Archive of Our Own ^omega

Halloween Special I promised you all is finally out here on Ao3 and also on Tumblr! On tumblr I had to divide in two parts because it was too long, lmao.

tw/cw: graphic violence, cannibalism references, psychological terror, home invasion, stalking, home invasion aftermath, graphic panic responses, physical restraint, predatory threat, knives and gun present, involuntary urination, gunplay, noncon, incest, light bloodplay, forced petplay, watersports, asphyxiation, forced orgasm, p in v, primal play, hunting, cannibalism referenced, Dead Dove Do Not Eat, you’ve been warned. | art by @kcokaine

God Can't Save What's Mine

You step out of the bathroom with steam clinging to your skin and the anchor’s voice still leaking from the living room — escaped inmate, armed and extremely dangerous, officers deployed to ensure a safe Halloween — when you see him.

He’s on your couch like it belongs to him.

Like he belongs to every room he enters.

Boots on your coffee table, one heel tapping out a lazy metronome against the wood. Jacket that isn’t his — stolen, scuffed — unzipped enough to show the cage of his chest, the black ink, the spread of old scars that look like countries ground together. The TV washes his face in police-blue, the scar that has taken his right eye and marked a third of his front has a sick, faint ghastly shine under that pale blue light, and the chyron below repeats his name as if the syllables themselves are a siren.

Your breath gutters.

Your towel slips half an inch — you catch it with shaking fingers you don’t recognize as your own.

“Close the door,” he says, voice low, sinister. The vowel drags, lazy, like a knife testing soft fruit. “You letting the heat out.”

You obey.

Not because you decide to, but because the body that wears your name decides for you and it knows better than to make sudden movements.

The latch clicks.

The sound feels like putting your head into a guillotine.

“Hi, kid.” He doesn’t look at you when he says it. He looks at his own hands — split knuckles, rusted crescents of blood under his nails, a dark smear you know isn’t paint. He rubs thumb to forefinger, as if remembering the texture. “Been a minute.”

You can’t answer.

Your mouth is a locked drawer.

Your mind is a thousands-volt fence.

Behind your ribs, a frantic animal throws itself against bone, again, again, again.

Run, hide, scream, call the police, throw something, run, run, run.

You hear the front-porch pumpkins humming with that warm candle heat. You hear distant laughter and the thin silver of wind through the maple. You hear the news saying his name and the words serial, mutilation, cannibal, corpse desecration, like beads on a string you can’t stop counting.

“You’re not — ” Your voice dies.

“Real?” He laughs, a short scrape. His eye cuts over to you, the gaze is a touch, cold and proprietary. “I’m tired of being held by idiots. Had to stretch my legs. And I missed my favorite niece.”

“Don’t call me that.” you breath, lips trying to be steady.

He smiles. It is not a human expression.

“Mm. You’d prefer what, then? Baby? Princess? Neighbor? Victim?”

The last word lands like a hand around your throat.

He turns the volume up with the remote, just a notch, just enough to let the anchor speak over you — officers urge citizens to lock their doors and report any suspicious —

“Look at that,” he murmurs. “They always get my worst photo.” He tosses the remote, it hits your rug, soft. “Where’s your phone?”

Lie. Hide. Call someone.

“Bedroom.”

You lie.

His eye flick to the wet glitter you’ve left on the floor from the bathroom to the living room, little comet tails of water — your betrayal in footprints.

He hums, pleased, and stretches, vertebrae popping.

The jacket rolls back and the holster prints against fabric.

Not empty. Of course not.

The air tastes like iron. There’s a dull chemical halo around him — garage oil, cheap motel soap, gunpowder. He’s recently washed and still cannot shed the stink of the places he passed through to arrive here.

“You shouldn’t be here,” you say with what you could gather of your courage.

Your throat is raw already.

“You think?” His brows lift, entertained. “Tell me more rules. I’ll write them down.”

He has always been big, but prison has distilled him. Every angle is harder. Every movement more economical. The softness he once wore like a mask around family gatherings — barbecues, birthdays, the benevolent uncle who brought fireworks that made your mother curse under her breath — that softness has been skinned and hung.

What’s left sits on your couch and looks like a god that never learned the word no.

He watches the way your hands shake around the towel. Watches everything.

“You got taller,” he says. “Got meaner in the face. Good. I always said you’d need it, kid.”

“I — ” You inhale wrong, cough, try again. “The police — ”

“ — are busy keeping the suburbs pretty for the kiddies.” He tilts his head toward the muffled chorus of trick-or-treat two streets over, his smile dry and deliberate. “They forgot to check the guest list. Negligence. It’s a disease.”

You take a step back. Your heel kisses tile. He notices — of course he notices.

His attention moves with you, a red dot on your sternum.

“Don’t,” he says, the word soft as pocket lint. Your muscles obey before your mind parses the command. “If you run right this second, you’ll slip. You’ll crack your head. I have plans for that little head.”

Your stomach turns.

The towel feels suddenly obscene, not because of your skin beneath it but because it’s flimsy and human and ridiculous in front of something this feral.

You imagine dropping it and offering both hands, fingers splayed, empty, the posture you gave junkyard dogs as a kid to prove you didn’t mean harm.

You imagine him laughing so hard he cries.

He unpins a small object from his pocket — metal, oval, a number stamped into its cheek — and rolls it across his knuckles. A badge. Correctional. The chain is broken, the metal bent, slicked dark in spots.

He tosses it so it lands by your keys in the ceramic dish. A souvenir, a punctuation mark.

You wish your knees would lock instead of float.

“You remember me?” he asks, near-gentle, like a doctor before a long procedure.

You remember too much.

You remember his hands on your shoulders at twelve, steering you out of the kitchen, saying adults were talking. His laugh at your graduation when he stood too close for the photo and you could feel heat through his shirtsleeve. He was always near, always protective, always fun to be around. He was always handsome in a menacing way you didn't understand very well. He was always there for you.

You remember the night they took him, how he smiled for the cameras and winked at you like the whole thing was a prank. You remember the photographs of rooms like butcheries you weren't supposed to see but negligence always existed. A bag in evidence labeled left hand, ring present.

You nod. The motion is a failure.

“Good,” he says. “I worried the years would make you soft.”

“Why are you here?” It comes out smaller than you intend.

He points at the couch between his spread knees, that casual invitation that is not an invitation.

“Because this is the one place nobody would expect me to go first. And because I wanted to see your face when you realized the door you locked, the life you folded and stacked neat, doesn’t keep wolves out. It keeps you penned.”

“What do you want.” Not a question. A surrender disguised as grammar.

Eyebrows knit, eyes trying not to be barred with tears, voice cracking, body fighting for dear life not to tremble — and to hold together.

He considers. He presses thumb to his bottom lip and smears the memory of someone else’s blood into a faint, glossy crescent.

“To play,” he says. “To talk. To eat.”

A little flash of teeth. Not humor. Inventory.

“In that order.”

Your gorge sprains against the back of your tongue. You look at the kitchen without looking — the sugar jar, the fruit bowl, the big knife you left to dry in the rack because you were tired.

Don’t be stupid.

He’s faster than you have ever been in your best year.

He can cross the room like a blink.

He wants you to try. He wants to break hope, not your door.

On the TV, a neighbor in a fleece vest tells the camera he trusts the police to keep the kids safe. Sukuna leans forward, forearms on his thighs, and listens to the man talk about vigilance while keeping his eye on you.

“You know what vigilance is?” he asks. He doesn’t need your answer. “Hunger with homework.”

He stands. The motion is unhurried, a tide.

Your heart tries to climb into your mouth.

He moves closer than you have ever allowed anyone.

The towel is a barrier made of spit and wishes.

“Breathe, brat.” he says, amused, watching you forget how. “You look like you’re about to faint. That’s boring.”

You drag air in and it slices. He smells like long road and bad gasoline, like night rain in alleys where even the rats keep secrets.

There’s a cut running along his jaw, thin and fresh. The urge to look for stitching supplies sits up in your brain like a friend you shouldn’t have texted back.

You shove it down until it bruises.

“You’re going to kill me,” It doesn't come brave.

“Eventually,” he allows, as if discussing taking out the trash. “But I’m not a bad host.”

A small laugh at his own joke.

“I like to get to know my guests. I like to see what lives inside the spineless people grow when you push them right.”

“I’m not spineless.” you don't know why you even try.

“Yet you’re still here,” he says, soft. “Still nice. Still using your indoor voice with the monster in your living room.”

His hand lifts. You flinch, hard enough your shoulder twinges.

He stops, lets that sink in, then rakes two knuckles — not gentle, delicate — down the edge of your towel where it meets your collarbone. You feel each ridge as if it were carved with a scalpel.

He is telling you he could take everything and you would let him because the alternative is worse.

He is telling you you’ve already let him in, and not tonight.

You remember it like bad home video — grainy, too bright in the wrong places, sound peaking when people laugh.

Your nineteenth.

Balloons knotted to chair backs, sagging ribbons, a supermarket cake sweating cream under the kitchen light. Your mother’s playlist stuck on a song that makes everyone nostalgic for a time you never lived. Paper plates stack like cheap shields. The house hums with family noise — forks, gossip, the wet squeal of sneakers by the back door.

Then the door opens and the footage steadies, like the camera itself holds its breath.

He walks in late, as he does everything, wearing the grin that makes adults tighten their mouths and kids light up. Leather jacket damp with mist, hair raked back, the last of day’s cold clinging to him. He gives your mother a bottle of something amber with a bow made of the ribbon he ripped off a balloon, and she laughs despite herself because he always makes people laugh despite themselves.

He doesn’t look at you first.

He makes you want him to.

Your heart learns a new tempo.

“Birthday girl,” he says finally, like it’s a private joke you told him years ago. He taps the cake box with two fingers, a drummer counting in a song he already wrote. “You ready?”

For what, someone asks, and he just smiles as if the question isn’t part of the language he speaks.

Candles. Wobbling flames. The lights go off and every face turns into a cave painting, all eyes and teeth.

You pull in air to blow and smell sugar and smoke and the faint metallic ghost that always rides under his cologne.

You close your eyes.

You wish for something you can’t say out loud with all these witnesses.

When you open them, he’s already watching you like the wish answered him instead.

Later, the camera shakes. The adults drift to the living room. Someone’s laughing too loud. Your name ricochets off a hallway and then gets lost. You are rinsing plates at the sink — cold water shocking sugar off paper — and the kitchen is a smaller, brighter planet, its own weather, its own gravity.

You feel him arrive before you see him — the air warms a degree. Your back learns the shape of his attention.

“Messy,” he says at your shoulder, amused, and you hear the smile, feel it. “You always were.”

You keep your eyes on the frosting slip-sliding into the drain.

“You’re late.”

“Had to find the right thing.” He sets a small box on the counter by your elbow. Plain, white, unwrapped. The kind of box that means nothing and everything. “Open it.”

You don’t touch it. Your hands are wet — you tell yourself that’s why.

He steps closer anyway, hip brushing the cabinet, jacket breathing out rain and road and the kind of night that sticks to skin. He flips the lid with one knuckle and inside — simple, a silver locket, oval, unassuming, the chain a bright snake in tissue.

Your name is scratched into the back in a hand that tried to be careful and failed on purpose.

“It’s—” Your throat forgets how to be a throat. Eyes wide, glazed in awe. “You didn’t have to—”

“I did.” Soft, decisive. He lifts the chain and the locket swings, catching light, a hooked fish in a kitchen that thinks it’s safe. “Turn.”

You do. The cool kiss of metal finds the hollow at the base of your throat — his fingers ghost your neck as he fastens the clasp.

It feels like a tag, like proof, like the first line in a ledger. You stop breathing for a second and he notices, because he always notices.

