Chase took one step before Bizzy grabbed his arm. “Cheese, we can fix this… I love you more than anything… please, I fucked up so hard, I can’t even say it in words.” Her pull became more insistent with every step her husband took, and it fed the fire in him like she’d tossed in a batch of plutonium. “Cheeeeeese, oh god, don’t do something stupid… just let him go…”
The plaintive, reedy whine was what finally made him stop. “Fucking hell Bizzy! After all this, you’re still choosing him? Fuck! Does he have some kind of magic fucking dick?”
“No!” She gripped his arm tighter and pressed her face to his shoulder for a second before looking up at him with desperation. “Never, never think he was… that you aren’t…” She grimaced, her eyes rolling around, trying to order her thoughts. “Cheese, you know Shane, he’s an asshole. He won’t just leave us–”
Chase had never gotten assaultive in the slightest with the light of his life, and he managed to hold himself back now from doing anything horrible, barely, but that didn’t mean he could just let her touch him with those filthy hands. He put his palm on her chest and shoved her back, and her grip was so hard that his sleeve ripped off as she staggered away. “He’s an asshole? Is that why you fucked him, or why you kept fucking him?”
“Chase, man. Just cool off. She wanted it, and I was there to give it. It’s not my–”
Chase didn’t even need to look away from where Bizzy was holding up his lost sleeve to her face like a security blanket. He could hear that same old smirk in Shane’s voice.
Even as his body went into motion, his bare arm hurtling across the space that separated him from the man who’d cuckolded him, flashes of the last months, of seeing Bizzy and Shane joking together in the office, of them having closed-door meetings for no real reason, of catching her texting nearly every day with someone she didn’t name, of Bizzy taking her own car to work instead of driving with him, then arriving home late two or three days a week…
…Of coming home two days ago to hear scrambling in their bedroom before she opened it and blocked his view of the inside, short of breath, with a shit-eating grin on her face, telling him she needed “me” time, so he should go play some videogames…
…They all coalesced together to pummel him ten times harder than his fist did to Shane’s face.
God, love really did make you a fucking blind moron.
Detachedly, Chase marveled at the sounds being blended in his ears. There was the wet thud of his knuckles colliding again and again with Shane’s soft tissue, Bizzy’s wails, Shane’s rattling wheeze of mortal terror… and Chase’s own sobs as he trumpeted his misery from the end of his fist. But it was a sound he hadn’t expected that finally made him stop and look one last time at his wife.
Bizzy was leaning against a wall, her head lolling over the puddle she’d made on the floor when she’d puked her guts out, wisps of golden hair clinging pathetically to her tear-moistened face. She gave out a low moan, turned to lock eyes with her husband, and then raan right out the front door, which had been left open by one of the departing guests.
Chase just watched her leave; he truly did not have it in him to say a word. He had no idea what to do, or even what he wanted to do; his heart was in his wife’s hands as she ran, even as his mind roared after her to keep going and never come back. As a compromise, he wandered over to the door and just looked out, into the empty night.
A gurgling sound brought him back to the situation at hand. With a calm that took every ounce of his willpower, Chase casually walked up to Shane and looked down at his demolished nemesis. “Here’s the deal. I’m going to let you live. You’re going to leave. Tomorrow, you’re going to disappear.”
“F… fuc…” The denial was aborted from the pain of birthing it, and Shane gritted his remaining teeth. “…cops…”
Chase bent down and took a fistful of Shane’s tawny hair, wrenching the broken man’s head up to pin him with his gaze. “If you call the cops, I will begin a campaign of poisoning every aspect of your life. Completely. FBI flags, sex offender lists, IRS audits, spyware, compromised accounts… do I need to keep going? You know how good I am, do you believe I can do it?”
Shane’s one working eye widened, and he nodded through his agony.
“Good. Take the deal.”
He assumed the yes when Shane wobbled to his feet through a series of groans, leaving a smear of blood on the carpet and wall behind him, and staggered out the front door. This time, Chase didn’t feel even the slightest need to take a look, and instead, in a fog, shuffled over to the glass of scotch he’d set down a lifetime ago. Picking it up, he peered at the amber liquid held in his crimson fist and laughed. “I should put you on a shelf as a memento. You’re the last thing I touched when I still had a life.”
After a second, he downed the spirit, then went looking to finish off its entire family.