Once outside, the night cut sharp and clean. The snow and ice covering the groundglimmered dark like a perfect mirror. For a moment, I considered pulling the pool cover back and drowning him right there. Holding his head under until the panic burned out and the body went slack.
But that was too easy.
I took him across the lawn instead, keeping one hand locked at the base of his skull and the other tight on his arm. I controlled his balance, dictated every step, and let his fear do most of the work for me.
At the side wall, I didn’t rush it. I pressed him chest-first to the stone and leaned in, using my weight until he understood he wasn’t climbing anything on his own.
“Slow,” I whispered.
I guided him over the low section where the wall dipped, lowering him down rather than throwing him. His feet slipped on the other side, and he went down hard on his knees, breath tearing out of him in a sharp gasp. He started shaking from the cold and fear.
I followed immediately, already hauling him upright by the arm when he tried to turn. He didn’t get far. I shoved him toward the car waiting in the shadows, forced him into the back seat, secured his wrists and legs with zip ties, and pulled a hood over his head.
I drove until the pavement thinned, and the city lights gave way to darkness. Asphalt cracked into dirt, glass towers becamerusted bones, and the slaughterhouse loomed ahead, half-collapsed and rotting. Fitting graveyard for this fucker.
I made my way into the decommissioned utility building at the edge of an industrial zone. Built of concrete with no windows at ground level. Once inside, the air was cold and stale, untouched by time or traffic. I carried him over my shoulder and kept his ankles and wrists bound.
I made my way down a narrow stairwell that hadn’t seen use in years. He struggled and cried behind the hood, but the sound was swallowed by thick walls and distance. The basement waited exactly as I’d prepared it.
I forced him into the chair bolted to the floor and secured him without ceremony. Plastic sheeting crinkled beneath his bare feet as I tightened the restraints on the chair legs. A drain sat directly below, the plastic cut away from it, and positioned for efficiency, not spectacle.
My tools were already laid out. My preparation wasn’t about cruelty. It was all about control.
I pulled the hood off.
Confusion came first. A slow blink. A faint frown. There was no recognition in his eyes, and I’d expected that. I had never been more than a shadow to him. I’d been behind the camera, unseen and irrelevant, forced to watch as my mother begged for her life.
“I’m the son of the woman you paid to watch die,” I said bluntly. Frankly.
Understanding didn’t come as memory. It came as realization. His eyes sharpened, his breath hitching as he grasped that this wasn’t about a woman he remembered, but about something he’d paid for.
He opened his mouth, but I didn’t let him speak.
The pliers were already in my hand when his eyes met them. I didn’t rush it. I let him see what I’d chosen, let theunderstanding sink in slowly, and relished the way fear always took hold when reality set in
Then I brought them down hard on his index finger. Bone gave way with a wet crunch, sharp and unmistakable. His scream tore out of him, high and panicked, slamming into the concrete walls and coming back distorted. His body bucked against the restraints, the chair rattling beneath him. No one would hear his screams. No one would ever come to his aid.
I didn’t stop as I shifted my grip and closed the pliers again on another finger. Another crunch, and another scream followed. This one was rougher as his breath shuddered out of him the moment I pulled the pliers back, skin, bone, and tissue shredding itself apart.
I went finger by finger. Hand to hand. I ruined that motherfucker until he was left with nothing but clubs attached to his wrists.
Blood poured down his forearms, slick and bright, dripping onto the cement and pattering toward the drain in thin red lines. His movements grew frantic, then disordered, muscles jerking without coordination. His breathing collapsed into broken sounds, snot bubbling out of his nose, saliva trailing down his chin.
He hadn’t given my mother clean. He hadn’t given her fast or been merciless in his sick depravity. My vision flickered, and for a moment I didn’t see him at all. I saw Zoya, wrapped in a blanket, her white-blonde hair a tangled web around her face, her icy-blue eyes wide as they stared at me. She was quiet, unbroken, and still breathing.
She would never be like them. Never a currency or a file passed across a table. I’d never let someone hurt her. That realization landed in me so hard that I actually took a step back. I gritted my teeth and focused on the task at hand. Thoughts of Zoya didn’t deserve to be in this violent filth.
I set the pliers down carefully and picked up the knife. “I was seventeen,” I said, my voice steady, stripped of emotion. “You paid to watch her be killed because it made you feel powerful.”
I slid the blade under his ribs, slow and deliberate, feeling resistance at first before it gave way. I watched the blood bloom under his white shirt at an astounding rate, spreading out and soaking the material.
His scream was fractured, raw noise tearing at his throat until there was nothing left but sound without shape.
I carved with purpose. This wasn’t about me being artistic or trying to make a spectacle. This was all about the rage I wanted on display for accountability.
I opened him up carefully, reverently, making him stay conscious and present. “Ya seychas razberu tebya na kuski, tvar’.”I’m about to take you apart piece by piece, you animal.
I wanted him to feel every second of this. I wanted him to feel what my mother had experienced, and what every other woman who’d been hurt had to deal with.