“Breathe,” he murmurs. “Can’t have the birthday girl fainting.”

When you turn back, he’s where you expected and closer than you prepared for. The camera in your head loses focus, blurs edges, decides to keep only the important things — the seam at his jaw, the no-color of his eye in this kitchen light, the scar over his knuckle where he once taught a man a lesson and you pretended not to listen.

“You’re nineteen,” he says, a fact delivered like a verdict.

“I know.”

“Do you.” His mouth is almost a smile. “Show me.”

There are still voices in the living room. A sitcom laugh track flares and dies. A spoon clinks against a glass. You could step around him. You could call for your mother. You could hold up a plate between you like a saint’s reliquary. You don’t.

Your skin has been arguing with your brain for months and tonight the skin wins.

“You’ll ruin this,” you hear yourself say, and only later will you realize you meant your life and not the party.

“Maybe.” He tilts his head, diverted, interested, unkind. “Maybe you’ll ruin me first.”

He doesn’t touch you. Not yet. He lets silence do it. He lets the humid hum of the dishwasher and the open-mouthed dark of the window and the candle ghosts on the counter do it. He waits until you sway, until your hands, still damp, brace the edge of the sink because gravity is suddenly a rumor.

“Look at me,” he says, and you do, and that’s the permission he was patient for.

His hand finds your jaw like it’s supposed to live there. Not rough, not gentle — claiming.

His thumb watches your pulse from the outside. He leans in slow enough to let you run and close enough to make running humiliating.

You meet him halfway.

The first kiss is an answer you didn’t know the question to until now.

He tastes like winter air through a cracked window, like something lit and put out with fingers, like something that will hurt if you ask for more and you ask anyway. He takes the yes he coaxed and edits it into something bigger. His other hand finds your hip and says stay without squeezing. The counter presses into your lower back, the sink’s lip bites your wrist, your stupid locket is a little cold sun between you and you don’t care because heat climbs everywhere else.

You’ve been kissed before.

By boys who tasted like soda and nerves and apology.

This isn’t that. This is a decision. This is a map being redrawn without your permission and with your consent.

When he breaks it, he doesn’t move far. A breath, a boundary. His thumb strokes your lip once like he’s removing a crumb no one can see.

“Firsts matter.” he says, quiet, almost to himself. “They teach the body what it’s for.”

“I know what I’m for.” Your voice shakes but it’s out there now, stupid and brave and yours.

His eye brightens — surprise, delight, menace, something like admiration weaponized.

“Do you.” he drawls, a little sinister.

You nod, and he looks at your mouth again like you got the right answer. The next kiss is slower, lower, it tastes like relief and a dare. He lets you catch his bottom lip with your teeth.

He laughs into you, pleased, proud, corrupt.

From the living room — your name, thrown like a coin you don’t intend to pick up. He waits. He always knows when to let the line go slack.

“You should go back,” you say, but your hands have forgotten every chore you were ever taught and are holding him by the jacket like you’re the one keeping him in the room and not the other way around.

“I will,” he says, and doesn’t.

He nudges you a graceless inch to check if you’ll stubborn, if you’ll stiffen, if you’ll break. You bend instead, a reed in a flood. He marks that down somewhere you can’t see.

“You’re shaking,” he observes, not unkind.

“I’m cold,” you lie, and you both look at the locket like that’s what chills you.

He kisses your jaw, precise, like he’s stamping a document, and the place he leaves warms through the bone.

“Happy birthday, little thing.” he says, almost formal. “Remember this part when it gets loud.”

“It’s already loud,” you whisper, because your pulse is a drum, because the house is a shell and he’s the ocean inside it.

He steps back then, like a trick — one smooth, infuriating inch, and air falls between you again. He looks you over with a calm that feels like hands. He straightens your shirt where it bunched under his fingertips. He wipes a smear of frosting from your wrist with a cloth and tosses it in the sink.

He is careful in the way arsonists are careful with kindling.

Then he’s gone.

Back into the living room, into the orbit of other people, grinning something that makes your uncle snort and your mother roll her eyes and the sitcom fill up the spaces he leaves. He throws you a glance that looks like later, and you hate how your knees soften around the word.

You stay in the kitchen clutching the counter while your mouth learns how to be yours again and the locket settles to the exact weight of a promise you won’t be able to return. The video in your head loops this part every time you let it — the lift of his mouth, the edge of his scar, the way he said turn and you did, the soft click of the clasp.

The party keeps breathing without you — bass through drywall, aunties laughing like wind chimes, a cousin yelling “where’s the knife?” about the cake you’ve already cut twice.

Sunshine slants gold and dust-soft through the hallway, and his hand ghosts the small of your back as you slip into your bedroom and let the door kiss shut, not click.

“Still sleep with these?” he murmurs, thumb hooking a plush by the ear. It’s the pink one you’ve had since ten, it lolls, accusing, when he sets it on your pillow like a witness.

“Sometimes…” you say, because lying feels louder.

“Not tonight.” The grin is quiet and mean and fond all at once.

He presses you to the mess of blankets with his hips caged wide and his hands braced by your shoulders, not touching you where you’re begging for it, just past it, mapping patience over want.

Your locket is a cool coin between you, he watches it rise and fall like a metronome he owns.

Down the hall, someone knocks the good serving spoon to the floor — clang, a chorus of oops — and the sound ricochets through your ribs. You taste frosting and iron and the citrus on his breath. The kiss is a theft that feels like returning something you didn’t know you lost. He takes your yes and tunes it until you’re sound, not person.

Footsteps pause outside your door.

The knob twitches once like a question.

You both go perfectly still, breath coin-thin.

A beat.

Another.

The footsteps leave, and the laugh he lets into your mouth is a sin.

“This lock work?” he asks against your lip.

“There isn’t one.” you whisper, and the way his eye brightens makes the room smaller.

“Brave girl.”

He straightens and scans the room the way he scans streets, quick and total. Posters. Books. The laundry basket you meant to hide. The closet mirror catching both of you in a sliver of afternoon where you look older than you feel and he looks like trouble earned. The plush on the pillow stares.

He flips it facedown with two fingers.

“Bathroom,” he says, and the word is already a hallway.

The master suite is two doors down and a lifetime of noise away. You walk the edge of it — music, forks, someone asking where you are — and your pulse gets so loud you’re sure it’s visible.

The bathroom smells like lavender and bleach and the cologne your mother buys in duty-free. The fan hums when he thumbs it on. The mirror fogs quick, the room going small and soft and secret.

The lock works here.

He boxes you between the sink and the door with nothing but presence.

“Shh,” he says, a breath against your ear, and your spine bows like you’re learning a new language.

Time fractures. Everything reduces. Tile under your palms, cool and square and real. His jacket shrugged off to the back of the door, a dark animal watching. The weirdly domestic click of the fan swallowing sound. Your locket tapping bone. His laugh caught in his throat when your fingers find the line of his jaw and tell him here. The way he says your name like a warning people never hear in time.

The party swells — a cheer for nothing, the thock of the watermelon being split, your mother calling a cousin by the wrong name and being corrected three times. You bite your lip when he exhales against your neck and the mirror blurs you to ghosts. Your sundress is bunched up, his hips pressing you against the wall and your mouth is trying not to be loud. He palms your knee higher with a patience that’s almost cruel and you forget what standing is for. One leg bracketed on his hip, the other still supporting half of your weight — his lips spreading open mouthed kisses on your pulse, on that spot behind your ear, on the curve of your neck — and somehow his pants are down just enough, and your panties are pulled sideways by your own hand to give hm access to your cunt.

He’s careful where careful belongs and reckless where it doesn’t, and you don’t know which is worse.

"Thought you were a virgin." he purrs against the corner of your lips, crimson eye fixed on yours.

"I am" you breath and the tone is embarrassing, but probably not as embarrassing as your whole face feeling like a volcano erupting.

"So fucking wet already…" he hums, brushing his lips on yours, biting your lower lip and making you wince lightly as the hot tip of his cock slides through your slick folds, collecting your arousal and coating the shaft in it slowly. He has no hush whatsoever — it's like he has all the time in the world. "You really wanted t to be defiled by your own uncle this much, little thing?"

His voice is poison and lust and something else that makes your knee become jelly, but his hand on your hip is still the one thing holding you up to so stand where you need to be.

"Don't say it like that" you mewl, eyebrows knit together in something that's shame and urgency and despair all together.

His grin is evidence that he is being nasty by choice and the kiss he takes from your pursed lips wash away your worries in a second. It also swallows your moan when he pushes his hips forward, sinking his fingers on the plush of your thigh where your leg is raised and braced against his side and thrusting into your pussy without a warning. He bottoms out in one go and you feel your body splitting in half, you feel pain, heat, a shiver rising, your eyes rolling back and then the faint throbbing of that becoming a different sensation — something like fullness and the pleasure of his warmth.

You pant against his mouth when he breaks the kiss, — his grin is impossible — and your hand is grasping his shirt with a strength that makes your knuckles white.

"Breathe, princess, relax." he mutters, nose tip tracing your cheekbone and breath hot against your face. Your body still trying to adjust to his size, breathing feels like a chore you're not being paid enough to do. "You're strangling me." he huffs a low laugh and relaxes you the way he knows it works — trailing kisses from your temple to the base of your neck, slow, loving, gentle with that low hum that reverberates inside your chest.

You close your eyes and take a deep breath. Your muscles relax. Your heart tries to calm down.

There’s a knock on the suite door.

Not the bathroom — the bedroom, just beyond — your mother’s voice, sing-song and too close: “Sweetie? You in here? People want photos!”

You swallow your own heart.

Eyes wide — doe on headlights.

Panic starts to rise in your guts.

He smiles like prayer is a toy.

One finger to his lips — quiet — and he holds your gaze through the sound of the handle testing.

The bathroom lock is flimsy, the kind that never mattered until this exact second.

The handle doesn’t turn.

Your mother hums, satisfied with an invented answer, and her footsteps retreat to the chorus of the day.

You breathe again so hard it feels like a confession.

He presses his forehead to yours, grin hot and private, and you’re dizzy with the fact of getting away with it.

It makes you braver, it makes him worse.

He says happy birthday into your mouth like a brand.

Your legs are both wrapped on his hips when he starts to actually thrust into you. Your arms are looped around his neck, hands buried in the pink, soft hair. Your face nested against the curve of his shoulder as you muffle your own moans and whimpers.

He groans, low, dragged — and he says the filthiest things because he gets off on the sounds you make when he does so.

"Your little cunt feels so good around my cock, brat." "Never thought you'd be melting on your uncle's dick, did you?" "You're so fucking tight, ffffuck."

You claw his neck, you clutch him closer to you, you want to feel his heat, you want to melt even more around him and against him and inside his kisses and his rotten words.

He gives you what you want — his hands grab the fat of your ass tighter as he increases his rhythm, fucking you against the cold wall as his lips clash into yours, drowning your pleas and letting your tongue taste his own while your body shows him he's hitting that exact spot, that one, that makes your legs close tighter around his body and your pussy clench, strangle, milk his cock to announce your orgasm.

And when you cum, you find your teeth sunk into the curve of his neck again, killing the broken sound you'd let roll off your lips.

He curses under his breath and doesn't stop pounding — he gets faster, rougher, until he presses you against the cold tiles and rolls his rips, rutting into you as you're finishing riding your own orgasm, finally letting himself spill and paint your insides white with his thick, hot seed.

The feeling is second to none, it's sweet, satisfying, suffocating, fulfilling in a way you haven't had before.

He keeps rutting into you as he spurts, your teeth still latched on the tan inked skin and your chests rising and falling in a wrecked pace until you both manage to control your lungs — breathe in, breathe out, four in, six out.

