Page 296 of Obsession

His head fell forward as he whimpered. His flesh was now browning around the cuts, which weren’t as deep as I thought they would be, but I guess that was the point. He didn’t want to kill him yet. He wanted to inflict unimaginable agony on him.

Harris pulled him by the hair to turn his head back and showed him the bottle with whatever it contained. Joshua began to shake and move as Harris held the bottle over his eye.

“No, please, please ...”

“What were you going to do with her? What were you going to do with the photos?

His voice was so… cold. He wasn’t even angry anymore, because he seemed to have turned into a different person. Joshua’s suffering didn’t affect him in the slightest, he probably could have ripped his heart out without batting an eyelid.

Joshua started to cry when the acid was so close to his eye.

Harris grabbed him by the jaw to keep him still.

“Nothing, man, I swear. It wasn’t me. Someone ma ...”

One drop was all that poured into his eye, but that was all he needed. Jay covered his mouth with both hands. He was wearing gloves and didn’t feel when Joshua bit him.

I covered my ears and wanted to leave because it was too much for me. That agonized howl would haunt me forever.

Joshua fought with all his strength, but Harris grabbed him so tightly by the neck that even his screams were silenced.

“You only have one eye left, Joshua. You better answer my questions.”

The coldness in his voice was something I would never forget. I couldn’t look at Joshua or his face because his eye seemed to have melted into his skull.

He fainted for a while and Harris stepped away from him as Ken threw a bucket of water directly into his face. He woke upwith a violent jolt and began to shake, but not because he was cold.

Harris had blood up to his wrist and it didn’t seem to bother him. He calmly circled Joshua until he regained consciousness and began to whimper in pain.

That’s when I realized I was crying too, petrified by what I was seeing. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t leave, no matter how much I wanted to.

I couldn’t stop him, could not approach him, because I was afraid that the same gaze would be directed at me. He would have asked someone to take me away so he could continue his torture.

He couldn’t see me where I was standing because the light was only shining on them. I was camouflaged by the darkness and the huge barrel.

It smelled of wood, wine and death.

They were standing on what looked like a metal platform, barely a few inches high, but the way Joshua’s blood flowed through a small sewer maw told me he wasn’t the first one being tortured there.

“Harris, please...”

He could barely hold his head up.

“Don’t call me that,” thedemongrowled, “you have no right to call me that.”

Joshua raised his eyes.

“Hawk,” he managed, looking at him with his only eye.

Hawk.

No one had ever called him that. He’d never told me, and I was too confused to understand where it came from until I remembered he had a Harris Hawk tattooed on his chest. HewasHarris Hawk.

That’s what the glove was. Eagle claws.

This wasn’t new to him. It wasn’t the first time he was doing it.

“You can do whatever you want to me after this, but let me talk for a minute,” Joshua pleaded as he gasped.

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