But now, six months later, I just felt crazy for doing it. I should’ve put him out of his misery a long time ago.
It wasn’t even fun anymore. He’d long stopped begging me to free him. He’d accepted his fate and I had officially broken him. He babbled incoherently whenever I visited, stringing words together that didn’t connect to anything real. I was out of my mind to keep this going.
“Thad,” I called his name.
“Ahhhh. The mango grows from a tree and the tree grows from the ground and I love it when you come around,” hebabbled, his voice dry and husky like someone had taken sandpaper to his vocal cords.
The months of captivity had hollowed him out. The old Thad had a sharp jawline, deep voice and a smile that made me stupid. It was all gone. His beard had grown past his chest and was matted with God knows what. The hair on his head was tangled into thick, dirty clumps that hadn’t seen water in forever. His body had eaten itself from the inside, arms and legs thin and wasted, ribs visible through the dingy t-shirt I’d given him back in month two. His knees had never healed correctly, both of them swollen and locked at wrong angles. Even if I opened that cage door right now and told him to run, he wouldn’t make it two feet. His walking days were done.
I hosed him down whenever I came, but he stank so badly that the smell hit me before I even rolled the warehouse door up. Urine, sweat, and something underneath both of those things that smelled like a body slowly giving up on itself.
I was a monster. I had to be, to force a man to live like this. I had taken all the rage from the bullshit my father put me through, everything my husband did to me, and channeled it here. Thad killed my sister. And he played me. Used me as a side piece while Kacey was pregnant with his baby.
But did he deserve this? This was worse than death. Should I have just let Prime kill his ass? Or was I just as bad as him? Was I evil? Misunderstood? Nothing made sense to me anymore. Especially not after what Janelle said in our last session about walls that protect you and imprison you at the same time.
I was sitting across from a man I’d imprisoned. The irony wasn’t lost on me.
“Thad…” I said his name again, just to see if someone human was still in there.
“Me-Me-Mehar…” he sang my name like a nursery rhyme, rocking slightly in the cage the way people do when their mind has checked out and their body is just running on whatever’s left.
“You’re barely human anymore,” I said coldly.
“More human than you.”
His response shocked me. My head snapped toward the cage because his voice had changed. The babbling was gone. For a second, maybe two, Thad was back. His eyes were focused, clear, locked on mine through the bars with something that looked a lot like the truth.
“What did you say?”
“More. Human. Than. You.”
I should’ve been angry. Should’ve gone cold the way I always did when someone tried to check me. But something about the way he said it, slow and deliberate and without an ounce of fear, made my stomach turn. Because he wasn’t wrong. Janelle’s words from Wednesday echoed in my head—you are not broken, you are injured—and I was sitting here injuring someone else.
“How do you figure that, sister killer?” I asked, pushing the guilt back down where it belonged.
“This is no way for a man to live.”
“You should’ve thought about that before you weaseled your way into my life. But don’t worry, you won’t be living much longer,” I responded.
He clapped his withered hands together, the sound barely making a noise because his palms had no meat left on them. “About time. I been ready to die.”
“Oh yeah?” I needed to twist the knife. I didn’t want him ready to die. There was a part of me that still needed him to suffer, because internally I was suffering too and if I stopped making him pay for it I’d have to sit with my own shit. And I wasn’t ready for that.
“Yes. I’mma die and then come back and haunt you and drag you to hell, hoe!” There it was. He still had some spunk. This man couldn’t walk, couldn’t stand, couldn’t feed himself without shoving scraps through a slot like an animal, but he could still talk shit. I almost respected it.
“Maybe instead of haunting me, you could go be a guardian angel over that son you never got a chance to meet, bitch. Your priorities are always fucked up.” I let that land. Watched his face crumble in real time. “Had you not come into my life and just stayed with your little girlfriend, you probably wouldn’t be in this position. Well—you definitely would be dead because you killed my sister. But you wouldn’t behere.”
“Let me out you stupid bitch! PLEASE! PLEASE! AHHH!” He started to cry and his voice cracked and splintered like sandpaper dragging across concrete. Gone was the sexy deep voice I thought I was falling for. He sounded like a ghoul—a poor, sad, curled-up shrimp of a man rattling the bars of a cage he was never leaving.
And just like that, all my guilt flew out the window. Antagonizing him made me feel better. It always did. That was probably something I should tell Janelle about, but it would go in the pile of things she’d never know.
“Well, until next time, my pet,” I said. I winked at him, stood up, brushed the concrete dust off my leggings, and walked toward the door without looking back.
The night airhit me like a reset button. Cool and clean after the stench of the warehouse, and I stood there for a second letting my lungs remember what oxygen was supposed to smelllike. The parking lot was empty except for my car and the usual nothingness.
I was halfway to my car when I heard footsteps behind me, moving fast.
My body didn’t ask my brain for permission. It never did. My hand was in my jacket pocket, fingers around the switchblade, and I spun and slashed in one motion that was muscle memory at this point—three months of self-defense classes and a lifetime of flinching had turned me into the kind of woman who cut first and asked questions after.
