Revenger

91

Alix Was Lying splayed, naked and ruined in the midst of a crimson eruption of blood. The sheets around her were sodden with it. Blood was dripping from the brass bed frame, sprayed and smeared across the wall behind the bed, pooled on the floor beside it.

She had been abused.

She had been tortured.

She had been eviscerated.

An incision had been made from her pubis up across her stomach almost to her ribs. Novak must have reached inside and pulled out Alix’s entrails, stringing them across the skin on either side of the cut.

It struck Carver that she might have been hunting for the baby, seeking out their embryonic child. It was somewhere in that glistening tangle of pink and crimson entrails, lying dead in its mother’s violated womb. He thought of the text, ‘Bye-bye baby’, and he had to lift a hand to his mouth to stop himself from vomiting.

It had been barely fifteen hours since he had walked into the ruins of the Lion Market and seen the dead and dying lying there so thickly that there was barely room to step between them across the floor. He’d thought that he had never seen anything as bad as that before, and never would again. He’d been wrong.

As he stepped closer, Carver saw how specifically Novak had taken her revenge. She had told him how Alix had surprised her with a kick to the knee. In return, Novak had kneecapped Alix: putting a bullet through the soft tissue just above each knee. Then, repaying the hands that had done her such harm, Novak had cut off every one of Alix’s fingers, one by one, leaving nothing more than two blood-drenched paws.

Finally he forced himself to look at the face of the woman he loved, the face that had always been able to make his heart sing. She had a smile that could light up the darkest corners of his soul. She had lips he could not go near without wanting, no, needing, to step close enough to kiss them. The vivacity in her eyes had given him life and hope at times when it had seemed both would be lost.

And now that was all gone.

Her mouth had been closed with a strip of silver duct tape. There were two blistering, disfiguring welts running in parallel down Alix’s cheeks, and a third, horizontal one across her forehead, branding her for ever.

Her hair had all been hacked off, almost down to the scalp, and it lay in a golden fan on the mattress around her head.

And she had no nose.

Novak had hacked it off — a repayment, with interest, for her own shattered nose — leaving a gaping black hole in the middle of Alix’s face.

The mutilation was terrible, and Carver tried to comprehend how much Alix must have suffered in the last minutes of her life. He had known real agony himself; far more than anyone should ever have to endure. But nothing that he had been through had remotely compared to this.

Just to see her there, spreadeagled, was more than he could bear. He was consumed with guilt at the thought that this was all his fault. If he had just had the guts to kill Novak when he’d had the chance, Alix would still be alive. Let her at least be given some comfort and dignity in death.

He was at the head of the bed now, and he took out the hunting knife and cut the ties that held her arms to the bed frame, gently taking her hands in his and laying them straight by her sides. He peeled the tape from her lovely mouth. He tried very hard not to look at the tools of Novak’s butchery arrayed on the bedside table: the carving knife, the sharpening steel and the secateurs, all steadily glueing to the table-top as the blood that had dripped from them congealed and coagulated into a sticky, solid mass.

Carver turned his eyes back to Alix and as he looked down at her, his vision blurred and it was only then that he realized he was crying. He wiped his eyes and his nose like a little kid, sweeping his sleeve across his face. And that was when he noticed…

She was alive.

Her eyes were flickering. She was looking at him, tilting her head up just the smallest little bit, and her mouth was moving soundlessly.

‘I’m here, my darling, my love,’ he said and bent his head so that she could try to whisper into his ear.

‘Please…’ she said. ‘Please… it hurts so much.’

‘Oh darling, it’s all right…’ He was scrabbling for his phone. ‘I’ll call an ambulance. It’s all going to be all right.’

She moved her head, a tiny, fractional shake. ‘No…’ she gasped. ‘No ambulance… Please, Sam… please…’

And then he realized what she was asking him, and he said, ‘No, baby, no… you’ll get better… you’ll see…’

‘Begging you,’ she said. ‘I love you… Please…’

Then her eyes closed again, her head fell back and her chest rose and fell as she gasped for breath.

He thought to himself: They could put her back together. It’s battlefield medicine. They could do incredible things these days. People could survive for years, decades in fact.

But how could he refuse her? She did not want to be that person, the disfigured recipient of other people’s pity. She wanted to be put out of her misery, future as well as present. And if he loved her, his final gift to her had to be a quick, merciful release from her pain.

He got down on one knee on the floor beside her. As he stroked her head with his left hand he looked into her eyes and said, ‘I love you so much…’

His right hand reached for the gun.

‘I love you,’ he repeated softly, and thought he saw the faintest flicker of a smile in her eyes.

He kept stroking her head as he raised the gun.

‘I love you… I love you… I love you…’

He took his left hand away from her head and put the gun to her temple.

‘I love you… I love you…’ he murmured.

Then Carver pulled the trigger and killed the woman he loved.