I look.
The thing on the platform doesn't look like a person anymore. It's pieces. Red pieces, and wet sounds, and the smell of copper and something worse, something organic and wrong, and my brain keeps trying to file it somewhere it can make sense.
He was a bad man. He hurt children. Five hundred and fifty-three children.
The number loops through my head like a broken record.
Five hundred and fifty-three.
Five hundred and fifty-three.
Five hundred and?—
The unmasked man is coming toward me. His cock is soft now, blood-streaked, still visible, and I watched him—I watched himcomewhile he?—
He was protecting you. He saved you. The bad man was going to hurt you and he stopped him.
My brain scrambles for the narrative that makes this make sense. The one where the hero rescues the maiden, and the villain dies, and everything is justified, and clean, andright.
But there's nothing clean about what I just watched.
"Scarletta." His voice cuts through the static. "Scarletta, look at me. Are you hurt? Where did he cut you?"
Hands on my face. Warm. Gentle. The same hands that just?—
Don't think about it.
"Your hip. There's blood. Let me see."
I can't speak. My mouth opens but nothing comes out except a sound that might be a sob or might be a scream that got stuck halfway up my throat.
"I need to get you out of here. Can you walk?"
I don't know. I don't know anything. The blonde attendant's head is still there, somewhere behind me in the mud, and the unmasked man is lifting me now, carrying me like I weigh nothing, and his skin is slick with?—
Don't.
Don't think about it.
He saved you.
The jungle blurs past. Trees, and vines, and shadows. And I'm shaking so hard my teeth are chattering even though the air is warm and humid. The unmasked man is talking, asking questions I can't process, his voice tight with something that might be concern, or maybe fear.
He came while he was killing him.
The thought surfaces before I can stop it.
He was aroused. He was?—
"Stay with me, Scarletta. We're almost there."
The staging pavilion appears through the trees, and there's screaming. More screaming. People in white running, crying, and bodies?—
More bodies.
Two staff members on the ground near the entrance, blood pooling beneath them, and the unmasked man's arms tighten around me as he steps over them.
"Fucking hell," he breathes. "Geoffrey! For fuck's sake…status report!"
