"Noira?" he said, his voice faint over the hubub of the crowd. "Moira," she corrected him with a giggle. He’d heard her right the first time, he just wanted to point out that she had a ridiculous name. It almost sounded like something Cohen would have come up with. The redhead offered her hand out to shake, but Ryan pulled it towards his lips instead, dragging them lightly across her knuckles to lay a soft kiss on the back of her hand. "A pleasure," he breathed, giving her hand a soft squeeze before letting it drop, and turning to introduce her to Diane.
Ryan took in the woman’s appearance with raised brows. She had been a good enough lay, but he hadn’t thought anything more of it than that. He certainly hadn’t expected her to turn up at his office, tears streaking down her face, a bruise already raising against her cheekbone. He almost felt… sorry? That couldn’t be right. This wasn’t his doing. Still, he did feel some strange obligation to make it better.
tw: violence and gore and death. This got… really intense.
Ryan peered down at the woman from across his desk to make sure the would-be assassin was dead. All it had taken was one shot, aimed carelessly at her chest. The buckshot had left a spray across her overalls, a red stripe where there had before been nothing but dirt and grime. He wouldn’t have even known she was a woman, if it hadn’t been for the shock of red hair that had spilled out of her bandana and across the floor. He leaned forward, trying to decide if she was breathing.
After a moment’s silence, he walked carefully around the desk, holding his weapon at the ready. Her eyes…. her eyes were open. Then she was alive? He set down the gun and knelt beside her, trying to feel for a pulse. No luck in her wrist but then, he had never done this on someone else before. He set his fingers to her neck… and then started with a shock.
Not because she was alive— quite the contrary. No pulse met his fingers. Her eyes, however. Her eyes struck him almost physically. They were brown and clear, sparkling. Almost golden. His mother’s eyes. He stared at her in horror, remembering the last time he’d seen those eyes. before the parasite went for her war against the state. Before she abandoned him for nothing but a coffin.
His horror turned to rage as he glowered at her irises, growing milky right before his face. His mouth cracked in a terrible scowl as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his pipe tamp, opening it and jamming a tool at random directly into her right pupil— gazing up at him with disappointment on the brow. The viscera was not so soft as he had expected, and there was some muscle to the process, which required him to brace himself against her face with his left hand, holding her cold mouth shut, as he scraped and dug at her eye socket.
He was no longer sure whether he was destroying one of his earliest parasites or taking his mother’s eyes away from this whore. There was some blood, less probably than if she had been alive, but the ruined eye caved beneath his metal tool, squishing out of her head like a used rubber. He applied the same force and vehemence to the other, throwing away his tool in the process and scraping it out with his bare fingernails to smash it against the floor beneath her, smashing and smashing until it was her face that he was destroying with his fists. The blood from his blows was wet on his cheeks and his breathing was ragged as he beat until the woman’s face was gone. No empty sockets looking back at his closed, wet eyes.
He ran a sleeve across his face, a change of clothes was in order. A change of everything. He went back to his desk and sat down heavily in the chair, leaning back to light his pipe bitterly.
Ryan whirled on her, practically spitting in his fury. "Tell you the truth?" he demanded, his pipe quivering in his mouth with the fever of his words. He plucked it out, gripping it with white knuckles as he hissed, "I don’t owe you anything, you stupid woman. If you came here for confessions and frivolity, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.”
A sardonic wrinkle appeared by his nose and he smiled wickedly, "Unless you can make it worth my while.."