You kiss the line of his jaw, he chuckles with a deep rumble in his chest and he helps you clean up when he gets you off his dick. Not without commenting, of course.

"Mm. I should make you go donwstairs take your family pictures with your cute pussy still stuffed with my cum and your panties drenched."

You smack his shoulder and his shit eating grin tells you he's just half kidding.

You call him depraved, as if the idea didn't make your cunt clench around nothing and throb immediately at the slight possibility of being caught.

After, you rinse your wrists under too-cold water because your hands won’t stop shaking. He watches you in the mirror and wipes a stray smear from your cheek with his thumb, domestic and devastating.

The fog thins, your faces come back in pieces — your mouth kiss-swollen, his eye pleased and wolf-bright, the locket shining like an oath you made without words.

“Fix your hair,” he says, smirking. He’s already rolling his sleeves down, buttoning the jacket, stepping back into the person the family believes in.

You push stray strands behind your ears and look normal wrong.

“How do we—” Your voice is a scratch.

“We don’t,” he says, gentle like a sharp thing wrapped in tissue. “We were never here.”

He cracks the door and listens to the house think — music, laughter, the world that existed five minutes ago pretending it still does. He steps out first, then stops, turns, and flicks your locket with a knuckle so it pings — a little bell only you hear.

“Later,” he mouths, and is gone.

You count to ten with your forehead against the door and the fan still humming like a lie.

When you rejoin the party, the room swallows you whole. Someone hands you a plate. Someone smears frosting on your cheek and you laugh too loud and wipe it away, and you feel like your body is a shop window with the light turned up too bright behind it.

He stands across the room with his shoulder leaned against the wall and a beer in his hand, smiling at a story he isn’t listening to, and he never looks at you except once, when no one can see, and that one look is the entire afternoon replayed in a blink.

Every photo from that day shows you grinning a little too hard, like the camera might hear your heart. Every time you look at them later, you can smell the lavender, hear the fan, feel the tile, feel his breath on your skin.

You can still feel the party outside the door, the way the whole world almost opened it and didn’t.

You carry that almost for years.

You learn how heavy it is.

Later, after the sirens and the cameras and the words you won’t say out loud anymore, you will rewind to this.

Not to punish yourself — though you will.

Not to absolve him — though he never asked.

You rewind because it’s the last frame in which you were only a girl in a too-bright kitchen with a cheap cake, and the man who would ruin your life hadn’t, not quite, not yet.

Play. Pause. Rewind.

“Look at you,” he murmurs. “Shaking like a little rabbit. You know I like rabbits.”

“Please,” you whisper, and hate how quickly it arrives, how it kneels without asking.

The word isn’t even bargaining, it’s reflex, an artifact.

He smiles with his eye half-lidded, that pleased cat who has already cuffed the bird enough times to break its map of sky.

“There it is, my little soft thing. Polite. Begging will do you better than lying.”

Knuckles tap your chin. Your scalp wants to crawl off your skull.

Somewhere down the block, kids chorus trick or treat and a parent says, only take one.

The world is stupid with normal.

He moves past you, slow enough you can feel the wake of him, and snags the towel hanging on the back of a chair. He tosses it at you without looking, it hits your chest and your body catches it like he’s taught you something.

“Get dressed,” he says. “You look like a crime scene.”

You fumble backward, half-running to your room because he has allowed you to, and the permission is worse than a blow. Clothes. You can’t figure out what they are. Fabric becomes puzzles. You put on the first things you find — sweatpants, a long-sleeve shirt that still smells like laundry day. Your hands do not stop stuttering. You don’t look for the phone you stashed in the drawer.

He has already found it.

He wants to see if you’ll lie.

When you return, he’s in the kitchen.

He has found your knives. Of course he has. He’s pulled the largest chef’s knife from the block and is rolling the balance across his palm, testing the hilt with a professional curiosity that makes your teeth itch.

“Decent steel,” he says. “You keep it sharp?”

You nod. You hate that you nod.

“Good girl.” The praise is poison, warm going down. “Hate a dull edge. Bruises the meat.”

Your vision wobbles at the corners.

“Don’t.” escapes before you can stop yourself.

He grins.

“Tell me don’t again.”

“Don’t.” you swallow and it feels like barbed-wire.

“Mm.” He leans on the counter. “You know, I was going to start with the neighbors. Real slope out there. Easy to roll. But then I thought… that would be rude.” He sets the knife down, perfectly parallel to the cutting board. “Family first.”

“I’m not your family.”

Oh but he is.

Very close family.

“Lies ruin the taste,” he says, almost kindly. “And you know me. I only eat what I kill.”

The room drops a degree. You lick your lips and taste salt and fear.

“How many— ”

“Questions are for people who make rules. You don’t make rules here.” He gestures toward the front hall with a flick of his fingers. “Shoes.”

“What?”

“Put them on.”

You don’t move. He doesn’t blink.

“Now,” his tone is final.

You obey.

He watches the way you stick your heel into the sneaker, the way your hands can’t quite tie the laces. He takes the knife again and slides it into his belt, the ease of the motion makes your lungs cramp.

“Here’s how we’ll do it,” he says, all business now, the way he got when he used to explain chores, when you were ten and thought ordering wood for winter was the same as moving planets. “You get a head start. Two streets. No screaming. No neighbors. You scream, I come fast. You make me come fast, I come messy.” He tilts his head. “And you won’t like messy.”

The world shrinks to the doorframe and the vaulted dark beyond it.

Your mouth dehydrates down to grit.

“Why,” you hear yourself say, “why play at all.”

“Because prey that doesn’t run isn’t worth the chew.” He steps close enough that your vision loses focus, your pupils swallowing his chest, his throat, the notch of tendon that works when he smiles. “Because I want to hear what your bones say when they find out what they’re for.”

He reaches past you and flips your deadbolt.

Click.

He palms the chain without looking, breaks it with a twist and a dry snap that sounds like a wishbone.

The porch smells like damp leaves and candy wrappers and night.

He looks down at you, and his voice drops to the tone he saves for things he intends to keep for as long as they last.

“Run.”

You run.

You don’t remember deciding. Your body does the math and rides the answer. Bare throat, bad lungs, the pavement outside cold through rubber. You scissor past your own jack-o’-lantern, past the bowl of candy you out of habit left on the porch with a please take one taped to it, because tonight you were going to watch a movie and fall asleep early.

You are not a person who outruns anything. You are a person who does budgets, who remembers birthdays, who locks doors.

You are a person learning other verbs.

Left at the mailbox.

Right at the maple.

You count breaths like rosary beads.

Two streets.

That’s the rule he invented to make you complicit.

That’s the leash length.

You hear him close the door with your doorknob, careful, courteous.

You hear nothing after. That’s worse. The quiet holds a hundred red eyes.

Your mind tries to broadcast to any deity within range — please, please, please — but the sky is a black lid and your prayers boomerang.

You angle through shadow instead.

You cut across a lawn where inflatable ghosts bob idiotically and a motion light throws your body double onto a garage door.

Two streets.

You don’t make a sound.

You don’t go to the police because the police are a line on TV telling other people to be careful.

You don’t go to a neighbor because neighbors are just rooms you don’t own.

You go forward, because forward is the only direction your fear has.

When you cross the second street, your knees tremble so badly you mistake it for an earthquake. You slow just enough to hide inside a black hedge, and you listen.

please, please, please, please.

You hear the distant trick-or-treat caravan, the wingbeat of a bat, the parasitic whisper of wind through plastic cobwebs, and you hear — nothing.

You press your palm to your mouth. Your heart doesn’t fit your chest. Your bones say run more. Your lungs say no.

You’re learning the language.

Then, from somewhere behind you, unsourced, unfairly close, his voice, low and pleased and patient.

“Good girl.”

You move before thought.

You tear down the next block with your laces slapping your ankles and the night swallowing your breath, and he doesn’t have to chase yet, because he’s already inside the thing you carry under your sternum that you used to call safety, and he has time.

He has all the time in the world he took from other people, and tonight he wants yours.

You are not ready.

That is the lesson.

And tonight, he is the teacher.

You run.

The word 'run' still echoes and it isn’t a choice, it’s a detonator.

Sneakers barely catching the damp, the night grabs your face and shoves cold air down your throat until you cough and keep going anyway. The next street is a smear — pumpkins, porch lights, paper bats — and you’re nothing but tendons and fear, a pulse wearing shoes.

Left at the maple.

Right past the cul-de-sac with the skeleton arch.

Your lungs burn like ripped plastic.

Your ribs are a birdcage trying and failing to hold a storm. You count breaths because numbers are a leash — one-two-one-two, and somewhere behind you a door closes softly, politely, like this is ordinary, like this is just another night in a neighborhood that thinks it’s safe.

You hit the third street, the last house, the end of the culvert where the manicured hedges give up and the black line of the trees begins.

The forest at the edge of town is a rumor in daylight, all joggers and dogs and filtered sun, right now it’s a single open mouth.

You plunge in because concrete feels like an aisle that ends in a wall and dirt feels like a chance.

The world goes dim and close. Leaves keep secrets underfoot. Your foot skids on wet root, your ankle folds, you catch a trunk with your shoulder hard enough to set off a white burst behind your eyes and keep moving because stopping is a word that lives with dead and found later.

Don’t trip. Don’t trip. Don’t trip.

Breath saws.

Hands shake.

Sweat runs in your eyes and tastes like pennies.

Your body invents new places to hurt.

You look back once — stupid, stupid — and all you get is a strobe of shadow and then the impression of him where the path should be, not on it but near it, not hurrying, not even committed to one direction.

He isn’t chasing yet.

He’s editing.

You clamp your mouth shut around the scream that wants to rip you in half.

The scream is a flare gun and he has a map.

You swallow it until your throat burns.

Up ahead, the trail splits — left is a gentle slope toward the creek, moonlight ribboning through saplings.

Right is steeper, older trees, bigger shadows.

You take right because hiding feels taller there.

Bark tears your palm as you drag yourself along, your knee kisses a stone and opens, warmth slides down your shin and makes your sock cling.

Keep going.

The night learns your noises.

You can hear each bad step hanging in the dark behind you like bells on a cat. You force your feet to land softer.

You fail.

Branches snap.

Leaves hiss a snitch’s secrets.

“Good pace,” drifts through the trees.

Not near.

Not far.

Buried in bark, like the woods themselves learned his voice.

“Don’t waste it on the wrong hill.”

You almost puke. Your body lurches like a car grinding its gears.

You slap a hand over your mouth and keep moving with the other three limbs, animal-fast and stupid, ashamed and alive.

A low branch becomes a ladder.

You grab, haul, get a knee onto a knuckle of trunk.

The bark bites.

You shin your way up to the first crook where two big limbs meet and jam yourself there, belly to wood, arms around the tree like you’re clinging to a sleeping animal.

Your heart hits the bark so hard you think you might bruise the tree.

Hide. Hide. Hide.

The woods answer with their thousand tiny mouths.

Drip.

Moth wing.

Far-off tire hiss on the highway.

Drip.

Your slashed knee makes the warm blood sliding down your shin drip down from time to time.

The creek’s throat clearing.

No footsteps.

No twigs.

Nothing human.

You don’t trust it.

You press your cheek to the bark and shut your eyes and listen with your bones.

A leaf sighs to your left that isn’t wind.

A small pebble ticks against another pebble to your right with the tidy certainty of intent.

He’s throwing sound the way a magician throws light.

He’s making your ears chase things that aren’t feet.

You hold your breath until your vision pulses with black stars. Your palms sweat. Your fingers slip. Splinters drive into your skin. A mosquito takes holly leaves worth of you and you don’t slap it because you want so badly to be a rock.

