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The ivory tube in one nostril, the other pinched tight, she again lowered her face toward his body. She sniffed up the lines of jolt, her body trembling with the powerful sensation of the drug. Only when the mirror was clear did she sit up again, face wreathed in a broad smile.
“Now, what shall we do, Ryan?”
“Get out,” he said.
“Worried the mutie redhead’ll find out you enjoyed me doing you? I might go tell her right now.”
“That jolt’ll kill you soon,” he said.
“I can stop when I like.”
“Like everyone else can. I seen the stiffs from coast to coast. Heart gives up the effort. You’re dead, bitch.”
“Harvey won’t live long. His heart’s near finished, brother-in-law. Then I rule the ville.”
“What about your son?”
“Jabez? The darling does everything I tell him to do.”
“Like fuck you?”
At last he got through her guard. She slapped him hard across the face so that his head banged back against the wall. She snatched up the knife and stared at him, eyes open wide in an insensate rage.
“You don’t…don’t…” she stammered, spraying him with her spittle. “I’ll…Jabez loves his mother. That’s all.”
Rachel put the dagger down once more, leaning close to Ryan so that he could almost taste the scent of her sour-sweet breath. With a swift movement she sat astride him, her weight on his groin. Her left hand tangled in his hair, pulling so hard that it brought tears to his eye.
“Keep very still,” she hissed at him, her white face inches from his.
Her right hand stretched and touched the leather patch over his blinded left eye, easing it upward.
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“No!” he cried involuntarily.
“Ah, so the brave hero has his weakness. I only want to see what good work my dear husband did on his little brother. There…”
Ryan closed his right eye. He knew what Lady Rachel was seeing. He’d seen it often enough in pools of water or in polished metal or in mirrors. The empty, raw socket, the skin puckered, red and scarred. Often the scooped cavity would weep a little. A clear liquid, as though it wept for the missing eye.
He winced again as she laid her thumb on the skin at the very corner of the eye. “What does it feel like, Ryan?” she whispered.
He screamed. For the first time in countless years, Ryan Cawdor screamed in helpless, mindless terror, feeling the jagged nail probe into the deeps of the empty eye socket, pushing hard against the agonizingly delicate skin. The pain went on and on as she turned her finger around, still keeping her iron grip on his hair. Through the mist of raw red pain, he could hear her laughing at him.
Ryan jerked so hard at the handcuffs that blood sprang from the ends of his fingers.
A millenium of suffering crawled by until at last she took the finger away. He could feel a warm liquid cours-ing down his cheek, but he didn’t know if it was tears or blood. It touched the corner of his lips and it tasted salty.
Her weight moved off him, and he blinked open his good eye. Rachel stooped and adjusted the patch back over the blank socket.
“So much blood, brother-in-law. Such a deep scar, isn’t it?”
Ryan didn’t trust himself to speak, knowing that his voice would shake with his pain and anger.
“I think I shall go and kiss my son a fond good-night. After all, I doubt you could please me with this-” she
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touched him contemptuously with the toe of her dark blue shoe “-this worm.” She giggled, the jolt coursing through her body, making her hyperactive for a brief few minutes. “Know what I do if I see a worm in my path, brother-in-law? I crush it beneath my heel. Perhaps… No, it would be a waste. If it was Harvey’s pathetic worm, then…”
“Why stay with him?”
“He is the baron, Ryan. You know what that means. After I throttled your father, Harvey stopped sleeping in the same bed as me, fearing for his wretched life. And he is right. Now he will soon die. There have been two at-tacks already, and the doctor says he cannot live through another.”