I had promised him terror, and that’s what I was delivering. Somewhere in Caro’s brain was the knowledge that he was going to die now. At the same time, he was slowly starving of oxygen, so the brain was ceasing to function. Slowly, in terror. I figured that while Caro’s thought process was limited, he was a human being after all. Like me, like Martaud. He’d have an instinct to survive. But that wasn’t going to help him.

After a minute or two of staggering around, trying to brush me off against the walls and furniture, Caro burst into a furious attempt to shake me. He went all in and put every ounce of remaining energy into a backwards run towards the wall. It might have worked, but I wasn’t going to wait and find out. I wrenched his neck to the left. The beast veered to the left and lost his legs. We went over and ended up on one of the love seats. I was underneath the giant, choking him out while he twitched, gasping on top of me. I flashed a look at Martaud. She was watching in fascination with a little curling smile on her face. Eventually Caro quit twitching. I held on tight for another minute, ignoring the pain of something hard sticking into my ribs. No movement, no breathing. I released the line. My hands were throbbing.

It took a while to get my breath back. By then, Martaud was standing over the love seat, pointing the H&K at me. There was nowhere to hide, I was stuck under Caro’s corpse. My ribs throbbed, and I realized why. It was Caro’s weapon, holstered at his back. I pulled the gun behind his back. Martaud was breathing heavily, excited by the blood lust. Then she looked angry, like I’d broken her toy. I was watching her trigger hand. She thumbed off the safety and selected for single. Her eyes were red. Maybe she’d loved the monster after all? I watched her finger start to squeeze the trigger. And I shot her in the face through Caro’s armpit.

Martaud dropped like a sack of rocks, leaving Nazari framed in the doorway, out of breath and holding an H&K MP5S up and ready. I said, “Better late than never.”

Chapter Sixty-Three

I rolled out from under Caro’s corpse.

Nazari was in shock, looking around at the pleasure palace room. “This is the most evil thing I’ve ever seen.”

I said, “Let’s go. There are a couple of girls missing from that room.” I picked up the H&K Martaud had dropped. I checked the chamber and closed the bolt. “Everything okay up top?”

“The girls are in bad shape.”

“They’re young, they’ll recover.”