“Trees are smarter than people,” his voice says, nearer now, conversational. “They spend their whole lives practicing still.”

You curl tighter.

The branch creaks.

It’s the smallest sound.

It still sounds like a confession.

Silence again.

Then, a hand skims bark below your left foot — not catching, just reading — and your bladder jerks like someone pulled a plug.

It happens before you can think of shame, before you can clench, hot and humiliating and unstoppable.

Warmth runs down your thigh, soaks your sock, drips off your shoe in little betraying taps onto leaves.

You choke on a sob.

It comes out a crushed squeak that might be an animal if animals begged.

“There it is,” he says, soft, pleased, as if you finally got an answer right.

You don’t feel your face until tears make it colder. You don’t feel your fingers until they scream at you for gripping so hard you’ve gone numb. You don’t feel your lungs until they remind you they can stop and you will die like a fish on a dock.

You force air in, out, in, out.

It tastes like rot and water and metal.

You imagine a plan, because your brain was trained to make lists even in hell.

Wait until he passes under the branch. Drop. Run again. He’ll be surprised. You’ll make distance. Find the fire road. Find the old fence line. Find —

A fingertip presses gently to the back of your calf.

Not a grab.

A tap.

The tree jerks with you.

“Don’t fall,” he murmurs.

The gun is visible when you look down because he makes it visible — black, short, quiet, the promise, not the threat. Your knife hilt is a small gleam at his belt.

His face is a shape you recognize too well in a smear of moon through leaves — cheekbone, the pale seam along his jaw, the scar that engulfs half his face and closes the hole where his right eye would sit to stare at you in that cold, deliberate way his left is doing, the patient brightness in his left eye that says he could do this all night and eat on the way home.

“You’ll snap your pretty neck and waste my work.”

He could yank you down by the ankle and end it. He doesn’t. He slides his palm up the back of your calf like he’s measuring distance in inches, finds the back of your knee, and pushes your leg just enough that your balance goes out from under you — not to make you fall, to make you cling.

You wrap yourself around the branch and gasp, the sound a ragged, helpless animal squeal.

More warmth.

More shame.

The smell of your urine fogs up around you and your body trembles so hard the leaves clap.

“Breathe,” he says, unbearably calm. “You stop breathing and I have to put my mouth on yours, and we don’t want that, do we.”

You shake your head so hard bark grinds your cheek. Splinters go in. Your mouth tastes like iron and tree even more.

“There’s my good girl.”

He laughs, quiet, delighted, and steps back into a slice of shadow so complete you doubt he was ever there.

You hear nothing.

You feel him anyway, radiation through wood.

You stay clamped to the tree until your arms turn to static. Until your fingers buzz and your shoulders drop from pain to something colder than pain. You count to a hundred. Twice. Five times. You don’t trust numbers anymore. You don’t trust anything.

Finally, when silence and dark and your own shaking are worse than falling, you peel yourself off the trunk a millimeter at a time.

You crawl along the branch and let yourself pour back to the ground, knees first, then palms, then face almost, because you are not sure how to stand as a person.

When your feet find dirt, he is not there.

That’s not comforting.

That’s the point.

You pick a direction — any direction.

You run again.

The forest changes as you go deeper — not trees, but angles.

Paths stop acting like paths and become suggestion.

Roots stop being obstacles and start being hands.

Your thigh screams. Your ankle grinds. Your lungs have lit a match and are holding it to the inside of your throat, daring it to burn.

You press your forearm against your ribs to hold yourself in.

Behind you, sometimes, you hear him.

Not footsteps. Presence.

The way the sound changes when a big thing moves through it and chooses not to make noise.

A small slip on shale — on purpose. A twig taken underfoot with surgical pressure, just enough to click.

A whistle, tuneless, a breath blown through teeth with no melody, just punctuation.

Once, a shadow crosses your path and you run toward it because you’re that far gone, because forward is all you have left, and it’s only a branch.

He laughs somewhere to your left like he saw you do it with his hands.

At a dip in the trail the ground turns to slick leaf mulch and you go down hard, both knees, palms full of grit. The smell of rot and water opens and swallows you, and you crawl out of it on all fours because your legs forgot their job.

You want to sob and can’t find sound.

You want to pray and can’t find God.

The trees crowd.

The neighbors are not even a memory anymore.

You are not even a memory anymore.

You are a hinge that opens and closes, lungs, legs, lungs, legs.

He lets you see him when the path narrows to two boulders and a leaning pine. He just steps into the space in front of you like the woods changed their mind about what they were made for.

One hand at his side. Knife still sheathed. Gun still holstered. Head tilted. Predator curiosity, clinical and bright.

Your feet stop.

Your whole life stops.

You try to sidestep.

He mirrors.

You try the other way.

He mirrors.

The smile is small and contempt and happy.

“Here we are.” he says.

“No.” you breathe, and don’t know what you mean by it.

“Shh.” He steps once.

You step back and your shoulders hit bark. The tree at your back is cold and wet and wide enough to hold you but not wide enough to hide you.

He comes in close, not touching, just crowding until your breath doesn’t fit your chest and your legs betray you and — humiliation floods again, your body gives up more warmth and you hear it patter on leaves and you want to tear your skin off and vanish.

You're as bad as a scared animal peeing yourself out of cheer panic, fear, terror.

His eye half-lid. He inhales through his nose like a wine snob.

“There it is.” he relishes in your tears as they trail down your cheeks once again. "Scared little lamb."

You shake so hard your teeth chatter.

Your hands come up because that’s what hands do when they don’t know where else to go — palms up, useless, pleading.

He glances at them, amused, then plants his palm flat against the tree beside your head, close enough that his sleeve whispers against your cheek.

The other hand lifts and hovers near your throat, not touching, the promise of touch mapped in heat.

He leans in until the brim of your fear tips and spills and you can’t see anything but the pale seam scar on his face and the little dark flecks in his sinfully bright crimson eye.

“Listen,” he says, voice low, rasp and steady, as if your panic is a radio he can tune. “Hear that?”

At first you hear nothing but your wrecked breath and the blood hurtling around your skull.

Then, under it, the forest breathing too. The slow drip of water. Far-off traffic like a deep animal. Your own heartbeat learning to be a drum in a different war.

“That’s how far you are,” he murmurs, satisfied. “That’s how alone you are.”

A beat.

Then, kind as a knife wrapped in velvet.

“Run again and we end this when I catch you.”

He takes one clean step back and gives you a gap the exact size of your hope.

"Beg and I give you a little more time, if you give me a good reason."

He's a cretin, he knows you can't run much longer. You're hurt, you're exhausted, you're terrified.

You're lost, also.

You swallow the lump in your throat and your barred eyes are fixed in his for another second before you open your mouth — lower lip trembling — to beg.

"Ah ah." he stops you even before you start. "Properly."

His eyes slide down and you feel your stomach knotting.

You lower yourself, slowly, too afraid to perform any kind of abrupt movement. You sit on your calves, knees and shin against the forest floor, hands on thighs , face up, wet, undone.

"P-please…"

"Mm. Please what?"

"Please don't do this…"

He falls to his haunches in front of you, forearms balanced on his thighs. He still towers over you easily.

"Princess," the sigh he gives sounds almost tired, almost like he's telling you he's doing something he's forced to do. Like a parent disciplining their child for a bad grade at school. "We are already doing it. You can end it soon, by running," he jerks his chin once towards the path back to the forest before facing you again. "or you can entertain your uncle for a few more hours. Call it family bounding time." his tone is too light for the things he's implying, and his smile is too gentle for the plans he has.

You go with surviving a few more hours it because you have to.

"What do you want from me?" you ask, voice small, afraid of the answer.

His hand is suddenly clamping your jaw, thumb and forefinger on the hinges forcing your mouth open with ease. Your eyes widen a bit more and you feel your breath halting.

His thumb leaves your cheek and slides across your lower lip, red orb flaring with malice.

"For now… your mouth will do."

You feel so dizzy you are positive you're passing out from lack of air.

He has his cock lodged inside your throat — the back of your head pressed against bark and moss from the tree, your hands gripping the rough fabric of his jeans over his corded thighs as a well kempt patch of pink hued pubic hair tickles your pressed nose.

When he realizes your consciousness is finally slipping like sand through spread fingers, he pulls his dick out until only the tip is against your parted lips and the cold air punches you lungs with the violence of a giant wave breaking on the shore.

You cough so hard you think you will throw up, and his chuckle accuses how graceful he finds the situation. It's like he's watching a puppy try to drink water for the first time.

"With a lung capacity this weak you won't outrun me even if you try, brat." his words barely reach you as you're clasping for air, panting, crying, pressing your eyes shut to try and calm down — his tip still leaking pre that's pooling between your lower lip and your teeth, mixing with your saliva and tears as it leaks down the corner of your mouth, and soon enough he's rubbing his shaft's bottom against your tongue once again. "It's been almost ten years, it's not possible you didn't learn something, huh? Or you kept yourself for when your favorite uncle eventually escaped from his death penalty?"

Maybe he's just messing with you and somehow he hit a jackpot.

Maybe the way you looked at him gave you away.

Maybe it's too evident you couldn't settle for someone after he fucked you so good on your fucking birthday almost a decade ago and then proceeded to be jailed for life for being a sick fuck.

"Oh." he lets out in something like realization and a devious, wide, rotten grin slashes his face. "My poor little thing."

His voice drips with the most vile malice there is and you let out a broken whine when his cock twitches against your tongue and he leaks even more.

He gets off on your misery — on how pathetic you are.

A hand clutches in your strands on the top of your head and keeps you steady.

"I should have ran away long ago and kept you as a pet."

You blink at his unhinged comment and you don't even have time to let out a confused sound before he's hammering his cock down your throat again, fucking your skull raw as your throat convulses around his shaft and you fight for dear life with your gag reflex.

The sting on your scalp is nothing compared to the flaring pain of keeping your jaw open that wide for him, or the roughness with which he thrusts his hips against your face, wet, obscene schlicks echoing as he fucks with relentless and steady rhythm the tight channel and barely leaves it long enough for you to catch a breath.

You feel like passing out again and as soon as your vision starts to darken on the corners, you feel your muscles lax, your hands falling from where they tried to find purchase on his jeans, your glassy eyes rolling back behind heavy lids — although he looks like he doesn't care if you black out as long as he gets what he wants.

He increases his pace, breathing heavier now, letting out louder lust filled groans while pistoning in a brutal rhythm, engorged crown bruising the soft skin on the back of your throat with each movement until he sheaths his length fully in your channel, bottoming out and letting the thick ropes of cum spurt and slide down your esophagus, denying you the choice to swallow his release as he curses under his breath, crimson eye heavy-lidded and latched to your face, grim wide, baring teeth.

That's roughly what you remember before losing consciousness entirely with his cock still fully encased in your still convulsing throat.

Rope bites your wrists when you wake up, disoriented, sore.

The chair creaks whenever you breathe too hard — so you try not to breathe, which makes the chair creak anyway. Your throat feels raw, but your body feels… clean.

Borderline immaculate.

No dirt, no sweat, no saliva, tears, leaves, moss, cum. No sticky sensation.

You blink a few times.

You're wearing nothing.

Nothing but a thin, light silver cord around your neck, with an oval locket nested on the slope between your collarbones.

You're also smelling like lavender, ever so slightly. Your soap.

The seam on your knee isn't leaking anymore, still stings like a bitch, but your blood learned it belongs inside, and the wound feels cleaner.

This is the first time cleanness feels wrong.

Did he bathe you?

He took the bulbs from the overhead and left the kitchen’s under-cabinet strip burning, so everything is knives and countertops and a long stainless shadow where he stands.

