But this? This ordinary man with his ordinary face and his extraordinary patience?
This is the kind of evil you can't predict, can't prepare for. The random, inexplicable cruelty that the universe deals like a bad card from a stacked deck, and no amount of shadow magic or loyal monsters or revenge plots can shield you from it.
He just looks at me for a long time, studying me the way a painter studies a blank canvas before committing to the first brushstroke, knowing that once the brush touches the surface, there's no going back.
I study him right the fuck back. The slight callus on his right middle finger—from a pen, maybe, or from the repetitive grip of a scalpel handle. The way he breathes through his nose, slow and even, with no excitement, no arousal, no visible anticipation. The faint lines around his eyes that deepen when he tilts his head, like he's listening to something only he can hear.
"You're not afraid, Penelope," he observes finally.
His voice is as unremarkable as his face—medium register, a Midwestern accent with the slightest twang.
"Most of them are afraid by now."
I stand in the center of my Seal-shaped cage, every line of my body designed to communicate one thing:I am not your usual prey.
I meet his eyes without flinching. They're brown, the color of soggy cardboard, of nothing.
"I've been afraid before," I say. "It didn't help."
Something shifts in those eyes, the faintest flicker of genuine curiosity.
"No," he agrees, his voice softening to something almost conversational, almost warm. "It rarely does help. But fear is honest. It strips away the performance and shows what's underneath. The women who screamed, who begged, who bargained… They were giving me their truth. Their real selves. The selves they spent their lives hiding beneath new names and new hair colors and new cities and new religions."
"And what's underneath me?"
He doesn't answer immediately. Instead, he sits in a folding chair between one table topped with tools and another with a laptop, leans forward slightly, elbows on his knees, and stares at me like he's trying to see through my skin. Through my bones. Through the shadows coiled dormant and useless beneath my flesh, trapped by the Seal he carved with my name.
"That's what we're going to find out." He reaches for the laptop, opens it, and angles the screen toward me so I can see it clearly from inside the Seal's boundary.
The screen flickers to life.
James.
He’s strapped to a metal chair, the same kind of chair behind me, the same kind Red Hands sits in now. His wrists are bound to the armrests with zip ties pulled so tight the plastic has bitteninto his skin, blood welling around the edges. His ankles are lashed to the chair legs. His shirt has been ripped open.
He’s soaked with blood.
And he's screaming.
The sound is tinny through the laptop speakers but unmistakable, the kind of scream that comes from a place beyond language, beyond thought, beyond anything except the pure, primal communication of agony.
I don't look away. I owe James that much. He endured this. The least I can do is witness it.
And I refuse to show this fucker any weakness.
On the screen, Red Hands's gloved hands enter the frame. One holds forceps. The other grips James's left hand, pinning it flat against the armrest.
The forceps close around James's index finger.
And yank it backwards. It snaps, the sound crisp and distinct even through the speakers.
My stomach lurches. Bile surges up my throat, hot and acidic, and I swallow it down with a force of will that makes my jaw ache.
The footage continues. James's screams shift in pitch and texture as the pain compounds, from sharp, shocked shrieks to lower, guttural howls to, eventually, a keening sound that barely qualifies as human. While he tortures James, Red Hands speaks to him in that same calm, measured voice, asking questions I can't quite make out over the screaming.
Then he flays more skin with a hooked instrument, until James's body convulses against the restraints, the tendons standing out in his neck. Red Hands drags it along the lines of James's chest, peeling back strips of flesh the way you'd peel an orange.
Red Hands works slowly, methodically, pausing between cuts to let the camera capture the result.
