Page 9 of Devoured
Then I stood.
My legs worked fine. My hands were steady. I went through the door to the garage, a place I rarely entered. This was Theo’s domain: his tools, his projects, his escape from me. The gasoline sat behind his workbench. The red container was heavier than I expected—still half full.
I turned to leave and bumped the wall button. The garage door groaned to life, lurching upward on its tracks.
Shit.
Through the widening gap, I saw Mrs. Landon on the sidewalk, walking her terrier. She stopped when the garage light spilled onto the driveway. We’d done this dance before—me pretending not to know about Tuesday afternoons, her pretending she wasn’t fucking my husband.
“Zahra?”She stepped closer and saw me standing there with the gas can. Saw the blood on my clothes, on my face. “Is everything...”
She stopped. We both knew what she wasn’t asking.
“Everything’s fine,”I said.
She looked at me for a long moment. Then at the gas can. Then back at my face. Her dog whined, pulling at the leash.
I hit the button. The door shuddered down between us.
Back in the bedroom, I poured gasoline over our bed. The comforter we’d picked out during our first month of marriage. The pillows that still smelled like his aftershave. I doused his body last, watching the fuel pool in the hollow of his stomach where the knife had gone in deepest.
One match from the fireplace set. The whoosh of ignition. Heat that felt like absolution washing over the bedroom walls.
I walked outside and sat on the concrete steps. Blood had dried on my hands in rust-brown crescents beneath my nails. My lip was split where he’d punched me. I didn’t cry. No tears. No shaking. No horror at what I’d done. Just a hollow space where guilt should’ve been—and the distant sound of sirens growing louder through the night.
There was simply nothing left in me to drain. I was empty as a gourd, hollow all the way through.
Smoke rolled from the windows upstairs. Glass shattered in the heat, and I could hear the house eating itself from the inside out.
Headlights curved up the street. Mrs. Landon stood at the edge of our driveway with her terrier. She must’ve called them. Her face was pale in the flashing lights as she pointed—at me, then at the house.
An officer walked toward me. “Ma’am? Can you tell me what happened here?”
I looked up at him from the steps and said, “I killed my fuck of a husband.”
Chapter 3
White. That’s what I remember most about the day they condemned me.
Theo’s mother, Agnes Quinn,wore it to the trial. She sat in the front row, hands folded in her lap, a rosary coiled tight between her knuckles like she might strangle God if He didn’t give her the right answer.
I saw her before I saw anything else…the way she refused to look at me, even as I was led in, shackled at the wrists and ankles.
They called it murder with extreme cruelty.
The stabbing alone might have been second-degree murder, but the things I did to his body... The stomach wound that I twisted the knife in, wanting him to feel what I’d felt all those years. The throat cut, so he couldn’t use that voice to hurt anyone again. What I did to his dick. The way I burned the place down after, erasing our hell together. The way I sat on the porch when it was over, patient as a saint, finally free to breathe.
That screamed premeditation. The prosecution wanted death.
Three of Theo’s colleagues took the stand—lawyers in thousand-dollar suits painting me as unstable, volatile, obsessed. They claimed I’d threatened Theo at a firm dinner, that he was afraid of me, considering having me committed.
No one mentioned the bruises shaped like fingers. The ER visits. The nurses who asked quiet questions when Theo stepped out.
Mr. Kurt testified, hands trembling as he swore the oath. He spoke about my work ethic, how I never missed shifts. When pressed about witnessing abuse directly, he admitted he hadn’t—but said he knew the signs.
Annie came next, walking slowly with her cane, her hair now completely white. She talked about raising me—how the light in my eyes had dimmed by the wedding and disappeared entirely six months later. When the prosecutor suggested she’d “failed“ as a foster mother, her spine straightened.
She hadn’t failed me, she said firmly. Life had failed me.
