Page 52 of The Hand that Frays

I roll my eyes. “It seems nothing you do is your fault.”

Carl shudders, and I know it’s reality bleeding into his diseased brain.

Moving around the desk, I keep the gun on him. WhenI get behind his chair, I roll him beneath the desk further as I press the Glock to his temple.

“Do you see that blinking light over there in the corner?”

He shakes under my weapon, and the scent of piss permeates the room as he soils himself.

“Answer me!” I shout; my voice is full of incurable insanity.

“Ye—yes!” he stammers.

“That’s what will be left behind after your death.”

While it’s not recording video, it is recording audio for apparent purposes. Anne will know her husband’s and daughter’s voices better than anyone else in the universe.

The woman has been tormented half her life, and she deserves to know the truth.

It’s unlikely he’s given it to her all these years. It’s more likely he let her think she was the culprit and was slipping into some delusion of grandeur as she poisoned her children.

“She’s going to have peace once you’re gone, Carl.”

He closes his eyes and nods, and the tension in his body subsides beneath my gun.

“Tell her, Carl. Tell her what you did,” I prod.

It only takes thirty minutes for all his sins to be laid bare on tape; it takes even less for my blade to slice his throat open, nearly severing his head from his neck.

His lifeless eyes stare at the ceiling as the screams of Ada Hatt have been silenced by my stupid girl’s knife. Her head is lolled to the side, blood leaking from her lips and dripping to the floor.

Lyla removes the tape from the recorder, pocketing it to edit and send to Anne Hatt when the time is right.

As I’m cutting off each finger Carl used to poison hischildren with, I feel a touch on my shoulder before Lyla crouches behind me, and her lips skims my ear.

“Almost done, madman?” her husky tone implies much more than she says, and I groan as the feel of it skims my infected cortex.

“Almost,” I tell her as I dislocate the last finger to make removing it easier. The crack of it charges the buzz in my veins, and I shiver against it.

I don’t watch Lyla as she moves away from my back. I’m too engrossed in defiling my prey, exposing him to the investigators that’ll eventually come.

The evidence is sprawled out on the desk as I lay each finger to point at the main bullet points I want to hit, blood seeping into some of the pages from the severed ends of the appendages.

When I look up, my heart nearly stops.

Lyla is at the door, hand about to turn the handle as if she’s going to leave here without giving me what my demented soul needs to finish this job.

As much as I’ve sated the urge to kill, I haven’t appeased another hunger. One that she’s deluded me with.

She thinks she’s the only one whose coupling has forever transformed, and she’s wrong.

Now, when I spill blood, I have also to have release.

With her.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” I growl, and she stops and turns back, tossing a sidelong glance at me.

There’s a mocking sneer on her lips, and it riles anger in my veins.

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