My first thought is that it's another gift from my mysterious admirer. My second thought is that I should leave it there and call the police. I definitely should not touch it.
But I’m also curious. And exhausted. My defenses are low, and before I can stop myself, I reach for it.
It's heavier than I expected, and ice cold.
I carry it inside and set it on my kitchen counter, staring at it for a long moment. The black ribbon is silk, tied in a perfect bow. The box itself is the kind expensive stores use, thick cardboard with a subtle texture.
I should not open it. But I do anyway. The ribbon slides off easily, and I lift the lid.
At first, I don't understand what I'm seeing. There's plastic wrap, and dry ice—the source of the cold—and something flesh toned…
Oh god.
Oh god oh god oh god.
It's a hand.
A severed hand, pale and waxy and packed in the dry ice like a piece of meat. The fingers are slightly curled, and on the ring finger is a gold wedding band with a sapphire in the center that I recognize because I saw it last night, when those fingers were attached to an arm.
ToRichard Maxwell’sarm.
I’m going to be sick.
My knees buckle and I make it to the sink just in time before I vomit, my body heaving, my mind refusing to process what I just saw. I retch until there's nothing left, until I'm just dry heaving, my throat burning and my eyes streaming.
When I can finally breathe again, I sit on the floor with my back against the wall, staring at the box on my counter, trying to make sense of this. There's a hand in that box. Richard Maxwell's hand. The hand that grabbed me, that squeezed hard enough to bruise.
Someone cut it off.
Someone cut off his hand and packed it in ice and left it at my door like a gift.
I should be screaming. I should be calling the police right now, this second, before I touch anything else.
But instead, I sit there and stare at it, because underneath the horror, underneath the visceral revulsion and the shock and the fear, there's something else—something dark that I’m afraid to acknowledge.
Part of me isglad.
Part of me is thrilled that someone punished him for what he did to me. That someone saw, or knew, or cared enough to make him pay for putting his hands on me without permission.
Part of me wants to know who did this so I canthankthem.
The thought makes me think I might be sick all over again, but I can't deny it. It's there, alongside the horror, a dark satisfaction that Richard Maxwell is somewhere right now, missing a hand and in agony, learning that there are consequences for treating women like objects he can grab whenever he wants.
I sit on the floor for a long time, my mind spinning while I try to reconcile the person I thought I was with the person who's feeling these things.
Finally, when I think I might be able to stand up without being sick again, I push myself to my feet and slowly, warily, approach the box.
The pale, waxy hand is still there. But this time, I notice something else. There’s a card next to it, made of that same cream-colored stock.
I pull it out with shaking fingers and read the message written in the same elegant script as my name on the outside:
No one touches what's mine. – I.S.
I stare at it for a long moment. Briefly, I almost expected to seehisname. Alexander Volkov. But I have no idea whoI.S.could be.
Unless…
Unless those are his real initials. If the reason I couldn’t find anything about him was because he’d given me a fake name, a fake identity.
