Walking into Nightmares

The Anger

He would need to kill soon, he realized, leaning back on the chair. Parker was... somewhere, while MacAllister and Hardy were on babysitting duty. Thanks to his last meeting with the other's boss, they were both extremely wary of him, as well as livid. Parker was the worst, funny enough. MacAllister had to stop her several times from blowing them all up.

Hardy was mostly indifferent, but Liano recognized it for what it was, a way to mask his panic. In one sentence, he had played the first of his cards, and would have disappeared, but MacAllister had convinced him otherwise.

He mentally chuckled. It had been almost three weeks since his meeting with Batty Matty, and about a week since he had ended the lives of two others.

He would ditch the other two soon, though. He needed to go and find his next prey. Liano ducked his head to hide a less than sane smile. They had been far more skeptical of him lately, but they seemed to know better than to speak against him. He had noticed that Hardy had attempted to track him down several times after he had left the safety of the newest safe house.

Sadly, it was far harder to track someone who was used to tracking than it was to trail a normal person. The other man wasn't bad at it, and seemed to know several tricks, but he was nowhere near good enough to successfully evade Liano.

The last of his prey hadn't even put up a fight, and had just seemed resigned to his fate from the moment he had woken up. He had been slightly disappointed that the man hadn't even twitched once he woke up, but that was alright. He screamed like the rest of them by the time Liano finally let him die.

Ian 'Dead Man' Brooke indeed.

"Hey, Mr. Altieri? Have you heard of a man named Jerrett Dietrich?" McAllister asked him, watching closely.

Liano refused to freeze up even a bit. He did, however, raise an eyebrow. Yes, yes he had.

"I do not believe so." He lied just as calmly. "Why?"

"What about a guy named Brandon Harper? Or Kennedy Allen?" Hardy asked.

Three for three, Liano thought with an inward chuckle. "Not that I remember. Who are they?"

The silence seemed to reign through the room, and he kept himself calm and amused by remembering how the feared Metzger looked as he suffocated thanks to the poison in his food. Harpoon Harper and the other idiot he had very carefully not watched as they died. He could have rigged the place with surveillance at the same time that he packed it with C4, but he had decided against it.

He had to admit, if only to himself, that he hadn't preferred the way that he killed the last three. It had been much more interesting listening to the screams of Mara. He was aware that it had less to do with the fact that Mara's death was the only one he was personally involved with, and more to do with the fact that Mara had actually wronged him. Harper and Brooke were nothing to him, and the only reason they had died was because his attention was drawn to him, not because he personally, had a problem with them. Metzger he was a little more annoyed with than the other two, killing children would do that. But he didn't hate the man.

That said, he couldn't help but wonder what Ken Allen had to do with anything. Oh, he knew the man was involved with something he shouldn't have been, but the idiot hadn't actually done anything that warranted him being killed and having his eyes gouged out in one of Liano's safe houses.

Well, unsafe houses. Or would they simply be homes since someone clearly knew where they were?

He inwardly snorted. It looked like he was due for another visit with Don Ridley, if only to find out who the pervert had told about his house. Maybe, he could even get more information on the people who blackmailed Ridley into bugging him.