Page 89 of Mayhem and Minnie

Fuck.

Why is she in the basement? And why is she now poking around the hidden entrance to the other side of the basement?

“Marlowe? Are you there?” she calls out.

More panic.

How the hell does she know I’m here?

I look right and left for a way out.

What if she somehow finds the way in? What if she sees me standing in the middle of a sterilized room that’s currently stained with blood, with butchered body parts lying in buckets?

No. I cannot have that.

She’d get scared then. She’d run off. And she has nowhere to go—nowhere safe.

That cannot happen.

She cannot leave.

Not now, not ever.

In a burst of desperation, I grab a white sheet and lay it on the floor. I head over to Paul’s lower body and grab his thigh, which should still have plenty of blood inside it.

Puncturing a few strategic spots alongside the inner thigh, I spray the blood all over the sheet, mimicking a Pollock design.

I’ve never been the artistic type, but I do think this might be a Pollock.

If nothing else, I’ll go with some modern nonsense. No one knows what those mean either.

“Marlowe? Where are you?”

Minnie’s voice intensifies as she walks around the ante-basement room. As she studies the area, she stops right in front of the door to my room.

Her eyes narrow in suspicion and she places her hands around the surface of the door, feeling it out.

The door won’t open to anyone but me, since it requires biometric information. But if she finds out that is a door, she’ll want to know what for, what I’m hiding.

She’ll grow suspicious, and that will feed into her negative feelings about me. It won’t be long before she grows to fear me and decides she’s much safer far away from me.

No. No. No.

She cannot leave.

She’ll stay here. With me. She’ll clean my house, cook my meals, and give me something pretty to look at. A little misogynistic, I know, but do I get a pass if she’s the only one who’s ever made me feel that way?

Probably not.

Goddamn it.

In my panic, I’m once more getting lost in my thoughts and the many what-ifs.

Perhaps if I wait, she’ll leave.

So I wait.

Minutes trickle by. My ADHD runs rampant, making me pace around like a madman—not that I am not one.

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