It's up to Me to Make You Bleed

Los Angeles wasn’t too far from the Huntington Beach area. So, why would they bother wasting their money on a hotel in LA? Because they’re beyond the term “rich.” They had to be millionaires at least.

And I can tell you right now that they didn’t get all of that money from being in Avenged Sevenfold.

Brian helped me out of the car and offered his hand in helping me walk straight toward the hotel entrance. I may have still been dizzy, but the closer we got to this be real, the more sober I became.

Thousands of questions zoomed through my mind each time the elevator produced a ding noise upon reaching the next level. Their room was on the fifth floor. This is not happening because I am falling for Brian in any way. I’m only doing this to get as much information on them as possible. Right?

They had rented out two hotel rooms. Jimmy, Johnny, and Zacky took the first room, which left the two “couples” to use the second one. Each of the hotel rooms was equipped with a living room/kitchenette, bedroom (with two beds), and a bathroom.

Matt had made himself comfortable on the couch, flicking through the TV channels. Sarah immediately got into the shower, probably in an attempt to sober up a bit. Her and I were pretty trashed about an hour ago.

It didn’t take me long to realize, with quite a bit of nervousness I may add, that this situation left Brian and I alone in the bedroom. I stole a glance at the alarm clock sitting on the nightstand. It was already near 5 AM. How could he possibly think of anything but sleep?

“Finally,” he grinned, “we can have some alone time together. Fuck, I don’t know how I was able to wait so long.”

I swallowed a few comments of distaste and tried to look interested. Yes, Brian was incredibly sexy, but that didn’t make it enough of a justification to go crazy. “It’s a shame it’s already practically morning,” I sighed.

“You’re tired already?” he asked, as if being exhausted after a hard day’s work by five in the morning was unheard of.

“It’s been a really long day for me,” I replied sheepishly.

His eyes seemed to be holding back some sort of emotion that I couldn’t quite read. My best guess would’ve been that he was angry, yet the rest of his composure was entirely calm.

“Are you…sure you don’t want to mess around a little before going to bed?” he suggested, boldly running his fingers up my arms and sliding the straps of my shirt and bra down the slope of my shoulders.

Just before my chest was entirely revealed, I jolted backwards and stepped away from him a couple feet. “Sorry,” I laughed nervously, “I’m half asleep, Brian, and I’d rather experience…that…when I’m more conscious.”

I pulled back the bedspread before crawling onto the cool, white sheets. Brian ripped off his shirt and pants and followed. The pants I’d been wearing – the same ones that held my guns and knives – were incredibly hard to lay down in, so I stripped those, keeping the covers wrapped tightly around my body.

Of course, I’d been worried whether or not Brian would try to sneak his way across the bed and wrap his arm around me, but it never happened. I was almost saddened at the thought that I may have already pushed him away. And that was just enough to send me reeling into a feeling of drowsiness and disgust.

My job isn’t exactly a 9-5 kind of career. An assassin should always be on alert and well prepared to strike at any time of the day or night. I’d rarely ever been called on to handle a job before 10 AM, but of course that couldn’t be the case now.

My cell phone buzzed violently inside my pants. If it wouldn’t have been for Matt’s insanely heavy snoring, I’m sure that these vibrations would’ve woken someone up. I gripped the phone tightly and hid it beneath the covers so that no one else could see the harsh bright light.

I had an assignment.

It was already 8 AM and I had no idea when these guys planned on waking up…but I’d need to get the job done before that happened. The target’s residence was only a couple of blocks from here, so by all means, I should be able to succeed.

Slowly, I crawled out of bed and put my pants on. It wasn’t until I crept over to the door that I realized Brian wasn’t in the bed…or anywhere else in the hotel room for that matter…

*Brian’s POV*

Jimmy and I left the minute Matt, Sarah, and Chelsey had fallen asleep. Unless it was a flashy kill, we really didn’t care to include Matt any longer. Sure, Sarah didn’t know what was going on, but she’d probably start to raise some suspicions if Matt left every time we did.

Chelsey was easy to get past, mostly because of how tired she claimed to be. Of course I would’ve preferred to have actually gotten somewhere with her, but I think I’d rather hold her to her word instead and get some action later this morning.

A couple days ago, Jimmy, being the evil mastermind he was, came up with another series idea. He wanted to go through the entire list of people in our graduating class and kill ‘em all. The only problem with that would be that all the victims had something in common – they all went to high school with us.

