Page 49 of Freedom’s Inferno

Richard stood behind her, dress shirt wrinkled and half-untucked, his tie hanging loosely from his neck. His sandy hair was disheveled, his eyes were glassy and wild. He held a bottle of beer in one hand, and his other clenched in a fist at his side.

“Dickie!” Lana gasped, turning around to face him. The room shifted every time she blinked, the bed moved closer, the door farther away.

Richard’s lip twitched, a muscle in his jaw feathering. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out what you did?” His mouth twisted in a sneer. “How you turned yourself into his whore?”

"What? Richard, I‒”

“Did you lick his cum from your lips when you were done?”

Lana felt like somebody had punched their fist through her gut and wrapped a hand around her spine. She didn’t know what was happening, she didn’t understand, but she recognized that look in her husband’s eyes. She knew what followed.

“Richard, please‒”

A beer bottle came hurling toward her and Lana flung her hands over her head. It smashed into the mirror at her vanity, exploding in brown shards and a spray of amber liquid. The mirror cracked in a spiderweb, Richard’s sinister stare fractured into many smaller versions of himself.

He took two steps closer, and Lana’s breath hitched. “Did you ever really love me, Lana? Or were you always just a gold-digging cunt?”

Lana stood on shaking legs, eyes darting between her husband and the doorway. She wondered if she could be quick enough to make it past him, if maybe the alcohol would slow him down. Just as he made to take another step toward her, Lana ran.

Her heart thundered in her chest, blood rushing through her ears. She managed to get halfway over the threshold when strong arms wrapped around her middle and hauled her back. Lana screamed, nails biting into the wooden frame, clawing for purchase as she was dragged to the floor.

Richard pulled her by the ankle until she was sprawled out in the center of their bedroom.

Her stomach burned from being raked across the hardwood.

He stood over her, one leg on either side, and bent low so his mouth brushed the shell of her ear.

“You will never be free of me,” he whispered, before digging his fingers into the back of her shirt and flipping her from belly to back.

A whoosh of air gusted out of her as Lana’s spine slammed into the floor, her eyes blinking wildly, before Richard’s furious face filled her vision. She tried to turn back around, tried to pull herself out from beneath him, but it was no use. He pressed a knee into her pelvis, pinning her to the floor.

“Richard…” she pleaded, voice hollow, broken.

He only smiled, wide and full of teeth, before clamping both of his hands around her slender throat and squeezing. She tried to scream, but no noise came out. Her fingers clawed at his wrist, but her vision blurred at the edges.

The veins in his neck bulged, his mouth thin and severe.

The pressure behind her eye sockets intensified, and she tunneled into darkness.

This is it. He’s going to kill me.

He leaned closer. His breath smelled of whiskey and something older, more sour, like rot under varnish. “Look at me.”

She tried, but the face hovering over her flickered like a bad projection. Each blink of light stole a detail and replaced it with something else. His jaw tightened, his hair darkened, his pupils widened until the whites of his eyes were gone. The light shifted again, and the features no longer matched. The nose was wrong, the mouth, the line of his brow—different, but familiar in a way that turned her stomach. Her heart stuttered.

Richard wasn’t the one cutting off her air; the hands around her throat belonged to Charlie.

He looked torn, desperate, furious.

She reached for the black fabric of his T-shirt, the kind he always wore under his racing jacket. His eyes, no longer Richard’s fierce, blue ones, were dark and fathomless.

“Lana,” he said, but his voice sounded wrong. It doubled, half-whisper, half-echo. “Lana. Wake up.” His voice fractured, it split into Richard’s, monstrous and mechanical.

Lana gasped, or she thought she did. The air refused to move. Everything tilted—floor, ceiling, sound—and her body followed, weightless and sinking at the same time.

Through the haze, Charlie’s face hovered above her once more, expression unreadable. His lips moved again, soundless this time, forming words she couldn’t make out.

Then, from somewhere behind him, came the faintest noise: a clock chiming. Once. Twice. Three times. Each strike louder than the last until the whole world was nothing but bells and firelight and the distant echo of her own name. She reached for him again, and the room shattered.