The relief is instant, and his entire body goes slack against the restraints. His cries turn into a shuddering, wet exhale that carries the weight of a man who has just been given back something essential. For about thirty. Fucking. Seconds.
Then I do it again.
Same shoulder. Same direction. Same mechanical precision. The ball slides out, and the scream that tears through him is worse than the first—not because the pain is greater, but because he knows now. He knows the relief was a lie. He knows the mercy was bait. And now it’s a cycle.
Out. Scream. In. Relief.
Out. Scream. In. Relief.
By the fourth cycle, he's not screaming anymore. He's making a sound I've only heard a few times in my career—a keening, toneless wail that lives somewhere below language and above silence, the sound of a consciousness collapsing as it discovers pain has no ceiling.
There’s a soft clink behind me. Valeria’s champagne flute sits on the side table next to her. She shifts in her seat, both her hands now resting on the gilded arms of the chair. I catch the whitening of her knuckles from the edge of my vision.
This is the part where her real evil unmasks itself. She lets the violence move through her like music she's conducting from the audience, and her body receives it with the composed greed of a woman who has learned to orgasm through power alone.
I know the signs because I’ve been forced to watch it too many fucking times. The flush that starts at her sternum and climbs, faint as watercolor beneath the neckline of the red dress. The way her lips part a millimeter—not enough for anyone else to notice, but I notice, because she made sure I would. The slight tilt of her head, chin lifting, throat exposed, the posture of a woman luxuriating in a sensation she considers her birthright.
She's getting off. On the screams. On the keening, the wailing, the wet animal sounds of a man being disassembled and reassembled over and over again. The violence is foreplay and the power is the penetration and my obedience is the friction that gets her there. She doesn't need a hand between her legs. She doesn’t need physical stimulation. All she needs is pain, screams, blood.
The revulsion still hits as deep as it did the first time. It’s still sharp, a blade of nausea that could split me in half if I let it. Over the years, I’ve been able to shut everything off and out. I’ve been able to move through this world without letting it touch me. But this—her sick, twisted, depraved pleasure’s something I’ve never been able to compartmentalize.
“Please…please kill me.” Thomas hardly has a voice. The man is fading. His head lolls, chin to chest, the keening gone quiet, replaced by a shallow, irregular panting. The shock is setting in—I can see it in the grayish pallor, the way his body has stopped fighting the restraints and gone limp. His left arm hangs at a grotesque angle, the shoulder dislocated for the last time, the ligaments too shredded now to hold even if I put it back.
I glower at Valeria. “We got ten more minutes before he’s useless.”
Valeria doesn't answer. She leans back in the chair, head tipped against the gilded frame, and her hips shift—a slow, barely-there roll, thighs pressed tight together beneath the slit of the red dress. It's subtle enough that anyone else would miss it. A restless adjustment.
The movement is rhythmic. Controlled. A slow grind against herself that she'd deny with a straight face and a champagne toast if anyone had the nerve to name it. Her thighs flex, release,flex again—the silk whispering against skin with each small, deliberate motion, her body chasing something her hands refuse to reach for.
Black hair falls over her shoulders. “Finish him. Make it bloody.”
I stand there with paint cracking on my face, watching the woman who owns me fuck herself to the sound of a man's suffering without ever breaking the posture of a queen on a throne.
I reach for the karambit, and for a split second I imagine sinking the blade into her stomach, tearing out her insides and feeding it to her until she chokes. But today is not that day.
When Thomas sees the karambit, he starts to sob. Not scream. Sob. But it’s not fear. It’s not panic. It’s relief. Like he’s waited his whole life for someone to take away the last piece of himself.
Something far below the surface of me shifts. A tectonic thing. Small and massive at the same time—the kind of movement that doesn't show on the surface but rearranges everything underneath. I've felt it before. In an alley. Over a woman named Allison Greene who had a five-year-old son and a bag of trash and the worst timing in the history of the world.
I smother it. I have to. Because the woman behind me is reading me the way I read her, and if she sees a crack—any crack, any hesitation, any flicker of the man Sophia built beneath the thing she made—she'll widen it until I split apart, and then she'll reach inside and take whatever she finds.
So I don't crack. I raise the karambit. I angle the blade against the man's throat and wait for the exact moment when his breathing catches on the inhale. When his windpipe is taut andthe carotid is closest to the surface, when the geometry of the kill is clean.
The blade moves. One stroke. The skin parts like wet paper and the blood comes in a bright arterial rush that fans across my forearm and spatters the stone floor in a wide, violent arc.
Behind me, Valeria exhales. It's barely a sound. A breath released—slow, controlled, almost meditative. Her eyes close for a beat too long, and when they open, there's a quality in them that I recognize the way you recognize a disease you've already survived. Satisfaction. Deep, physical, total.
Her fingers relax on the armrests. The flush recedes, and she picks up the champagne flute with the grace of someone resuming a conversation after a pleasant interruption.
“That was lovely, Nazareth,” she murmurs, and my name in her mouth does what it always does—lands like a collar snapping shut. The same name that once made my chest crack open when Sophia whispered them against my lips, her hands on my face, me inside her perfect body. She said it like a prayer. Valeria says it like a brand.
“God, I could watch you kill every day. It’s like…” her hand drifts upward, fingers curling loosely as if she's plucking the right word from the air, “…watching someone play an instrument they were born to hold.”
Something dark stirs inside me.
I don't hate her. Fire hates water. Prey hates the predator. Those are clean, biological oppositions that serve a purpose. What I feel for Valeria Capello is something else entirely. Something that lives deeper than hate, in the place where scar tissue remembers the blade that made it. With memory. Withpermanence. With the intimate knowledge of exactly how she cuts, how deep she goes, and which parts of me she ruined for the sheer pleasure of watching them stop working.
Valeria watches me over the rim of her glass. “You know what will be better than this?”