Sukuna doesn’t pace. He occupies.

Hip against the counter, forearm braced, the other hand flicking a paring knife so it turns once, twice, and settles in his palm as if his hand were made for that exact weight.

“You want to know how I do it,” he says — not a question, just a decision he makes for you. His voice is unhurried, sanded, cruelly patient. “Good. I like an audience that listens.”

There's not enough words to describe how much you don't want to know how he does it.

You keep quiet.

Eyes wide, looking for ways to leave, escape, run, find help.

There is none.

Your heartbeat drowns out the refrigerator hum. You taste metal and bile.

You stare at the knot in the wood floor because his face is a cliff and you can’t look over it.

“Start with weather,” he goes on. “Nobody thinks about weather, they think about locks. Rain is my favorite. Rain erases. Footprints soften. People hurry and forget to look behind them. Thunder buys me a second for free.” A small, approving grunt. “You learn to love margins like that.”

He sets the knife down. The sound is precise.

Then he takes your chef’s knife — his thumb tests the edge, and pride glints.

“You keep this honest. Sharp is mercy. Dull is spite.”

He taps the spine to your cutting board, one, two.

Your stomach lurches.

“I watch breath,” he says. “Not eyes. Breath tells the truth. Fear has a rhythm. It stutters, it speeds, it tries to go quiet — like yours is trying now.” A soft click of his tongue, disapproving. “Easy. Don’t choke yourself.”

The rope burns hotter beneath the sweat already surfacing on your skin. You didn't know how fear were capable of making someone start to sweat so quickly.

You pull a millimeter and stop when the chair complains.

“I don’t hurry.” He wipes the nonexistent print from the blade with a paper towel, folds it into a neat square, sets it aside. “People think it’s… impulse. It isn’t. Hunting is a study. You taste a neighborhood for a week — routes, habits, who waters plants after dark, who leaves a window cracked because they hate waking up to stale air.” his eye flick to you and brighten with amusement. “You always did that. Steam gets trapped in your bathroom. You told me that when you were twelve. You remember?”

Your throat locks.

Your eyes blur.

You nod once because any other movement might break you.

“That’s the thrill,” he murmurs. “The little door you gave me years ago. The knowing. The right. When the moment comes, it’s quiet in my head. Everything lines up. I step in. I close the distance. No speeches. No mess I don’t need. Control is the point.”

His hand ghosts through the air, a clean, economical gesture describing angles you’re grateful you don’t see finished.

“I don’t make art of the killing,” he says. “I make art of the after.”

He tips the blade, considering you the way a chef considers mise en place.

“There’s noise at the front end — adrenaline, breath, the body arguing with the truth you’re giving it. But the moment after? The drop? That’s the fucking cathedral. That quiet is what I chase. The world kneels. Even clocks listen.”

You swallow and feel it scrape. The chair ticks. The house feels like a lung holding air, waiting to be told what to do with it.

He slides your skillet from the rack and holds it the way other men hold infants.

“You season it right, you don’t have to fight it. Heat is language. Medium for patience. High for punishment. Butter is an apology you make to whatever came before.”

He sets the pan on the burner but doesn’t turn the flame. The shape of the act is enough to make bile climb your throat even harder.

“You hear ‘cannibal’ on your pretty TV,” he says, and the word is flat, clinical. “Journalists like words that knock pictures over in your head. What I do is not a headline. It’s closure. The hunt has to end somewhere, and it ends where all hunger ends — in the mouth and in the bone. You take what you chased. You finish the circle. You reduce the noise to something you can swallow.”

Your breath snags. The room swims. He notices, always, and shifts closer — not touching you, only taking up space until the air has to go around him to reach you.

“I’m sparing you details,” he says, almost kind, the smile ruins it. “You’re welcome. But listen to the craft. Aromatics. Salt, never late. Heat, then rest. You don’t tear, you wait until it yields. You treat the quiet like a partner. You plate with respect because you took it. You earned it. You don’t waste.”

He leans down a fraction, voice gentling into something worse.

“And you remember breath. Always breath. How it sounded when it argued. How it sounded when it learned.”

Your eyes burn, tears spill and make your vision buckle, you drag air in too fast, it hitches and seesaws, ugly.

You clamp your jaw to stop the noise trying to escape, because any noise feels like permission.

“See?” he croons, more amused than pleased. “You’re learning the rhythm. Panic is a drum. Terror is a metronome. I could stand here all night and conduct.”

He sets the chef’s knife aside and takes a length of kitchen twine from the drawer. He winds it around his fingers, then unwinds it again, the slow rasp of fiber on skin louder than it should be.

“People always ask why,” he muses. “As if a cathedral answers why it’s a cathedral. I do it because the world is sloppy, and I know how to make it clean. I do it because the quiet after is the only honest thing I’ve ever heard. I do it because when the work is done, and the pan sings, and the room fills with the right scent and proof… the hunt is a closed book. No loose pages.”

He turns the burner knob with two fingers.

Click.

Gas whispers.

He doesn’t strike a flame.

He just lets the possibility of fire sit between you.

“Don’t look at the rope,” he says softly when your eyes flick to your wrists. “It isn’t your way out.”

A beat.

“You don’t have one.”

Your chest clenches, a fist closing around your lungs. A knife plunged into your hope.

You fight for air and it feels like drinking the ocean.

He watches, head tilted, studying the desperation move through you. He’s quiet for a long, unbearable span, then he speaks like a teacher delivering a final rule,

“The point isn’t pain, the point is ownership. I take chaos and make it obey. I hunt, I end, I cook, I consume.”

His gaze narrows, bright, predatory.

“And you — tonight — you learn what it sounds like when the world narrows to a knife’s edge and refuses to fall off.”

A soft scrape, metal against metal as he sets the pan down again with care.

“That’s enough talking.”

He eases back a step, giving the room back its size as if he’s generous.

“Listen to the quiet. Hear how big it is.”

You do. And it’s monstrous. And there’s nowhere inside it to hide.

The flame never comes.

He turns the burner knobs off one by one until the faint hiss is nothing and the kitchen becomes a chapel to everything that doesn’t burn.

Your wrists throb against the rope, your ankles ache with the static of blood trying to come back.

The locket is a cold coin that keeps touching bone, a cheap sun on a dead planet. seemingly thinking of something else that will make his night even better in a way that makes your night even worse.

“I like the chase,” he says, breaking that loud silence he made you focus on. “Not the running — your kind are clumsy — but the moment I close the gap and feel the heat coming off a body that knows it’s done. The sound right before the throat locks. You hear it? Little wet cough in the back of the mouth. That’s fear turning solid.”

You try not to flinch. You do anyway. He watches, pleased.

“Blood’s hot at first,” he goes on, voice even, bored with your horror the way a butcher is bored with flies. “Everyone thinks it’s syrup. It isn’t. It’s thinner than you expect, it steams, it smells like pennies and old meat at the same time, and it sticks. Gets under the nails. You wash and wash and there’s always some left. I don’t mind. It’s a souvenir.”

He lifts the paper towel he’d used before, shows the dried smear, folds it neatly again.

“Joints make good noise,” he says. “People imagine bones are quiet. They aren’t. Hips pop. Ribs complain. Fingers go like twigs if you torque them right. Teeth?” His grin flashes, quick and mean. “Teeth are loud when they leave.”

Your stomach lurches but nothing comes out.

You don't even remember if you ate something today.

You remember nothing from the moment your eyes met him on your couch to the start of the day. You only remember here, now, panic, pain, fear of dying and things you shouldn't feel.

He tilts his head, listening for the gag, satisfied when he gets it.

“You want meat talk? Fine. Cheek is soft, tongue’s strong — chews back if you let it. Heart’s hot and stubborn, it keeps its own time for a few seconds after you ask it to stop, and that little thump against your palm?” He taps his own hand, once, twice. “That’s a private conversation. Liver’s forward, copper right up front. Marrow is the prize — bone splits and the room fills with steam and fat and that sweet smell that tells you you’re the only honest animal here.”

You breathe through your mouth.

It doesn’t help.

“I like kitchens,” he adds conversationally. “Tile tells the truth, you see everything you did. The pan sings, the fat talks, you scrape the fond and the spoon leaves trails like writing. You plate it because this is a meal, not trash. You finish it because leaving things half-done is for cowards.”

He steps closer, sets two fingers under your chin, and lifts your face until you’re trapped in his eye.

“This is the part you’re not hearing, it isn’t rage. It isn’t art. It’s appetite with discipline. I hunt, I end, I eat. That’s the loop. The thrill isn’t screaming. It’s the quiet after the screaming stops.”

You try to pull back, the rope says no.

He smiles, small and patient.

“You think you can buy time with tricks,” he says. “Crying buys nothing. Begging buys my attention for as long as it amuses me. Prayers?” He shrugs. “Talk to your mother about those.”

Your breath hitches.

“Want more?” he asks softly, almost kind. “Take a deep breath.”

You don’t. He takes one for you, exaggerated, like teaching a child.

“When the cut lands right, your whole body knows. Heat blooms, then sting, then the brain tries to climb out of your skull. If I put my hand on your chest, I can feel your heart lie, ‘Not me, not now.’ But it is. It’s always now.”

He picks up the small blade, holds it where you can watch the light skate the edge, then lowers it to the counter again without using it.

It’s worse that he doesn’t.

It means he can. It means he will.

“You picture running,” he muses. “Into the trees. Hiding behind a trunk like a rabbit behind a broom handle again. You picture climbing.” He laughs under his breath. “You won’t make it far. You’ll pee yourself again and hate that more than you hate me. You’ll shake so hard your teeth knock, and your tongue will stick to the roof of your mouth and taste like coins.”

He gestures lazily toward the sink.

“You puke, we keep going. You faint, I wake you. You do well, I let you breathe. That’s the game.”

Your eyes blur.

He watches the first tear collect and refuses to fall, rapt.

“You want the worst of it?” he asks. “It’s not the knife. It’s not the bite. It’s not the pan. It’s the part when you realize you’re food and you still try to make a deal. Soft people are adorable like that. You’ll offer me lies. You’ll offer me names. You’ll offer me yourself like you didn’t already. And I’ll say no because I’m already fed, and your bargaining tastes like ash.”

You don't need to offer yourself, he takes what he wants from you and you have no saying in it. He did once tonight, he can do it again.

He hooks your locket with his finger and lets it snap back against your sternum.

You flinch.

He’s delighted.

“I could cut you now,” he says. “Shallow. A bell, not a bell tower. Here—” his fingertip hovers a breath from the thin skin inside your elbow, then shifts to the curve where neck meets shoulder, then to the tender skin just above your knee— “or here, or here. Little songs. You’d shake. You’d sob without sound. You’d give me a truth you didn’t know you had just to make the next one not come.”

He lowers his hand. Doesn’t do it. Yet. The promise hangs heavier than the act.

“And when I decide the loop closes,” he finishes, voice dropping into something flat and final, “I make it quiet. I make you quiet. The room tells the truth. I sit down. I eat. I clean the plate. I sleep like a man who finished his work.”

You are shaking so hard the chair ticks against the tile.

He leans in, breath warm, tone almost sympathetic and worse for it.

“Now,” he murmurs. “Say what you’re thinking.”

“I—” Your voice breaks. “I don’t want to die.”

“There it is.”

He smiles, small and scathing.

He straightens, taps the knife handle with two fingers, and turns away to the sink, humming nothing.

The relief that jumps in your throat is so violent it hurts.

He glances back over his shoulder and kills it with a look.

He keeps standing for a moment in the under-cabinet glow like the room belongs to his shadow first and his body second, and then he tilts his head — interested, playful in a way that makes the floor tilt with it.

