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He sang as if I was his child, bobbing his head side to side while he stepped into the room, eyes fixed on me like I was the only thing there. “Happy birthday, dear Evelyn…” He paused as he stopped right in front of me. “Happy birthday to you.” The final note hung between us as he lifted the cupcake toward my face.

“Go on,” he said softly.

Somehow, I managed to lean forward, and my breath stuttered as he watched the way my lips puckered when I blew out the small flame. The candle went out in a thin curl of smoke, and for a moment, there was only silence. Wayne didn’t move. He just watched me. Then slowly, he pulled the candle free. Wax coated his fingers, but he didn’t seem to care.

“Thank you,” I said for the fourth time, and it sounded even smaller than the rest.

He didn’t respond. Instead, he peeled back the pink wrapper and lifted the cupcake toward me. My body stiffened as the icing brushed my lip.

“Don’t just stand there,” he grumbled. “Take a bite.”

As I hesitantly opened my mouth, Wayne pushed his hand forward, forcing me to take a mouthful. There was no real choice in it. My teeth sank through chocolate and sugar, sweetness blooming across my tongue, with something colder curled beneath it. As Wayne watched me chew, the grin he’d been wearing thinned. He guided the next bite in without breaking eye contact. I swallowed, forcing it down past a throat that suddenly felt too tight. “It’s delicious,” I managed, clearing my throat, as if that would fix the dryness scraping inside me.

“But I really should be getting back n-no…” The words faded off my tongue as Wayne loomed over me. I frowned, trying again, but nothing came out. A slow, creeping panic rose in my chest. I stepped back on instinct, and my knees folded immediately.

Only, I never hit the ground.

Wayne caught me like he’d been waiting for it.

“Oops-a-daisy,” he chuckled. “Where ya think you’re going, darl?”

The world tilted as he hauled me up and over his shoulder in one fluid motion. I tried to struggle, but my body felt heavy, uncooperative, like it was slipping away from me piece by piece. His shoulder drove into my stomach as he carried me down the dark corridor. My arms hung limp as we moved deeper into the house, deeper than any part of me wanted to go. Fear pressed so hard against my ribs, I could barely catch my breath as he descended down a steep staircase.

What was happening?

Why was he doing this to me?

My heart roared in my ears as he unceremoniously pulled me off his shoulder and dumped me onto a hard mattress. “And then there were two,” he cackled above me, his voice abrasive and harsh. I tried to push myself up, but my body didn’t listen. I struggled to keep my eyes open as he dragged me further up the bed, then whimpered at the unmistakable sounds of chains clinking as he lifted my arms above my head.

“No…” I tried to say. “Please don’t,” I slurred, the words unintelligible to my own ears. My head jerked sideways as his fingers locked under my jaw, forcing me to look at him.

“What was that?” he murmured. “Didn’t quite catch it.” He grinned before he got off the mattress and disappeared into the darkness. My head lulled onto my shoulders as I struggled to stay awake and make sense of what was happening. Tears slid down my cheeks as he came back holding a glass jar, kneeling beside me as the mattress dipped under his weight.

“Say goodnight to your father, Evie.” He cackled maniacally as the jar tilted toward me.

At first, my mind refused to accept what I was seeing, and the sound that should have been a scream never came. It died somewhere before it reached my throat as I saw my father’s head in the jar, his dead eyes open and connecting with my own. Wayne watched me carefully, like he was studying the moment something inside me broke.

And that’s when it finally clicked into place.

The horrific realisation that Wayne Gatz was The Skinner—the man who’d killed my father—was the last thing I remembered before waking up to an unimaginable nightmare I’d spend the next seven years trying to wake up from.

But everything happened for a reason.

Right?

CHAPTER THREE

EVIE

Seven Years Later

Ididn’t know how Wayne could stomach the stench of the bodies in the summer. The fetid scent of decaying flesh, coagulated blood, and human excrement was practically suffocating in the warm, windowless basement. Sometimes I tried to remember how it first felt, how it burned the back of my throat and made me gag until I couldn’t breathe. The semi-decomposed accumulation of flayed flesh from his most recent victim, Liam, was flung over a bloodstained wire clothesline that hung from rusty water pipes on opposite sides of the room. The flickering flame from the wax-dripped candelabra placed in the centre of his wooden workbench partially illuminated the birthday gift Wayne had spent the last three nights working on.

The forever-stained embroidery hoop pulled the flayed section of flesh taut with the bellybutton in the centre. He’d stitched red petals around the umbilicus to resemble a macabre poppy flower; it was beautifully grotesque, one of many morbid pieces he’d created. The hallway upstairs was crowded with trinkets, wall hangings, and paintings he’d crafted out of his victims’ flesh and blood over the years. He only recently began making furniture, upholstering the backs of the four dining room chairs with the flesh of a man—which would have been an impossible feat, had he not been slightly obese when he first arrived here. But that didn't last long.

“Let me go!”

The assortment of revolting pieces were nothing compared to the large pickle jar containing my father’s decapitated head, partially preserved with ethanol and formalin that sat unmoved on the shelf above the old washing machine beneath the wooden stairs. It had accumulated a layer of dust and grime over the years, the once-clear liquid now murky, his face no longer recognisable. That was harder than anything, I think. Watching him disappear again. One day I could see his soulless green eyes, the next they were gone. Wayne had promised that he hadn’t used my dad’s flesh to create anything, and that he’d fed it to the pigs after he’d removed it, but he’d kept his head as a souvenir for when he’d eventually bring me here—words that had shattered me the first time I’d heard them. But these days, the knowledge of what had happened to my father at the hands of Wayne was a feeling that had gone numb years ago.