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I kicked him until he stopped struggling, then bent his arms behind his back and taped. Tape around his ankles, then his knees for good measure. I taped his mouth shut.

He slumped, shuddered, his eyes leaking like a scared child.

I went back to the kitchen. Found a knife. I paced around him. My boots tracked blood across every inch of tile. He tried to scream, but the tape muffled it.

I knelt next to him and cut the tape off his mouth. He tried to bite me.

“I want you to scream, Brandon,” I whispered. “I want every fucking inch of you to scream. Like she did, every time you touched her.”

He spat in my face. I cracked him across the cheekbone. A tooth went spinning on the floor.

I straddled him, knees crushing his arms. I jammed the knife against the side of his face. “You won’t walk away from this. You’re not even going to crawl.”

I pressed the knife to his cheek, dragging it slow, a soft line at first, then deep. The muscle split open easy. His body kicked under me, spasms and screams.

I cut a patch the size of a quarter from his cheek. Peeled it free.

He screamed. For real now. He howled like a dog chained out in the rain, and it made something happy inside the boiling black.

“Good,” I crooned. “Keep screaming. You’re feeding the dark now.”

I peeled strips of skin from his arms. The insides of his thighs. The back of his hand. I worked slow, careful, making sure he saw every inch of the blade before it bit him.

Blood gushed in sheets. I licked my lips. It smelled wonderful. He whimpered, then sobbed. Big man, now a sack of meat.

“You remember the night you took her from me?” I whispered in his ear. “You took her and locked her in a box, didn’t you? Did you make her beg you not to hit her? Did you like it when she screamed?”

He tried to talk. Just noises now. I cut away the skin at the corner of his jaw, right down to the bone. He made a gurgle but couldn’t fight anymore. Pain will drain a man fast.

I sliced the shirt from his torso and took skin from his belly, then kept going until both his arms were glistening wet strips of red. Sometimes I stopped to punch the wounds, just to see him flinch.

The blood got everywhere. My hands were red. My clothes were soaked through. I imagined what Starla would say if she saw me like this. Would she scream or would she just tremble and wait for me to put her back together?

He shivered, gasping. I didn’t want him to die yet. Not yet.

I wiped sweat out of my eyes and knelt by his head. The knife pressed in under his eyelid.

He screamed again. I palmed his skull and yanked the eye out. It popped free with a wet, sucking sound.

It bounced on the tiles. I laughed. I took the other, got it in one tug. Both eyes gone, ruins trickling down his torn face.

He mewled, gasped, shuddered at the agony. But I wasn’t done. Not even close.

I cut into his mouth, split his cheeks even wider. His lips flopped around the teeth. I cut the tongue. Yanked it free. Sloppy, thick, covered in mucous and blood. I threw it across the room. It slapped the fridge and fell to the floor like a dead bird.

He convulsed on the floor. I flicked blood from my hands and moved down to his crotch.

“This is what you really care about, right? This is what you think makes you a man?”

He tried to roll away, but with his hands and feet taped he was nothing. Less than nothing. I ripped open his pants.

I cut his cock off in three steady slices. The blood sprayed my face. He shrieked; the noise was warbling and soft, no real voice left.

His insides squirted onto the tile. I tossed the ruined chunk of flesh toward his face. It smeared a red arc across the floor. He was limp now. Barely breathing. But he was awake. I wanted him to feel it. All of it.

I straddled his chest. His heart beat in his chest, fluttering like a terrified bird.

I pressed the knife under his ribs and pushed. Deep. Hands sunk in. I cut up through the cartilage, splitting his chest open wide. Blood fountained up, hot and sticky. I reached in, bare-handed, and fished out what I wanted.