Page 8 of Devoured
And in the corner, where nothing should have been, something massive waited.
Eight feet of muscle, bare chest scarred and gleaming, leather pants clinging to massive legs. A huge blade dragged behind him, scraping grooves into the blood-filled floor. His helmet was crude iron, just slits where eyes should be. Red light burned through those slits, watching me.
He stepped forward, and when he spoke, his voice came from everywhere and nowhere, grinding like metal on stone. “What you do next will condemn you to hell.”
I looked at him, into his red eyes. At the twisted version of my home around us. “Good,”I whispered, and meant it.
Then everything snapped back.
I gasped, eyes flying open. The living room ceiling stared down at me. My throat burned where Theo’s fingers had been, but I could breathe. Air moved in and out of my lungs.
I sat up slow. My body felt different. Heavier. Like someone had filled my bones with lead and my veins with ice water. When I touched my neck, the skin was tender but whole.
But I remembered dying. Remembered the relief of it, the welcome dark.
And I remembered what I had to do.
I sat there, trying to breathe through the blood. My ear rang high and tinny. Blood tickled as it ran from my nose, pooling on the white tile he insisted I keep spotless.
Upstairs, he was humming in the shower. Actually humming “My Way,”like he hadn’t just killed his wife in the living room. Like this was any Tuesday night. The sound crawled under my skin and nested there with all the other nights, all the other songs.
I got up. Everything hurt. My face, ribs, the spot where my knees had hit the tile. My vision swam, the walls tilted at strange angles. Red footprints marked my path to the kitchen—not neat drops, but smeared half-moons from my bare feet sliding in my own blood. The knife block stood under the cabinet lights like it always did. I grabbed the carving knife—the German one with the heavy handle, the one he used at dinner parties to show off while he carved the roast.
The stairs whined under my weight. I knew which ones creaked—had memorized them over seven years of trying to move silently through my own home.
In the bedroom, steam leaked from under the bathroom door, carrying that mint soap scent I’d grown to hate. Light spilled through the gap. I heard the shower shut off. The curtain rings scraped against metal.
He walked out with a towel around his waist, another in his hands as he rubbed it through his hair. When he saw me, he stopped dead. “What the fuck!”His eyes narrowed, water dripping from his hair. “Guess I didn’t choke you hard enough, huh? Should’ve held on a little longer, made sure you stayed down.”
He spread his arms wide, still dripping, still smirking. “What’re you gonna do? Cry on me? We both know you don’t have the balls. Put it down before you embarrass yourself even more than usual, you pathetic cunt.”
I don’t know why, but I laughed. Blood poured from my mouth as I laughed at his question. How was I supposed to tell him that I think I chose hell just to come back and kill him?
“Oh no, that’s not how you should be talking to me, Theo. Ask me nicely and I’ll tell you what I intend to do with this very serrated knife.”
“Zahra! Put it down.”His voice shifted into that executive tone—the one that expected instant obedience. He stepped toward me, hand out, like he was approaching a skittish animal. “Put the knife down and we’ll forget this happened.”
Something snapped. Not in my mind, but somewhere deeper—in whatever part of me had been holding my spine straight all these years.
I lunged forward and drove the knife into his stomach, just above the towel. The blade stuck at first, resisting against skin and muscle, then slid in with a sound like puncturing a watermelon. He made a noise which was half grunt, half gasp and stared down at the handle like it was some impossible thing that didn’t belong in his world.
I twisted the knife and ripped sideways. His skin split with a wet, tearing sound. For a second, nothing happened—then his insides bulged out like they’d been waiting their whole lives to escape. Guts slithered through the opening in wet, purple-gray ropes. He dropped to his knees, hands scrambling to stuff everything back in, making small, desperate sounds.
“Call someone,”he wheezed. “Call a fucking ambulance.”
I stepped closer and opened his throat with one hard slash. Blood sprayed the white walls in a wide arc, hit the mirror, hit my face. He clutched at his neck, eyes bulging with that special terror reserved for people who never imagined they could die. His legs gave out and he collapsed backward, towel falling away.
He was still half-hard. Fucking figured.
I stood over him, watching him gasp like I had just sometime ago. His chest jerked in smaller and smaller movements. His eyes rolled back, then fixed on mine with the last of his consciousness, pleading for something… mercy, maybe. Or just understanding.
I knelt beside him in the spreading pool of blood and grabbed his cock in one hand.
“This doesn’t belong to you anymore.”
I sawed through it with the same knife. The sound was gristle and meat. He convulsed once, violently, and went still.
I sat there in the warmth of his blood. The knife dripped between my fingers. Blood seeped into the floorboards beneath our bed. His eyes stayed open, staring at the ceiling, finally seeing something I couldn’t.
