Kill Will
Volume 1
"Do you find this cruel?"
She couldn't see who had spoken those words, but she knew. Despite her swollen eyelids, she recognized the words. Although her eyes were battered, she knew his voice.
She could not speak; the reason why not could vary wildly. It could have been her smashed jaw, destroyed from countless, merciless blows that were passionately dealt out; or her bruised neck, tortured to the point of agony from scores of vicious jabs to her throat; or her choked airways, ravaged with horrible vitreous fluids slipping from her brutalized mouth and drenched in blood that trickled down her tormented throat.
But for whatever reason, be it shattered bone, injured chords or blood-soaked lungs, she didn't respond to his question.
"Because it seems to me," she felt the floor bend slightly as he descended to her side, that you know me so well," he continued as he looked at her with a gaze so penetrating that she could simply feel it, lying on the floor, beaten to within an inch of her life, "you must understand that I am never cruel."
"I couldn't be," he added, wiping some of her blood away from her chin with a kerchief he'd drawn from his pocket, "not with you." The blood was slowly replaced with more leaking from her ruined nose. On its way down, it mixed with tears descending more rapidly from her bloodshot eyes.
"No," he rose, "this is me," he turned, "at my most," she faintly heard the familiar sound of steel rasping against leather, "vengeful."
"Will," she finally managed to murmur, "it's..."
They were her last words before he viciously lashed the blade across her neck in a fluid motion, severing her carotid artery.