“Let’s make you useful,” he says. “Four ways out. All fake. You pick the order.”

“I—” Your throat dries into sand. “What do you mean fake?”

“Language lesson.” He flicks your fridge magnet with a knuckle so it clicks against steel. “Hope.”

He lays objects on the counter one by one, a teacher setting up a cruel demonstration — your phone, a small brass ring of keys you don’t recognize, a metal kitchen timer the shape of an egg and a coin, heads up.

“Door, call, timer, coin,” he says. “We’ll add a fifth. Confession. Every win buys you a minute. Lose, I take two. Ready, little one?”

You shake your head and it doesn’t matter.

“Door, then.” He plucks up the keys, comes behind you, and with two careless tugs loosens the rope at your ankles. The chair creaks when you jerk. Your calves prickle with blood returning, stupidly grateful. “Back door’s bolted,” he says, almost apologetic. “But the deadbolt’s keyed. Pick right on the first try with your hands tied, you get sixty seconds to run. We’ll even count together.”

He drops to a knee by the back door and slips the ring into your palm. The keys are cold and slick — your fingers won’t listen. He drags the chair so you’re facing the door, your bound hands barely able to reach the lock.

You fumble.

The metal kisses, misses, keys clack uselessly in a rhythm that sounds like your pulse learning to drown.

“Listen for the whisper,” he says, entertained. “Locks talk.”

You try the square-cut key, the one with the black rubber cap, the tiny mailbox-looking one because panic isn’t linear. None seat. You have the thought — bright and cruel — that your mother’s keys have little flowers printed on the heads.

These don’t.

“Time,” he says pleasantly when the chair creaks under you for the fortieth second. He takes the ring back, selects one, and with a casual pressure sinks it home.

The bolt doesn’t budge.

He twists, metal complains, nothing.

He holds the key up where you can see its chewed teeth.

“Wrong house,” he says. “Stole these two blocks over. Keep up.”

He ties your ankles again with a different knot — tidier, meaner — and pats your shin like you did well on a test you failed.

“Call,” you rasp, because speaking is the only way to keep from making the sound inside you that isn’t language.

“Of course.” He lifts your phone, wakes it with your face, the tiny betrayal a knife you watched him make. “You can nose it,” he offers, setting it on the table edge within reach of your lips. “911. If the dispatcher says your name, you keep your minute.”

You lean, wrists sawing the rope, shoulder screaming.

Your cheek smears the glass, your nose taps, the Emergency slider appears like a saint in a hallway.

You mash, mash.

The dialer opens.

You drag and hit call with your chin, and the phone rings.

You cry out — small, ugly, relief splitting you open.

A click, a voice,

“Nine-one-one. State your emergency.”

“My—my name is—” You give it. You give your address. You say kitchen and tied and please and the words flow like blood finding a sluice.

“Stay calm,” the voice says. “Officers are en route.”

You dare a sob. You choke it down. You look up at him, hatred like a fever bloom, and he’s smiling with his eyes soft the way people look at fireworks.

Then he turns the phone so you can see the screen.

The call timer doesn’t move.

The status bar says No SIM.

His thumb taps a hidden corner and the image freezes, then rewinds — there is your own voice again, tinny and raw, overlain with the same canned dispatcher greeting.

He’s smiling when he hits stop, like a teacher grading an essay.

“You called no one,” he says. “But now we both have a copy.”

He holds the phone up to your ear so you can hear yourself say please to nobody. Then he ends it and wipes the glass on your shoulder like he borrowed a plate.

“You get good at puppets in cages,” he says mildly. “Timer?”

You shake your head too fast and the room yaws.

“Timer.” He twists the metal egg. It begins to tick. “Hold your breath for thirty seconds. Don’t cry. If a tear falls, the second falls with it.”

It’s a child’s game.

It’s the worst thing anyone has ever asked you to do. You haul air in and pin it under your ribs.

Your eyes prickle, revolt.

The tick is a nail being tapped into wood right beside your ear.

Your lungs rush the door and beat at it like fists.

You last eighteen seconds.

The first tear goes hot down your nose.

The second loses itself at the corner of your mouth.

The timer keeps ticking toward a ding you don’t deserve.

He leans in, watching the water gather and curve, fascinated. When your body forces the breath out of you in a broken bark, he sighs.

“Minus two,” he says, light. “We’re at negative three minutes. Careful. You’ll owe me time.”

“I can’t—” Your voice collapses.

“You can.” He sets the egg aside. “Coin.”

He shows it between finger and thumb.

You see both sides once — you think you do.

He flips.

“Call it.”

“Heads.”

It lands, slaps his knuckle.

He shows you, heads.

Your chest hiccups hope you didn’t consent to.

He flips again.

“Call it.”

“Heads.”

Your mouth shapes the word before your brain catches up.

He shows you, heads.

He smiles like someone enjoying a very simple card trick. You hate yourself for liking his smile looking like a smidge of pride in such a fucked up situation.

“You really are my favorite,” he says, and flips a third time.

You hesitate now, brain scraping for the angle you missed.

“Hea—” you start, and swallow it. “Tails.”

He doesn’t bother to catch it. He lets it kiss the counter and whirl to a slow clatter. When it stills, heads stares up.

He turns the coin once on his fingertip and you see what you needed not to — both faces the same.

He puts it to your lips and you taste metal and a shrug.

“There,” he says. “Math lesson.”

Something inside you that was holding a door for someone else to run through sits down and puts its head in its hands.

“Last one,” he says, almost gentle. “Confession. Buy a minute with a truth you have never said out loud.”

You stare at the knife block so you don’t have to look at his mouth.

“I—” The words scratch their way out. “I should’ve told them. About us. About—” You can’t make the shape. “I should’ve ruined you then.”

He nods, approving your self-harm like good form.

“Earnest,” he says. “Boring. Try again.”

“I hate myself for loving you,” you gasp and that sentence alone flares some kind of despair inside you.

He tilts his head.

“Closer. One more.”

“I wore the locket until last year,” you finish, and it costs you something you didn’t know you were still carrying. You're suddenly very aware of the cold silver kissing your chest.

You kept it.

You kept it because you couldn't bear to throw it away.

You kept it because you had some kind of hope.

And now it sits once again on your chest — over your heart, over your lungs, a target for his undying hunger.

“Minute earned,” he says softly, delighted, like you managed a trick with cards and a tablecloth. He lifts the kitchen shears and snips one thread at your wrist. It loosens nothing. It feels like cooling down after a race, the illusion of safety parading as mercy. “Spend it however you want.”

“Untie me.” You lunge at the word like it’s a life raft.

“No.” He smiles with his eyes half-closed, pleased you tried. “Try again.”

“I… water. Please.”

He pours a glass. He holds the rim to your lips and tips it too far too fast so you cough and spill and hate him for catching the dribble with his thumb like care.

“Last ten seconds,” he says, counting them in the air, slow and lover-gentle. “Nine. Eight. Think of something good.”

“Please,” you whisper, and you don’t even know what you’re asking for anymore, only that the animal in your chest will say anything.

“Time,” he says, cheerful, and sets the empty glass down with a sound that makes you flinch. “See? Now you know what a minute is for.”

He stands close enough to fog your breath with his.

The sneer isn’t a twist of his mouth, it’s in the brightness of his eye, the little lift of his chin that says I taught you a new despair and that is a gift.

“Here’s the last game,” he says, voice gone soft and instructional. “Repeat after me, There was never a way out.”

You shake your head. You won’t. You won’t give him that.

He waits.

He’s very good at waiting.

“Say it,” he murmurs with his lips brushing gently against yours. You share a breath with him.

Your lips move.

The rope bites.

The chair creaks.

The word never lands in your mouth like a coin that belongs to him.

“Good girl,” he says, scathing and sweet. “We’re going to make your body tell the truth your mouth won’t,” he says, easy, almost instructional. “No gore. Not right now. Just… bells.”

The little blade he uses isn’t the big one from the block.

It’s a small thing, almost polite, and that makes it worse.

He doesn’t swing or stab — he sketches.

A line that is more insult than wound on your skin, shallow enough that it stings before it bleeds, a bloom that teaches your nerves new vowels.

You try not to move and the chair answers for you with a scrape that sounds like begging.

“See?” He coos and watches color rise as if he’s checking proofing dough. “Body learns fast. Mind drags its feet.”

Another kiss of edge somewhere the skin is thin.

The pain is a bright pin.

Your breath lurches out in little chopped pieces.

Your heart is a caged panicked rabbit trying to escape your ribcage.

He nods, pleased by the rhythm he’s conducting.

“Here’s your bargain,” he says, wiping the blade with a paper towel he folds into a neat square. “Tiny door, tiny prize. For every truth I like, I don’t ring another bell. For every lie, I take two minutes you don’t have.”

“I don’t—” Your throat is dry sand. “I don’t know what you want.”

“Start with the easy one.” He leans on the counter, forearms corded, attention warm and merciless. “The night they came for me. Who opened the door in the first place?”

“I didn’t.” You hear how fast you say it, how desperate, and hate the sound. “I never— I didn’t call—”

He tilts his head like a dog hearing a frequency only it can love.

“I didn’t ask what you didn’t do.” He smiles without showing teeth. “Confession buys quiet. Avoidance buys noise.”

“I didn’t, please—” you repeat, stupidly, because there’s nothing else in the drawer. “I didn’t.”

“Bell, then.”

Another thin line.

It waters your eyes before it waters your skin.

You bite the inside of your cheek and taste pennies again and again. Your cheeks feel as raw as your throat, but this time the blame lays on your teeth, not on the tip of his cock.

He watches the tear form and refuses to fall, delighted by its balance.

“Try again,” he says, almost tender. “Give me a picture. Where were you when the sirens climbed our street?”

You swallow.

The house in your head spins up like bad tape, your bedroom light, your door cracked, the TV laugh track in the living room, your mother pretending not to watch the window.

“My room,” you get out. “I’d… I’d just showered. I heard—” You make your hand shape lights in the air with wrists still tied because the word won’t come. “I heard it. I thought it was for someone else.”

“Did you.” He’s not looking at your face now, he’s looking at the muscles around your mouth, at your throat, at the way your chest forgets how to breathe when you say mother without saying it. “She said what, exactly?”

“She—” You blink.

The moment you’ve always remembered as a smear focuses and makes you sick.

“She told me to stay in my room. Not open the door. She… she turned up the TV.”

“Such a good, obedient girl.” he says automatically, and the praise makes you want to jump out of your skin. “And the phone?”

“What?”

“Her phone. In her hand? On the table? Plugged in?” He’s gentle because it’s worse. “Picture it.”

You picture it.

The lock-screen glow in her palm.

The way she kept turning her body so you couldn’t see, a stupid mother-move that never fooled anyone.

Your stomach drops through the chair.

“I don’t—” The breath you pull in catches like a nail. “I don’t know.”

“You do now.”

He scrapes the chair a half-inch with his boot, a sound like a saw starting.

“That’s a truth.”

A small nod toward the blade.

“And that buys you quiet.”

You don’t believe him.

He doesn’t care if you believe him.

He sets the knife down within your sight line anyway, a thin horizon.

“Next.” He taps the egg-timer but doesn’t turn it. “Say the part you never say even to yourself.”

You shake your head, no left in you, and the locket taps bone.

He watches it like it’s a metronome he set.

“Fine.” He lifts your empty water glass, studies the rim, finds your mouth on it. “Say you kept my locket on for nine years and took it off for— what? A date? A job interview? A night you wanted to pretend you were a different species?”

You choke.

Heat crawls up your neck.

“Last year,” you admit, hating your own mouth. “I took it off last year.”

“For what.”

