Cristal cried out in pain. Her knives weren’t in her reach. She was now on her hands and knees, scurrying toward the bed.
He grabbed her by the back of her neck, elevated her into the air, and hoisted her over his head, rendering her vulnerable to anything. He hurled her across the room like a ball, and Cristal went crashing into the dresser, the room mirror breaking around her, and shards of glass cut into her skin.
He laughed. “I told you, bitch, you gonna die tonight!”
Cristal was dazed and injured, bleeding and winded. Now, it was his turn to toy with her. He grabbed her ankle and dragged her across the room. She tried to resist, but he thumped her in the back and made it feel like her spine had snapped in two. She howled from the pain. He turned her over to see her pretty, young face bloody and bruised, and then he punched her in the face several times.
Cristal wanted to black out. Her mind was trying to go unconscious, but she knew if that happened, then she would never wake up. He was going to kill her.
He wrapped his hands around her slim neck and squeezed. His hands were crushing. She gasped for air and fought vigorously, grasping and clawing at his wrists, frantically trying to prevent her death, but Kenny’s hands were clamped securely around her throat like a vise grip. He wasn’t about to let loose until he squeezed every drop of breath from her body.
“I’ve been sent to end you. Too bad, because you have some of the best pussy I ever had.”
Cristal didn’t have much time left. She could feel her life slipping from her body. Her breathing was becoming thin.
With one hand still grasping at his wrist, she stretched out her other hand across the floor to snatch something frantically nearby to help keep her alive. Fortunately, her fingers came upon one of her small knives on the floor. She grasped the sharp tool, and in one quick shift, she thrust her knee into his groin and slammed the knife into his neck.
Kenny jerked from the blow, and an abrupt rush of pain jolted his body. He immediately tried to stop his wound from gushing blood.
Cristal pushed him off and scurried to her feet. Shockingly, with the blade protruding from his neck, he still wasn’t dead. In fact, he stood erect, glaring at Cristal while he pulled the knife from his neck and blood squirted out.
“You sneaky little fuckin’ bitch!”
Shit!
“I underestimated you,” he said. “You’re good. I haven’t seen my own blood in almost twenty years. The Farm did you justice, and Bishop, he made you even better. Too bad he’s dead because of you.”
The mention of Bishop angered Cristal. No doubt, GHOST Protocol had sent him. They were both standing now in the messy room that had been torn apart by their battle.
Blood flowed from Kenny’s broken nose, his neck wound, and his body, and Cristal was in bad shape too.
Once again, Cristal primed herself for combat. She had one special move to pull.
“A different life we had, a different time . . . we would have been great lovers instead of adversaries,” he said poetically.
He suddenly propelled toward her with a shard of mirror he’d picked up, and Cristal instantaneously reacted when he tried to slice her face apart with the bloody tool. They tangled in quarrel, matching deadly skills.
Cristal then struck him suddenly in the V area underneath his ribs, the place where the sternum ends, and she thrust her second small knife into him.
Kenny jerked and grunted, “Ugh,” and stumbled backwards. He reached for the second knife protruding from his flesh.
The blade had paralyzed him as he struggled for breath, and then he doubled over and dropped to his knees.
Cristal stood there in silence, simply observing him dying slowly. She had finally defeated him.
“You fuckin’ bitch,” he uttered before he keeled over.
There was no time to gloat or rejoice. Cristal hurriedly got dressed and collected her things. She made a speedy exit from the hotel and hurried back to her own room to pack and leave town. Somehow they had tracked her down. How were they able to track her to New Orleans she didn’t know. She had been careful, or so she thought. But The Commission and GHOST were very resourceful and highly organized.
Her sexual urges had almost cost her her life. Never again. She left New Orleans that same night.
