Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston Read Free Book Online Page A

answer to you any longer.
A chair creaks as she sits. —Does that clarify the matter?
Leather-soled shoes take a few steps. Another chair creaks. —Yes. Yes it does.
—And so, after an unnecessary digression to illuminate you regarding the obvious, we can return to the matter at hand? I have disobeyed your charge. What cost must I pay? What is due to Caesar? What can you afford to extract with your power crumbling about you?
Papers being turned.
—You are still well regarded by some members of the council. This hinders me somewhat. Limits the scope of what correction I might impose. Yes.
A folder being snapped shut.
—But you force my hand, and I must do something. If you can tolerate another question, let me ask, in similar circumstances, when I was in your care, what would you have done to me had I shown the same lack of regard for your commands?
Whisper of fabric.
—What a coward you are. Unable even to devise your own chastisement. Id have killed you. There is no room for any lack of—
The sound of something sharp cutting the air, a clatter of furniture, breath whistling from a hole nature made no allowance for.
—No need to say anything further, Mrs. Vandewater. When you are right, you are right. And I can complete the thought for you. There is, indeed, no room for any lack of discipline in this life of ours.
The floorboards vibrate as a body thrashes against them. Thick fluid leaks onto wood.
—And you are, as ever, correct in most things. You were correct in thinking that you would soon be released from any obligation of answering to my
authority.
Metal scraping on bone, sawing.
—But giving myself some credit, you were off by several months in your estimation of how soon your release might come.
And a sound not often heard in the natural course of things, but one I've had opportunities to hear on more than one occasion: the soft but solid thump of a human head being dropped to the floor.
—My only regret being that I cannot ask you how the view of the path appears from where you are now.
Footsteps striding down the room toward me, stopping.
I open my eye and look up as a lean, dark shadow leans over me. It kneels, whisking a handkerchief from its breast pocket and using it to ream the caul of blood from my eye. —Open your eye, Pitt, I have a job for you.
I blink as he comes into focus: smooth-faced, a fall of glossy brown hair across his forehead, a painfully flawless bespoke suit splashed generously with blood. —Hey, Mr. Predo.
I rest my head on the floor and sight down the room at the beheaded corpse
lying in a spreading red pool. —If it's her old job, I think III pass.
He's not going to kill me.
It's not that fact of him telling me he's not going to kill me that assures me I've got some time to breathe. Predo could look me in the eye and tell me whiskeys good and cigarettes are better and I'd still need a drink and a Lucky to believe he's not lying. The man breeds lies. He spawns them asexually, with no need for any assistance. He exhales and lies fill the air. Alone in a room, he mutters lies to himself to keep from falling into the trap of truth-telling. In the day, sleeping in his bed, deep in the safest heart of Coalition headquarters, he dreams in lies. The better to keep his left hand from knowing what betrayals his right has planned.
Stretched on the rack and burned with hot irons, Dexter Predo will be in no danger of revealing the truth. Living so far beyond its borders. —I'm not going to kill you.
Said as we watch two of his own burly enforcers, black rubber aprons, galoshes and gloves protecting their suits, while they bag Mrs. Vandewaters remains and mop her blood from the floor of the rotting ballroom around us.
I finish the big bag of blood Mrs. Vandewater had taken from Laments
fridge, and that Predo has given to me to speed the Vyrus through my wounds. —I can't make the same promise, Mr. Predo.
I toss the empty bag into the bucket containing Mrs. Vandewaters head.
He finishes