet girl what I knew was inevitable.. That she would have to leave me.. That she can't stay with me forever..

Even if I want her to..
I tried to tell Frankie who I am, I wanted to..
But I didn't really.. How could I?
I'm a fraud.. A conman..

Everything about me is conflicted and confused.. I'm put together wrong..

How could I be a good man when I am a killer and the kind of torture I am about to administer is a skill set that exists in my repertoire?

Fuck..

When Frankie looks at me, I'm afraid she has forgotten what I had demonstrated to her on the night we met, when I murdered a man I've known for years in cold blood.. I am afraid she only sees the softer side of me, the gentle aspects of my nature which while present, do little to compensate for everything else about me that is so violently dark..