*
Two days later, Cristal settled in the remote Shenandoah Mountain of Rockingham County, Virginia, with no phones, no Internet, no television, and no neighbors for miles. There, she took comfort in a log cabin nestled deep in the cold mountains. She brought in the New Year alone and hiding from The Commission and GHOST Protocol. There, she would tend to her wounds and heal, and she would spread out her arsenal and train in the woods.
Cristal needed to rest and come up with a final game plan for herself. Running and hiding from the agencies was definitely taking a toll on her. There had to be a solution to escape the madness. So far, the only real escape she saw for herself was death. She had really pissed them off, writing books about them, revealing their secrets, talking about her training on The Farm and the people she had killed. It was blasphemy in the eyes of her ex-employer. Her books sold extremely well nationally and internationally, and the pseudonym she wrote under had become a household name in the literary world. And she had killed several of The Commission’s men and now GHOST Protocol.
Still, she wondered how they’d found her in New Orleans.
Taking no chances, Cristal rigged the entire cabin and the surrounding area with booby traps. Scattered around the cabin were simple trous-de-loup, concealed pitfalls with sharp spikes at the bottom, something she’d learned to do on The Farm. She knew the key areas to step on once she stepped out of the cabin. Also, the ground was rigged with motion sensor lightings. If anyone stepped too close to her cabin at night, the whole area would light up with blinding lights, giving her a few precious seconds to arm herself for attack.
Inside the cabin at night, with the fireplace burning and the area tranquil and silent, Cristal decided to call Daniel once more via satellite phone. His phone rang several times and then someone picked up.
“Hello?” Cristal said frantically.
“Hello, Cristal,” a woman’s voice answered.
Cristal knew something was wrong. And the woman knew her name. She felt trepidation. “Where’s Daniel?” she asked.
“Him busy.”
“If you touch him—”
“Me know de routine—yuh kill me.”
Cristal felt helpless. This bitch had Daniel, and she had no idea where they were.
“Time ah runnin’ out.”
The call ended.
Cristal cursed loudly. She had to find him. Her stay in the Shenandoah Mountains was suddenly cut short. It was back to civilization.
Twenty-Five
Aoki had to admit that she had fucked up big time. It wasn’t her intention to murder Daniel so soon. He was supposed to be leverage to lure Cristal to her. But something about him bugged her. The way he spoke so fondly and lovingly about Beatrice and their unbridled determination to beat the odds and stay connected had irked her. Why should their love transcend The Commission’s boundaries? Girls like them don’t get happily-ever-afters. Aoki wasn’t afforded that luxury. Fate had stepped in and shut love down for her and Emilio, so why should Daniel and Cristal’s thrive?
Human life was of no value to her. Within a day of kidnapping Daniel, she had taken her trusty dagger, stood behind him, then grabbed him forcefully and cut open his throat from ear to ear. He had struggled to stay alive, squirming violently in her grasp, begging and pleading for her not to kill him, but his efforts were in vain. He had gagged and bled like a stuck pig. Still tied to the chair, his body slumped as his life drained.
Immediately, Aoki began to fear for her own life. What had she done? She was so impulsive and fucking stupid.
What she had going for h
erself was Daniel. All she needed to do was have him speak into the phone to Cristal and then wait for her to show up like a superhero to try to save her man. Now her plan had gone up in smoke. Aoki figured that Cristal was too smart to fall for the ruse that Daniel was still alive. At some point she would ask for proof of life. Aoki didn’t have a choice. When Cristal called, she set the trap, hoping that Cristal would take the bait.
She’d heard about the attempted hit on Cristal in New Orleans that left a GHOST Protocol assassin dead in a hotel room. If he’d succeeded in killing Cristal, it would have looked bad on her. And she couldn’t look bad. She couldn’t fail. The Commission had given her ten weeks to complete her assignment, and time was quickly running out.
