Page 2 of The Grief We Hold

Using my knife, I slice through the rope holding Reaper up. He hits the ground, landing face first with a thud and groan. His hands, currently tied behind his back, do nothing to break his fall. He wasn’t elevated enough to snap his neck, but in approximately three minutes, he’s going to wish he had.

“Tell me who killed my girls,” I say.

“Go. Fuck. Yourself,” Reaper says.

“You got a few minutes left on earth. You wanna spend them using every variant of the word ‘fuck,’ you fill your boots. Not gonna make a bit of difference to what I’m about to do.”

His feet are tied, as are his knees, and there’s a rope around his biceps. Looks like a pathetic human caterpillar twitching around on the ground.

I crouch next to him, tilting my knife from left to right so he can appreciate the violent teeth on it. “I use this for gutting things,” I say.

I lift the damp T-shirt from his skin, hitching it up just enough so I can make a sharp incision through his abdomen.

Reaper screams in agony.

If he hopes it will give me cause to show sympathy, he couldn’t be more wrong. Every night for the past eight weeks, since I put my family in the ground, I’ve heardtheirscreams.

The imagined screams where they call me, begging me to save them.

The pleas and deals I know Hallie would have made to try and save Lottie.

Take me and not her.

You can have anything you want.

She’s innocent.

I hear my baby girl’s screams, even now. Even though I wasn’t there when it happened. Different to the cries when she was hungry, or cranky and tired.

I never much thought about the afterlife before, but I find myself praying that it somehow wipes those last few minutes of life for Lottie. I hope all she’s left with are memories of a happy and loved life while she waits for me.

I walk to the work bench, where I have a claw hook waiting. When I return, I crouch next to him. “One last chance. Tell me who killed my family.”

“You’re gonna fucking kill me anyway,” he snaps. But this time I hear it. I’m breaking him.

I nod and tap the hook on my palm. “I am. But you could, perhaps, meet your maker with a clearer conscience if you tell me what I need to know.”

He spits in my direction, but blood loss and exhaustion mean his mouth is dry and his aim shot to shit.

“Pathetic,” I say as I dip the claw through the gash in his skin and hook his lower intestine.

There’s a reason medieval torture included disembowelment. The scene is gruesomely horrific. And if you pull out only the intestines, leaving all the other organs in place, the person can stay alive for hours like something out of a horror movie.

So, I pull slowly. Because I want this man utterly ruined.

Every few centimeters, there’s a slurping sound as intestine is pulled out through the incision.

“Fuck me,” Smoke says. “That’s some next-level shit.”

It is.

But even as I do it, I feel like I’ve failed Hallie and Lottie all over again.

Because I couldn’t get this man to tell me who killed them.

And I’m going to have to do this again and again until my enemy’s blood permanently stains my hands red.

I’m going to disappear into myself, into the hell of knowing it’s my fault my family is gone forever.

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