I was having far too much fun to go to prison, so we decided only to pick a few people off the list, just for a bit of personal revenge, nothing commercial this time.

Jennifer Boone had known how to make her way around back in the day. She was notorious for finding a group of guys who were all friends and then dating each of them until their friendship had been entirely destroyed. Now, she was married and a mother. Both Jimmy and I had a grudge against her, so she was the perfect former classmate to begin with.

Her husband answered the door wearing his robe and slippers, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “Good morning sir,” Jimmy greeted with a sadistic smile before shoving a random screwdriver through the man’s stomach.

He shoved him back into the apartment, allowing perfect access for us to enter and lock the door behind us. “Who the hell are you?” the man gasped, hands desperately trying to cradle the wound, though doing absolutely nothing to cease the flood of blood.

“Honey, what’s going on?” Jennifer called from the bedroom.

Jimmy gave a swift kick to the man’s face before we headed for the other room, hearing the satisfactory grunts and thuds the man had made.

Jennifer gasped when she saw us. Jimmy eagerly turned his camera on as I reached for the hunting knife I’d cleverly concealed in my pants. “Nice place you got here, Jennifer. I never would’ve thought that all your whoring around in high school would ever pay off,” I taunted before chucking the knife forward with perfect precision.

It lodged itself directly in the middle of her chest. The hilt of the knife protruded from its cozy position between her double D’s. She gasped loudly as I ripped the knife out of her chest, spraying a stream of blood onto an unknown audience member – her baby.

“P-please don’t kill me…m-my son…needs me,” she cried, hardly able to speak as the blood rushed out of the hole in her chest.

Her words meant nothing to me, and neither did the baby’s cries as he became soaked in his mother’s own blood. I continued stabbing her until she no longer had her humanity. Her face was entirely gone, bits and pieces of her features gruesomely scattered across the floor. Her limbs were hardly still attached to her torso anymore. There had to be a least a couple inches deep of blood pooling and flooding out into the hallway.

The baby was entirely coated in the crimson liquid, as were Jimmy and myself. He was still crying and screaming even after we left. No one would ever be able to his answer his tears.

We both shed our t-shirts in a nearby dumpster, walking around in nothing but muscle shirts and black pants…where no one would be able to see the red stains through the black fabric.

*Normal POV*

Speed was my biggest assistant right now. I needed to be agile to get the job done and return to the hotel before anyone notices my absence. The soles of my feet burned as my heels made rough contact with the concrete in quick, rushed steps.

My target lived alone. Alan Burke, 43, was a bank robber who stole from about 20 banks within the county. His streak was about to fall short. I wasn’t going to drag this one out, not only because time wasn’t a luxury today, but also because I was pissed at this man. He was my first kill scheduled for this early in the morning for fucks sake!

I busted down the door with a heavy kick and shoved past the splintered remains. My face held an uncommon fury as I watched the man jump up startled in his bed. If I can’t sleep in, then neither will he…ever again.

My fingers slid into my lower pocket down at my knee and gleefully gripped the revolver. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded in an annoyed, yet sleepy voice.

“You’re going to die,” I shrugged nonchalantly, offering him a sickly sweet smile before pulling the trigger three or four times.

The silencer was well secured, so at least I could shoot as much as I wanted. And what made the kill even more…enjoyable…was that with each bullet that indented itself into his head, chest, stomach, and shoulder, I imagined that that bullet had instead been aimed at Brian Haner, Jimmy Sullivan, or Matt Sanders. It was a beautiful thing.

As the sun shone through the slits in his blinds, the blood splatter on the wall seemed to form the shape of an arced rainbow. But I didn’t quite have enough time to admire the art. It was already going on 9 o’clock now.

I discarded my bloody clothes in the laundry shoot at my dad’s place, which was conveniently on the way back to the hotel. I grabbed an outfit similar to the one I had been wearing and headed back to the hotel.

As I sneaked back into the hotel room, I ran into Brian who had been walking around the corner, heading for the kitchen. There was something sticky on his pants that caused him to adhere to me a little more than I would’ve preferred. The curtains were drawn closed, which made it easier to conceal my matted, bloody hair.

Our eyes shared an intense stare that shook me to my very core. I watched as he leaned in and I remained in position, not doing anything to stop him. And the feeling of his lips on mine…it burned in so many different ways.

For the first time in ten years, I was scared.