Page 57 of Devoured
He pulled away slowly, fingers glistening with my release. He raised his hand beneath his helmet. I heard the faint rasp of breath—then the unmistakable sound of him licking his fingers clean.
One by one.
Savoring.
Then he draped a black cloth across my chest, covering me with something that felt almost like tenderness.
He lifted me, carrying me to what served as his resting place—a raised platform of welded metal and leather. But it was only as he laid me down, as the leather embraced my used body with sickening warmth, that the full weight of it crashed over me.
What I had done. What I had let him do.
I rolled onto my stomach, turned my face to the side, and let the tears run.
Chapter 19
The salt from my tears had dried into crusty tracks down my cheeks when I finally opened my eyes again.
How long had I been crying? Hours? Days?
Time felt meaningless in this place, where torchlight never changed and shadows never moved.
The leather beneath my cheek felt wrong. Too soft in some places, too rough in others.
Suddenly, I realized it wasn’t leather.
No… it was human skin, stitched together with black thread thick as fishing line. I could feel the raised edges where different pieces met: a birthmark here, dark and round as a quarter; the puckered ridge of an old scar there, maybe from surgery or violence. The faded blue of a tattoo that had once meant something—to someone who was now furniture.
“You skinned them.”The words came out flat. Empty. Like my soul had finally given up trying to feel shocked by anything he did. I rolled off the bed and hit stone. My knees cracked against the floor and I vomited.
My hands shook as I wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist, leaving streaks of spit and blood across my skin.
The bed loomed behind me like an accusation. I could see it clearly now in the flickering torchlight: patches of skin in different shades, from pale white to deep brown and everything in between. A patchwork quilt of human beings reduced to their most basic components.
Someone’s grandmother. Someone’s child. Someone’s lover.
“And I came for you.”My voice trembled.
He stood in the doorway, watching me retch. Steam curled from the seams of his helmet, and the great blade rested against his shoulder like it weighed nothing at all. “They were already dead,”he said.
No emotion. No justification. Just fact, delivered in that low rumble that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his chest.
“They had names.”I screamed.
I stayed on my knees, staring at the bed. At the stitchwork. At the way someone’s hand had been preserved and stretched to form a corner.
The fingers were curled slightly, like they’d died reaching for something.
“They had families. Dreams. Fears. They probably begged you not to kill them.”
“They were sinners.”
I looked up at him—this towering figure of judgment and steel. “Aren’t we all? Aren’t you?”
He tilted his head. The red glow behind his eye slits showed something that might have been curiosity. Or hunger.
With him, I couldn’t tell the difference.
“What was their sin?”I asked. “What did they do that was so terrible you turned them into furniture?”