“Picture day.” It sounds so stupid it could be a joke. “Work. New ID. New—”

The word life withers before it leaves.

He laughs once, mirthless and cruel.

“There we go.”

He drags a finger lightly along one of the little red blooms he made, not touching the wet, only the edge where sting meets skin.

Your body tries to fold itself away from even that.

“The bell stays quiet.”

He takes your phone from the table and sets it just out of reach, a glass eye. He drags the chair a fraction so the rope bites new places.

He opens a drawer and takes out nothing of consequence — a crumpled birthday napkin, a bread tie — and puts them down like offerings.

“You want another door?” he asks. “Fetch.”

“W-what.”

He flicks the bread tie with a knuckle so it lands a little far from both of you on the kitchen's floor.

“Bring it to me with your teeth. Be a good little dog.”

You stiffen so hard your calves cramp.

You stare at him.

You stare at the floor.

You stare at the bread tie, a nothing, a humiliation shaped like a wire.

“Untie me,” you say, and it’s not brave, just exhausted. “I— I won't run.”

"I know you won't." you can't figure out if his tone is matter of fact or testing. You don't want to find out either.

He unties you. You were skeptical but the ropes loosen on your ankles and on your wrists.

You don't move for long seconds and he steps back, leaning his hip against the counter, measuring you with his eye, gaze scorching, finger tapping the counter top — lazy and deliberate.

You slide from the chair slowly, your knees are lies until they hit the floor, then you feel it all at once, the electric jolt, the pain from the seam, the cold from the floor tiles, the weakness crawling up, the oppressive frame that is your uncle standing a few steps from you, giant, a behemoth of a man looking down on your frail, broken-self about to crawl like a dog.

His eyes brighten like you’ve given him a present.

“There she is.” he almost purrs. "I always liked you like this."

You don't think about what that means. You feel the cold tiles against your palms, they hurt, everything hurts, all of your muscles pull, and you feel so exposed you can't afford to fall for his baits or you're collapsing right there.

You crawl like a dog and you can feel his eye on your naked body, you can feel the heat crawling up your spine and pooling on your cheeks.

You try to grab the damn wire with your teeth without touching the floor with your lips, but of course this wouldn't be the end of it, would it? Everything with him cannot be slightly near to simple.

The heavy boot presses your face to the floor and you let out a shriek and your body jerks. Your teeth clack against the tile but you manage to turn your head slightly to the side.

He's stepping on your head and keeping it pinned down, left cheek to the tile, ass up, knees screaming, forearms also on tile, crooked position making your body hurt even worse.

"Even when you're facing your imminent doom," he drawls, increasing a bit the weight so you wail and whimper, pleading, apologizing, begging, babbling anything to get that sole out of your fucking face. "Even now you're fucking horny. Pussy soaking wet from being humiliated by me." he huffs a laugh and clicks his tongue, "Unbelievable."

You feel him shifting and the weight lifts — you lift your head and shrink your shoulders and you think, for a second, of fleeing, but you stop yourself from bolting, running, going anywhere, — and how fucking glad you are because your eyes meet the barrel of his revolver as soon as they rise from the floor.

"Can't believe my niece is such a fucking desperate whore." his tone is endearing and his words are as filthy as you'd expect from him.

The gun pointed at you, though, that's bringing a new sensation.

He notices how very still you go.

You think you have stopped breathing.

You think your heart also stopped beating.

You hear absolute silence and it's deafening.

Staring at the barrel of that gun unlocks another level of fear and agitation you didn't know it to be possible.

You're petrified.

He tilts his head and squints his eye.

He cocks the gun's hammer.

Click.

Your body feels like it's vibrating.

You see yourself in third person — you see the whole scene before your eyes like your soul left your body before you die.

Your body feels cold, hollow, heavy and light at the same time. You don't blink. Your mind becomes hazy, foggy, scrambled and unable to form a single thought. Your eyes bar tears that glisten down your cheeks and drip from your chin on the next moment.

Warmth, unfortunately familiar, slides down your thighs. You didn't even know you had anything on your bladder still, but apparently your body decided that this was the perfect moment to let you know.

"Tch."

He decocks his gun using both hands, safely putting his thumb over where the hammer would strike, pointing the revolver down and pulling the trigger to unlock the hammer softly.

No shots fired.

You're alive.

And no longer clean.

You're — once again in the same night — half covered in your own piss.

He doesn't holster his gun.

He holds it firmly and crouches before you, sitting on his heels, forearms on knees, eye on yours.

"I guess you need more training." he deadpans and you don't process his words.

You process the pain of his hand yanking your head by your hair gripped in his empty hand.

You process the warm wetness against your face as he presses your cheek once again on the tile, but not before turning your body to rub your cheek against your own filth, your ass bared to him.

"Mutts pee outdoors, not inside, dumb fucking bitch."

You whine — much for his amusement — like a wounded animal. A kicked dog.

Your eyes are closed shut and the bitter acid smell of urine floods your lungs as you repeatedly apologize, a string of sorry leaving your almost closed shut lips because you don't want pee to enter your mouth.

"Mutts also don't speak." He forces your face to shift a tad, pressing your nose and almost your whole front to the floor.

He wants to drown you in your own piss?

"W—oof." your voice is weak and wrecked and cracked and laced in tears and he laughs, scathing and loud, entertained with your anguish.

The vice that is his hand on your hair eases and you raise your head from the floor in a jerk of your body.

Dripping piss mixed with tears, you back up — still crawling — and your body meets his still crouched, massive frame.

You're between his legs.

You look up, he's looking down at your dirty, wet wreck of a face and you can see something flare up behind his eye. You're not sure of what, but it's nothing that will prevent you from meeting the fate he already trailed for you.

Even if it looks so much like it.

Almost tenderness towards something he broke.

"Up." he says, voice even, and he wraps your waist with the same hand he used to push your head down. He raises himself and raises you like you are just an inconvenient sized cat and the next thing you feel is the coldness of the counter marbled top against your back before you pull yourself up by your forearms.

He's standing in front of you. Your legs dangle on the edge of the counter, your knees bracket his frame — which forces your legs to remain open wide, he's a massive man.

Every single muscle of your body is taut.

Your attention is entirely focused on the hand still holding the gun, and he obviously notices.

He wants your attention on him, and nothing else.

"Let's solve this little issue before we continue." he places the revolver on the counter besides your splayed and tense body. Your eyes still transfixed on the dark metal with the fluted smooth nozzle.

His other hand finds the inside of your thigh. The pads of his fingers tracing slowly the way up, not caring for the fact that your skin is probably still tainted by urine.

Your eyes don't move.

He grabs and squeezes tightly the plush of your soft skin until he rips a pained sound from your lips and your attention flicks to his face.

His brow is lowered, he's not pleased, you know that look.

"Since you like my gun so much, I'll let it solve this for you."

That phrase could mean so, so many things.

Solving a problem with his gun.

And even in your wildest thoughts, a smith wesson revolver's nozzle being used to fuck your cunt wasn't a scenario you would ever imagine.

Still, that's exactly the situation you were in.

The corded forearm of his left arm pressed across your sternum, holding you down in a mean weight against the counter top, and his right hand — holding the gun by its grip, finger off trigger — being used to slide the long, smooth, lustrous nozzle of the loaded revolver in and out of your wet, tortured pussy.

Maybe you should have let him hunt and kill you.

Your pleas are nothing — they slide off his skin like air. Your body tries to fight, then to relax, then it doesn't know anymore what to do and what to make of this situation.

Your walls clench and it hurts against the solid cold metal.

It doesn't stop him.

"I thought you liked it? Couldn't take your eyes off it." his tone is venom and your wet face, retorted in pain, tells him so much — yet, he ignores it and keeps fucking you with the long nozzle.

Things shift drastically when, somehow, he drags a moan out of you.

It catches you and him both by surprise and you swallow a gasp when he pulls it off your hole and holsters it again, for your brief relief. He doesn't relent on the pressing of your upper body, however. You're still incapable of moving as you hear the soft clink of metal against the counter top and a zip of what you can only imagine to be his jeans.

The forearm lifts. His hands grab you by the waist as he sits on the chair he used to torture you a few moments — minutes? hours? you don't know — ago, straddling his own hips with your thighs as he settles you over his lap. The hard ridge of his cock is evident against his jeans.

Oh.

Oh?

Your brows knit together and, by now, you should know better than to expect anything other than mercuriality from him.

Your chest rises and falls quickly, adrenaline kicking in once again as you see how blown out his pupil is, almost swallowing entirely the usual crimson.

He's fucking you before killing you, is that it? Did he get this hard because you… moaned?

The confusion in your eyes are enough to rip a growl from his throat as he decides to lose no more time before his cock slaps your lower belly, swollen tip flushed red, glistening with the leaking pre, and shaft hot, heavy, once he frees it from his jeans and boxers.

Something uncoils inside your chest and something else tightens in your stomach.

This is messed up.

You're still bleeding from a few of the cuts he left on your skin. You're sticky with your own fucking piss, — not only in your legs but your face too, thanks to him — and yet your body reacts immediately pooling slick in your pussy the second his cock whips out?

Not to mention the serial killing, cannibalism, torture, and the other quirky things in his criminal record.

Maybe your brain is just too fried.

Or maybe you're, as he said already, a fucking desperate whore.

His hands close around your waist and he raises you with the same ease as before — your cunt hovering over his hard cock.

You didn't even try to run. You could have punched his cock. You could have punched his throat. You could have grabbed the knife in his belt and stabbed him. You could have—

Your mind goes blank as soon as he lowers you and your pussy easily swallows his girth and length and heat and every fucking bad thing he did to you apparently.

Because you're melting.

Your body goes slack for exactly one second and then your hands are gripping his shirt, near his collar, as you feel yourself clenching and tightening him, massaging his dick with your inner walls, panting and trembling. The groan that escapes his lips as you sheath him entirely is low, dragged, and raw. And it makes your arousal go as high as it could.

He notices.

"You're a fucking bitch on heat." he mutters when he leans in, face too close, breath hot against your lips. "Figured I could give you something nice before I take everything from you."

Your body doesn't cease to amaze you on how much liquid it holds, because you could swear your tears had already dried, but your eyes are glittery and your breath hitches the moment his hands make you roll your hips. You feel every bulging vein, every spot being stretched and tainted by his dick. You feel every throb making you want to move. To grind. To surrender.

And then he moves you.

Up and down and up and down and up and down.

He fucks you on his cock, grip firm on your hipbones and your hands, at some point, slide to his neck, as if—

As if you could choke him. Strangle him. Kill him.

Do it.

Press tighter.

He pulls you down to take his cock entirely, bottoming out on you once again when he notices your hands pressing ever so slightly around his broad neck.

A derisive chuckle escapes his lips and he presses his forehead against yours.

His smirk is unsettling and his eye is a lit pyre.

"You wanna kill me, brat?" he whispers softly and amused as if trading secrets with you.

You go still. You think. Your head spins so fucking quick and you shake it subtly.

No.

The corner of his lips pull and he bares teeth, you see once again how his canines are slightly pointier than average.

You always thought it to be charming.

He bucks his hips once and you let out an unguarded mewl that has another dark chuckle leaving his mouth.

"You want me to stop?" now his lips are against yours.

You can feel his breath and your breath synced. You can feel his warmth.

You remember how good it felt to be embraced by him, kissed by him, fucked by him, adored by him, to have his attention, his jokes, his tenderness and company.

You remember how betrayed you felt the night he got taken in.

You remember the hollow in your chest that took eight years too many to be almost filled.

Surrender.

You shake your head again.

No, you don't want him to stop.

You don't know what you're doing.

Still, you're doing it.

