Page 33 of Shades of Red

I grab him by the hair and jerk him up until his head is cradled on my thighs. His eyes are still closed, the last normal looking part of his mutilated face. I take my knife and jam it into his right eye before jerking it out of his eye socket with a loud pop.Thatstartles him awake, his eyes fluttering as he tries to equilibrate while his body is in a state of trauma. Well, one eye flutters. His other is a gaping hole where I’ve ripped through his eyelids and left them in bloody tatters.

Huffing at the inconvenience of getting his blood and vitreous fluids all over my shirt, I fling his eye and the connecting tissue onto the scale. The dial slips down incrementally. It’s still not enough.

“You still owe me. How do you want to pay?”

“S-s-s’il vous plait,” he splutters. “I h-have m-money.”

I scoff. “Oh, I know you havemoney, Monsieur Moreau. That’s part of the whole fucking problem.” I let the knife circle his other eye. I don’t cut him, but I remind him that I could. “But I don’t want your goddamn money. I want my pound of flesh. So how do you want to pay?”

“P-please,” he pleads again. I wonder how many times Aurélie pleaded for mercy as he hit her over and over until she bruised and bled? And how many other women before her?

“No ideas, then?” I ask, my voice jovial as I consider my next torture.

It hasn’t escaped my notice that my cock is hard as steel in my pants. Turns out, his screams and tears turn me on almost as much as hers do. “I’m so fucking hard watching you bleed under my knife,” I tell him, scraping the blade over his skin. “I swear the next time I cum, I’ll be fucking someone in your blood.” I laugh cruelly when my eyes land on the most useless hunk of meat on his whole body. I rise to my feet and point my knife between his legs before running it down toward his belly.

“What about this?” I stroke my knife along the underside of his dick hanging limp and flaccid on top of his toned abdomen. “I think this little chunk of meat might just tip the scale in your favor. What do you say, Blaise?” He shakes his head as well as he can, his lips trembling as he slowly understands what I’m about to do. “No complaints, then? Perfect.”

I take my time, slowly sawing through the meat hanging against his belly from the balls down. The blood spurts farther than I expect, bright red spraying against my white shirt and dripping down his abdomen and chest in rivulets along with other fluids. He stays conscious for as long as it takes for me to rip through his sack, his sweet screams filling my ears before he finally passes out again from sheer agony. I leave him be, having an easier job dismembering him when he’s not squirming in terror. And when he wakes up, he’ll be fucking cockless.

When I finish castrating him, I toss the small handful of meat on the scale and watch in satisfaction as the dial passes one pound. He’s paid for his sins. Now it’s time for him to burn.

Refusing to let him go out in his sleep, I bend down and slap him with the same knife that just removed his cock and balls. It takes a few slaps before he rouses, his one eye rolling open slowly as tears streamdown his temples. I grab a fistful of his hair and jerk so that he focuses on me. “Any last words, you abusive cunt?”

His bloody lips smack together, but no words come out. “No? Well then, I’ll see you in Hell, motherfucker.”

I reach up and stab my knife into his stomach before jerking the blade all the way across his abdomen, disembowelling him. His lips quiver and his single eye spasms as he clings to his final moments of life while his entrails spill out of his body and onto the floor in a steaming mess of blood and bodily fluids. After what seems like ages, his body finally stops jerking, and he sways gently through the air with the leftover inertia of his death spasms. In the end, he’s just another slab of meat on a hook.

I’m a fucking mess, covered in blood and gore. My white shirt has turned completely red, and I have entrails in my boots. The only expensive things I own are ruined because this pig couldn’t fucking die without being a piece of shit. Sighing over the damn boots, I get to prepping the ingredients I need.

In the end, I harvest a quart of blood in a sanitized container mixed with vinegar to keep it from coagulating, a portion of meat from the thigh in addition to the pound of meat I already collected, and the small intestines emptied and cleaned. When I’ve taken what I need, I butcher the meat into smaller portions and throw them onto a sheet of plastic and rinse the floor clean.

It takes a fair amount of effort to drag the spare pieces down to the incinerator and drop them in one by one. I throw my own ruined clothes and shoes onto the pile along with Blaise’s wallet and jacket. Since we are about the same size, I keep his clothes and shoes for myself to wear home. I’ll have to trash them later. I keep his phone so that I can buy some time before his disappearance is noticed. And I still haven’t decided what to do with the gun.

I turn on the incinerator and allow what remains of Aurélie’shusband to burn along with the last of the feelings I had for her. Then I get to doing what I do best.

The rare summerrain streaks down the windows of the local cafe, and the typical blue August sky is painted a dim gray. I kind of appreciate the dreary weather for a change, and it means there are less crowds of people bustling around the city. It’s Saturday, which means I’m not spending the day in the Dix kitchen trying to be the best chef I can be. Instead, I’m sitting across from my beautiful little betrayer explaining why her husband didn’t come home last night.

“What do you mean, he’sgone?” Aurélie asks with a haughty arch of her perfect brow.

She’s wearing her signature color, her lips painted to match. She knows what seeing her in red does to me, so I can only guess that it’s a calculated move on her part. In fact, maybe every one of her moves since the moment we met in the back of the Dix kitchen has been nothing more than a pretty manipulation.

I smile at her, taking a leisurely sip from my café crème before answering her question. “Well, if you want specifics—I lured him to a downtown boucherieafter hours with a naked picture of you coming on my cock. I knocked him unconscious, strung him up in the meat locker, carved the skin off his face, cut off his cock and balls, and finally gutted him like the worthless pig he is.”

Aurélie hasn’t started screaming, so I take it as encouragement to continue. “I drained him of blood before using a cleaver to cut up his body into more manageable pieces and burning what was left of him in the incinerator.” I don’t tell her what I did with the pieces I kept. That might be too much even for her.

I look at her quizzically, wondering why she isn’t more terrified to be looking into the steel blue eyes of a killer. “So, he’sgonegone,” Ifinish with a shrug.

A soft, chilling smile pulls at her lips, her white teeth gleaming with bloodlust. She’s not horrified. In fact, I’d guess she’s fucking thrilled. I’ve just told her I used a knife to carve up her husband, and she’s beaming as though I’ve offered her a million euros. Which, technically, I suppose I have since she’ll have sole access to his bank accounts.

“You fucking did it,” she gasps finally, something ravenous shining in her periwinkle eyes. “Even when I told you it would never work, you still found a way for us to be together. I knew you were determined, but this is incredible.”

I scoff, truly wondering if she’s any more sane than I am. AndIhave a growing body count. “So the fact that I’ve just killed your husband doesn’t bother you in the slightest?” I ask, my voice tinged with rational disbelief.

“The man was a monster. It’s not like his death is any great loss,” she retorts, brushing off the grisly details of her husband’s death with as much concern as a piece of lint on her perfectly tailored dress. “Your methods were unorthodox, sure, but that’s just part of your creative style.”

“Butchering your husband is all part of mycreative style?” She stares at me with that look of exasperation that I’ve grown so used to over the summer. Somehow it hits different knowing that she used me with every intention of tossing me aside.

“You killed for me.For us. I mean—it’s dark—but you know I’ve never shied away from a little darkness.”

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