TwentY--Six
The house was silent, with Wendy and the boys having gone out for the day. AZ was in his private home office, sitting at his desk with a bottle of vodka, trying to take comfort in his leather chair. He downed the clear liquid in the glass and quickly poured himself another. He downed that too. He then leaned forward, placing his elbows against the desk, and clasped his hands together. There was so much going on, from his personal life to the street life. Mateo was still waiting on his five hundred kilos. It’d been several weeks now, and still, AZ wasn’t able to deliver. It was making him look bad. He continued to assure Mateo that he would get his drugs.
Oscar had to hold back this shipment due to internal problems with his organization and delivery issues with his trucks and Drug Enforcement Agents. Before the year ended, Customs and DEA agents combined had pulled over three 18-wheelers in separate locations—Austin, Houston, and at the Mexican border—and seized over eight hundred kilos of cocaine altogether with a street value of fifty million dollars. Suffice it to say, it was a major blow to the cartel.
AZ knew the effects of that many kilos being seized would trickle down. He knew there were going to be severe consequences and people murdered behind this shit. There was no way the police had gotten that lucky. There was a snitch inside Oscar’s organization, and until the matter was resolved, everything had been shut down. It angered AZ, but what could he do? He simply had to stand on the sidelines and wait for the game to continue.
But that wasn’t his only issue. His family life was falling apart.
He poured himself another shot and threw it back. He stared at the paternity test results that had arrived. It sat on the middle of his desk taunting him. He was hesitant to open the package, knowing the wrong results would change his life entirely. He needed some liquid courage.
AZ had swabbed the mouths of his children without Wendy knowing and sent the kit to the lab to be examined after Lisa’s impromptu visit. He had to know. Lisa had planted that bug in his head. There was no telling who else Wendy had fucked since they got together. How long had she been fucking that punk, Justice? Could he be Randy’s and Terrance’s father?
The results were that he was 99.9% not the father of either boy. The news was devastating to him. He couldn’t believe it. Reading the results made his blood boil.
“Fuckin’ whore!” he growled, tears running down his cheeks.
AZ went through a swirl of emotions—disappointment, hurt, rage, anger. He sat in his chair and downed more vodka. Knowing neither of his sons was his biologically, he felt paralyzed with resentment. All this time he thought he was playing Wendy. He thought he had the best of both worlds by marrying an assistant state’s attorney as a big-time drug dealer who secretly liked men. But in the end, she was playing him—twice pregnant by some other man.
“Fuckin’ whore!” He tossed the glass at the wall and watched it shatter.
AZ stood up and walked toward the window. It was starting to snow outside. Whiteness and ice blanketed his backyard. The trees were bare, their leaves having fallen months earlier, and his back and front yard looked barren, just like his life had started to look.
Whatever they needed, and whatever Wendy needed, he had provided for them. He was seething with so much anger, his blood started to feel like acid inside of his body. He wanted to take that same acid he felt inside of him and pour it all over his wife so that bitch could melt and scream in agony. There was no way around his pain. He couldn’t escape from it.
He curled his fingers into a fist and plunged it into the window, spider-webbing the glass. He suffered a few minor cuts on his knuckles, but it was nothing compared to what he felt in his heart.
All over his home were pictures of his beloved family, from his home office to the hallways of the mini-mansion to the fireplace mantel. He’d once cherished the pictures of him with his sons, and he now loathed every single one.
Walking into the kitchen, he placed the paternity results on the kitchen island, where Wendy couldn’t miss them. He went into his pantry and grabbed another bottle of vodka. He was going to try and drink his pain away to escape the hurt, but everything in his house was a reminder of his wife’s infidelity and two boys that weren’t even his.
He opened the bottle, took it to the head, and guzzled down a large amount of the liquor. He dropped into a chair, still drinking, and sat in the dark, waiting for Wendy to come home. He was eager to confront her and see what type of lie she would come up with.
Two hours later, Wendy’s car pulled into the driveway. From where he sat, AZ could hear every movement she made outside. Everything was off in the house, and the place was dark. He heard one car door shut. She didn’t have the kids with her, which was for the better. There was about to be hell in his house.