"You'll let me ruin you entirely? You'll let your own uncle fucking ravage you?" his eyebrow is arched and his expression is raw malice.

Your mind is hazy once again.

Your chest is tight.

Your pussy is clenching him and his hands are rolling your hips so, so slowly, grinding you against his lap, making your clit rub against his groin as he waits for your answer.

You don't mind, do you?

Surrender, it's the best you can do.

You've always been his favorite, anyway.

"You'll let me fuck your tight little cunt until I'm satisfied, use you as my little cocksleeve and then kill you after? Are you this needy? Did I fuck you stupid a decade ago and get you addicted to my cock?"

His words should sting and yet it seems that you're too far gone.

He exhales heavily, you breathe him in deeply.

"You're still my good little thing, aren't you?" you aren't quite sure if he said, if he whispered, or if you imagined — you're bouncing on his cock in the next second.

Hands clutching the unruly pink hair falling on his nape, head thrown back as he buries his cock inside you in a brutal, reverent and ruthless pace.

He lets his moans, groans and curses mix with your mewls and moans, and every time you cry out he goes harsher, faster, bruising force pulling you down and smacking the softness of your ass and the back of your thighs against his corded legs still covered in his jeans.

You're far, far gone, babygirl.

There's no coming back from this.

After all of the events of the night you're there, riding your uncle's dick, moaning inside his mouth, letting him mark you in so, so many ways. Letting him bite your skin until he breaks flesh and draws blood and you remember, for a second, he ate people. The next second you don't care anymore because he has his lips around your nipple and his teeth pressing on the swollen tip of it.

Desperate whore, sure, and still a good little thing that opens up easily for him.

You let him kiss you.

Or you kiss him — you don't know. You don't care.

It's messy. Everything is already so messy.

Maybe you finally made peace with losing your life if it makes things less complicated.

You still don't know.

What you know is, he's dragging a violent orgasm out of you while he's still making you ride him. He growls when you pull his hair harder and his teeth mark your pulse where your jaw meets your neck — you shriek again, you cry, you feel your muscles convulsing as you cum from the absurd mix of pain and pleasure and madness of it all.

He was right back then.

No one would fuck you better than him.

It doesn't take much more for him to reach his own release inside you. A last thrust, his hands pressing you down painfully as his tip kisses your cervix, pressing on it and making you arch with the discomfort as thick ropes of cum fill your pussy, hot, abundant, so, so fucking much cum what the fuck.

Your body goes slack once more, you collapse on his lap.

You collapse against his body.

Shallow breathing, heart beating fast, maybe your little head is working again after you came.

Maybe you're now realizing what you agreed upon.

You start to cry without sobbing, cooling salt cutting tracks your skin doesn’t have room for.

He watches the water gather and fall like he’s waiting for a kettle to sing.

“There.” he says softly, the sneer living in the kindness of his tone. "

You’re boneless and shivering on his lap, skin cooling, the locket a cold coin knocking your sternum every time your breath stutters.

Rope prints ring your wrists and ankles like wilted bracelets.

The kitchen is quiet except for the clock and the click of the cooling burner he never lit.

His hands sit open at your hips, not gentle, not moving, just deciding.

You keep waiting for the squeeze that means you’re falling again.

It doesn’t come.

He’s gone still in that way that means the knife in him has turned inward to think.

“Tell me the night.” he says finally, low. “Slow.”

“You know the night,” you rasp, throat raw, voice small.

“I know my side,” he says. “Give me yours once again. Humor me.”

You stare at his collarbone because his eyes are a cliff.

“Sirens. Lights on the ceiling like… like a storm came inside. Mom turned up the TV. She told me to stay in my room. Don’t open the door. Don’t—” Your voice thins. “She kept saying don’t.”

He hums.

“She say a name?”

“She said sweetie…Not mine.”

He smiles against your cheek, a small, satisfied cut.

“Good. Again.”

You repeat it. Smaller. He keeps you circling it like a drain, same details until the edges sharpen and bite — the way your mother’s thumb stroked the case, the way she put the remote between you like a fence, the way she glanced toward the back door when the first knock hit.

He shifts you on his thigh just enough to feel the tremor in your legs, just enough to make the locket tap.

“And after?” he asks. “After they took me?”

“You told me not to cry,” you say, because that’s what you remember most — him, laughing for the cameras, and under it, that private order flicked at you like a coin.

“She made tea. She said ‘it’ll be quieter now.’ She said ‘it’s for the best.’”

He tastes the words, decides where to place the knife in them.

“You ever ask her who called?”

“I—” You blink. “No.”

“Why not.”

“Because I thought… the neighbors, or— someone. Everyone else knew and didn't tell me, apparently.”

Your mouth dries around the lie you raised like a pet.

“It didn’t matter who.”

He turns your face with two fingers, studying the pupils like he’s checking if the animal in you has learned a new trick.

“It matters,” he says, almost kind. “It’s the only thing that ever matters.”

Silence stretches. The house ticks. Somewhere outside, a late car ghosts by, tires whispering wet leaves.

He watches your throat work. He could put his thumb there. He doesn’t. He sets it on the locket instead, taps it once so it pings.

The sound goes through you like a current.

“You never knew,” he says, not a question. Testing the shape of it on his tongue. “Did you?”

“I didn’t know.” The words come out small, bewildered, like a child finding blood on her knee and not remembering falling.

His smile is bright and vicious and pleased with himself.

“Of course you didn’t. If you had, you’d be dead for lying to me now.”

You flinch. The locket knocks bone. Your hands fumble for somewhere to go and find nowhere.

He places your hands on his chest over his shirt. You feel his heartbeat and it's both soothing and enraging how calm he is.

He exhales like a man finally locating the loose nail he’s been hearing in a wall for years.

“She called,” he says, light as weather. “Your mother. Not anonymous.”

A little click of his tongue.

“She walked it in.”

“You’re lying.” It’s reflex now, not faith.

You're afraid again and you don't know why.

He tilts his head.

“Darling,” he says, half-laughing, “I don’t lie about records.”

“What records.” you feel like a kid again. You feel like the adults talked about things and left you out and now you feel dumb and small and defensive.

“Discovery.” The word drops like a coin in a well. “You don’t go through a trial without getting to read the song sheets. Times. Numbers. Voicemail that never hit anyone’s desk because the detective already had her direct line. She gave my name like it was spare change. She gave the address. She gave them where I kept the car.”

He watches you choose which part to swallow and choke on.

“She told them what back door you leave unlocked.”

You shake your head.

It feels slow, underwater.

“No.” you breathe. She's your mother, his sister, she wouldn't.

“Yes.” He strokes the chain at the nape of your neck, not to soothe — never to soothe when it comes to his touches — but to watch the way your skin jumps. “Don’t worry. She didn’t grow a conscience about my ways and my hobbies.”

His smile cuts wider.

“She grew a boundary.”

Your mouth shapes the word why and refuses to push it out.

You access memories, you think of all the times you allowed him to enter your bedroom, your bathroom, your pussy, your life.

Did she know?

She couldn't have known.

Could she?

“She knew,” he says, patient, delighted by the lesson. “She knew the whole time. Little things disappear and don’t make the news. Men you don’t ask about stop coming around. Your neighbor’s dog digs something interesting at the fence line and everybody decides it was a butcher’s trash.”

He shrugs.

“No one wants to believe their pies are baked in a kitchen that’s been a morgue.”

You’re cold.

It arrives all at once, crawling into the hollows of you.

“Then why—”

“Because she saw this.” He taps the locket. “Because she saw me kiss her girl in her bright little kitchen and found a line. She didn’t draw it at blood. She didn’t draw it at bone. She drew it at you. Took her long enough.”

He grins, cruel and impressed.

“I always did like her spine.”

You try to get off his lap. Your muscles misfire and leave you where you started.

He doesn’t have to hold you, the chair does.

“You’re lying,” you say again, soft and useless and once again in the verge of tears.

He nods toward the phone he’s left face down on the table, a black square that might as well be a gravestone.

“We can pull the bill when we’re done playing. Cross-street. Time stamp. Her thumbprint on the glass.”

He leans in, voice a rasp of velvet.

“She watched me for years. She made space for what I am. The only thing she wouldn’t make space for was you wanting it.”

“I didn’t— I—” The word breaks.

He laughs, quiet and sardonic.

“Save it. I’m not the church. My cock is still buried in you if you didn't notice.”

Your eyes burn raw. The kitchen tilts, rights, tilts. You remember her voice — stay in your room — and the way she’d turned the TV up and how loud the laugh track was while they cuffed him and he smiled like he was on stage.

“Say it, princess” he prompts, amused teacher to a failing student. “Get the poison out.”

“My mother called them,” you whisper.

“Again.”

“My mother called them. She knew about your crimes. She excused… everything. She drew the line at— us.”

He kisses your cheek, a casual, possessive stamp that makes bile crawl up your throat.

“There you go.”

“She—she knew.” It tastes wrong in your mouth as you repeat and try not to gag and cry and scream at the same time. You try again. “She always knew.”

“Yeah.” He rolls the word in his teeth like gristle, enjoying the tug. “Women like her always know. They keep the ledger in their heads and pretend it’s a grocery list. They feed you dinner and decide what not to see. She liked holding your leash.”

He tilts his head.

“She saw this and hated that you gave it to me.”

You can’t help it, you look at the locket. Your hands are shaking, useless birds.

“She turned you in because of me,” you say, and the room makes a new shape around it.

He smiles with all the brightness of a fresh wound.

“Because of us,” he corrects. “Don’t steal my credit.”

Something hardens under your ribs.

It isn’t strength.

It’s a shard of a different kind of grief.

“You’ll kill her.”

“Eventually,” he says, as if you’d asked if it will rain in a climate that only knows storms. “Not tonight.” He taps your knee twice, a signal you can’t parse. “Tonight the truth landed where it belonged. You would have taken the blame, I thought you did it. Should have known better.” he muses for a moment "my pretty, obedient little thing wouldn't turn me in."

You’re crying and you don’t remember starting.

He watches tears drip off your jaw like a scientist tidying notes.

“Here’s the part you’ll hate,” he says, almost tender. “She didn’t do it to save anyone. She did it to clean the picture in her head. She could cook for a monster. She couldn’t sit across Sunday lunch from a girl who tasted like one.”

You gag on nothing. The chair complains. He holds you in place with nothing but warm hands and the geometry of him.

“Breathe, baby.” he coos, the way he did when you were nineteen and he fastened the clasp for the first time. “In. Out. Look at me.”

You do, because you always do.

His eye is bright and bored and hungry and newly entertained.

“There,” he murmurs, satisfied when you catch. “Lesson absorbed.”

He sets you back on your heels — not off his lap, just… placed. Claimed. He reaches for the egg timer, turns it once.

The soft tick tick starts up like a heart that belongs to the room and not to you.

“You’re going to think about calling her,” he says, as if predicting weather. “You’ll think about asking. She’ll lie to you because she has to live with herself. You’ll believe her because you have to live with her. And I’ll still be right.”

You find your voice in pieces.

“What do you want me to do.”

“Nothing,” he says, sinister. “I like you exactly like this.”

The timer ticks. Your pulse tries to keep up and can’t. He smiles at the sound, taps the locket one more time, and lets the little bell ring between you.

“My good girl.” he says, scathing and sweet. “Now say thank you, after all, I saved your life.”

He doesn't say spared.

Saved.

You don’t.

You can’t.

He laughs under his breath, pleased anyway, and leans back in the chair like a king satisfied with the ruin he’s arranged. You lean against his chest because that's who you are, apparently.

His good little girl.

Outside, wind lifts the dead leaves and the porch pumpkins go hollow when it hits, and in the kitchen the minute stretches until it feels like it might never end.