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“You’re early, Daddy,” Red grunts into my ear. “I was still busy with your girl.”
Mother. Fucker.
I’m thrown back into the past like Evel Knievel shot from a cannon.
I’m standing in Lizzy’s room, a room that used to be pink and dove gray, but is now painted red. My wife’s body sprawled on the tiny bed like the broken, oversized toy in a doll house someone discarded when they got tired of playing with it.
“Dada.” Lizzy reaches for me with the crumpled, unhappy face of a toddler in a preschooler’s body. Shock has forced her little mind to regress to a time when all she needed to feel better was being in the arms of her mom or dad.
“Stay there, or I’ll slit her tiny little throat,” Red says, pressing the tip of the blade against Lizzy’s neck. My already stiff body goes rigid.
“Please. Don’t hurt her.”
Red chuckles. “Tell you what. You stay right where you are, don’t make a sound, and I’ll let her live.”
I nod. “Yes. I’ll stay here. Please, just don’t hurt her.”
“Oh…I didn’t say I wasn’t going to hurt her…”
“Dada!” Lizzy screams.
I watch like a scarecrow version of myself as Red picks up my now howling baby girl, and takes her over to the bed. She fights him, but he holds her down easily.
“No. Please stop. I’ll do anything. I have money. Please, just stop.” My voice is disembodied, surreal. I sound calm, and, looking back at the past through the lens of the present, I know I was starting to disassociate.
That’s why I couldn’t remember Red speaking to me. How he toyed with Lizzy before brutally murdering her right in front of my eyes. I erased a huge chunk of this traumatic memory if only so my mind wouldn’t shatter.
“Daddy likes to watch,” Red says. I can’t tell if it’s a voice from the past, or if he’s whispering it in my ear now, today, in this frantic, desperate moment in time. My body starts succumbing to the loss of oxygen, limbs deadening, head swimming, thoughts dissolving.
I manage a pathetic buck of my hips, but all that succeeds in doing is letting my robe fall open. Air currents swirl against my skin. Warmth emanates from Red’s body in waves, and a wall of heat pours over me from the nearby fireplace.
A log pops like a fucking gunshot. The nurse gasps, and I hear Charlotte groan somewhere behind me.
My fiancée, the love of my life, is still alive.
I’mstill alive.
And then the nurse lunges at me and stabs me in the thigh with a syringe.
A burst of superhuman strength fills me, crowding out everything except a sudden rush of rage. Bellowing like a maniac, I brace my feet on the floor and throw my body to the side.
Locked to me as he is, legs wrapped around mine, Red comes with. And as soon as we hit the floor, I keep that momentum going. He growls at me, the lock on my neck releasing so he can claw at the carpet, but I just kick down and send us into another tumble.
It could have ended one of two ways. Red could have hit the grate in front of the fire, knocking it out of the way, and then I would have rolled straight into those flames.
But the shitty hand I thought I was dealt just turned into a straight flush.
My back slams into the metal grate. It’s the ornate kind, big and heavy, but our combined weight sends it scraping aside with a piercing shriek. The heat of the flames burrows into the back of my head, and I smell burning fabric a moment before I twist and shove Red face-first into the roaring fire.
His body spasms in pain. When he opens his mouth to yell, I shove his face deeper into the glowing coals. He thrashes violently, clawing at the hearth above as he tries to pull himself out of that infernal maw before it can consume all the flesh from his skull. The stench of burnt hair and crackling skin rushes out of the fireplace in puffs of oily gray smoke.
I brace against the carpet, my body shuddering with the effort to keep him pinned down,inside.Watching him fight for his life, how the flames latch onto his head and wolf him down, it’s possibly the most satisfying thing I’ve ever seen.
“You’re right, Red,” I mutter through clenched teeth. “Daddydoeslike to watch.”
“Fyre.”
His skin is starting to sizzle, and I swear I’ve never heard a sweeter sound in my life. Except maybe his screams. His body starts convulsing, and I know it’s the end for him. I’m filled with a rush of sickening pleasure, the kind I drank down like motherfucking ambrosia whenever I’d hunt down a sicko back in the day.