Wendy marched toward the kitchen’s back entrance. She was in a wool trench coat with a faux fur collar, shielding her from the bitter wind. She strolled inside looking like a million bucks, long black hair flowing, eyes glinting, because at that moment, life was good. She had secured a guilty verdict from the jury. It was another notch on her record, bringing her closer to a judgeship.
The lights came on in the kitchen, and seeing AZ seated in the dark with a liquor bottle in his hand she jumped back and placed her hand over her heart.
“AZ, you scared me half to death.”
He didn’t respond. He simply sat there frowning.
“You okay?” she asked him.
He remained silent.
It didn’t take Wendy long to find out what was eating at AZ. She glanced at the kitchen island and saw the paperwork. She walked to it with nosiness and picked it up. Her eyes quickly scanned over the writing and the paternity results. She gasped at what she was reading. Her mouth was wide open.
“AZ—”
The moment she turned around to speak, he was standing right behind her. He snatched the papers from her hands and pushed them into her face. “You cheating bitch!” he screamed.
Then he pounced on her. His straight right to her face sent her flying across the island and almost blacked her out.
Wendy scurried toward the kitchen drawer and went for a knife. She looked fiercely his way, her eye blackened and droplets of blood coming from her nose.
“You wanna play with me, bitch?” he shouted.
“Get the fuck out my house!” she screamed.
“Your house? You better drop that fuckin’ knife.”
She gripped it harder and pointed it at him, but he wasn’t fazed by her threat. He was drunk, angry, and ready to spread vengeance.
He pulled out something much more threatening—his loaded black Glock 19—and pointed it at her. Wendy stood wide-eyed. AZ looked like he was ready to kill her dead.
“All this time, and they’re not my kids,” he griped.
“Of course, they’re not your kids!” she admitted boldly. “You never fucked me!”
“What?”
“You don’t know how to fuck me right, AZ! Because you don’t like pussy, muthafucka! You think I don’t know about you? You’re a fuckin’ faggot!”
AZ kept steady aim at her head. He was tempted to squeeze the trigger and blow
her fucking head off. Hearing his wife holler that he was a faggot made his skin crawl. What made her assume he was gay? He had always been careful.
He lunged at her and smashed the butt of the gun against her face. She screamed and fell to the floor. AZ stood over her and shouted, “I’m no faggot!”
Wendy was shaking with fear. Her mouth and nose started to bleed more. She hugged the kitchen floor and cried.
He pointed the gun at her head. Every fiber in his body told him that she deserved to die. “I should kill you for lying to me. You played me for a fool all these years.”
“You never loved me,” she cried out.
“Because you’re a fuckin’ whore!”
The damage had already been done. Her face was bruised and broken apart. Her blood was dripping on the kitchen floor. She was on her hands and knees, and she expected to die by his hands.
“You think I didn’t know about that white boy?”
“I’ll kill you, bitch! Keep talking.”
He threatened to kill her if she got him arrested again. There was no way he was going back to jail.
“I’m not the man you think I am, bitch! I’m somebody you do not want to fuck with. I will personally see to it that not only you but your family die too,” he said through clenched teeth.
It was hard to tell what was coming more from Wendy, blood or tears.
AZ gave her one hour to pack whatever the boys needed and to leave his home. The kids had to go too. He didn’t want to be anywhere around them. He couldn’t bear to look at them. AZ knew that the mere sight of them would break him. It would be too painful.
Wendy knew not to take his threat lightly. The look on his face was ominous.
He nonstop pointed his gun at her, threatening to take her life. He told her to leave the car keys, the clothing, the furs, diamonds, and everything he’d bought her. She was to leave with the clothes she had on her back and the boys’ items. In fact, he was tempted to have her strip down to nothing and kick her out butt naked in the cold. The faster she left the house, the better.
Killer Dolls, Part 3 Page 15