AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He continued to edge the table over into the center of the room, careful not to shove it and risk tearing the plastic. The whole process only took a few minutes. When he laid a sheet of plastic over the table like a tablecloth, I looked around. I shivered when I realized we had created a kill room.
He had made sure there would be no evidence once he was done, and if I had to bet, I’d say the shack was expendable. If it came down to it, he would set the whole thing on fire, getting rid of any trace he’d ever been there.
“What do you do with the plastic once you’re done?”
He looked up from adjusting the new tablecloth and pointed outside. “There’s a metal barrel out there. I stuff it inside and pour gasoline on it. Within a couple of minutes, it’s nothing but a melted, charred mess. It stinks to high heaven, but it works.” I nodded.
He walked over to where I was still standing against the wall and cupped my cheeks with his hands. “You know I love you, right?” I blinked up at him, sudden wetness filling my eyes. “Ethan and I both do. We wanted you to be ours the very second we saw you. We have been waiting for you our whole lives. I don’t want to live without you, dollface. I can’t live without you. If I were to ever lose you…” He put his forehead against mine and ghosted out a breath against my lips. “If what I’m about to do bothers you, I need you to leave. Climb into that truck and don’t look back, okay?”
I nodded as we stared straight into each other’s souls. I knew it was too late to turn back now. He had already taken the guy. It was impossible to just take him home and pretend that none of this had happened. Brent had to see this through, and he had to do it in the way he always had, with no evidence left behind.
“Brent?” I breathed out, not letting my eyes leave his even as a tear rolled down my cheek to slide over the back of his hand. “I love you, too.”
His eyes flared, and then he was kissing me with so much passion I couldn’t help but melt into him. “When we are done here tonight, I’m going to take you back home and fuck you in the shower. Then both of us are going to fuck Ethan until we all pass out, okay?”
“Okay,” I breathed out, then he pulled away, giving me one long look filled with promise before turning back to head outside. I slumped against the wall, realizing that somehow, through all the darkness, I had found my light.
Brent came back in a few minutes later, carrying the man over one shoulder and a metal bucket in his hand. He dropped the guy on the plastic covered table, his head dropping with a thunk. He was nothing interesting. At first glance, I would never have thought he was the monster that he was. He was average in every way, from his height to his brown hair. He wasn’t muscular, nor was he overweight. He looked like he was getting soft around the middle, but that was the only description I could have given anyone if they’d asked me what he looked like. For a monster, he was rather insignificant.
Brent stepped back inside without me even realizing he had left again as I had studied the man that had killed his wife and unborn child. Next to the man’s feet, he laid out a small black bundle before unrolling it. Out of pure, morbid curiosity, I pushed away from the wall and stepped closer. They were tools.
There was a set of pliers, a screwdriver, and a straight-edged razor that glinted in the light. There was also a wicked-looking knife that I would have guessed was for hunting. It had a sharp edge on one side of the blade with serrations the last couple of inches on the top. I shook my head as I took it in, then looked back at the rest of the tools. They looked so innocent compared to the knife, but I had a feeling it was the other items that were the most dangerous.
Brent took the top off of the small bucket, and I could see it was filled with some kind of liquid. It smelled awful. Brent handed me one of the bundles.
“Put this on, baby.”
I opened the package and saw a set of gloves that looked just like the ones he was wearing. I took them out, setting the rest of the items on the ground at my feet, and slipped one hand in before pulling back off again. They were huge on me. I picked up the next item to see a pair of canvas overalls, the kind someone might wear while painting a house. I shook them out and found a velcro opening. As I began slipping into the huge cover, I saw Brent doing the same.
The inside of the canvas had a rubbery texture that I guessed was to keep them fluid resistant. It made sense why he wasn’t worried about blood getting on his clothes. These overalls would keep him completely dry as he did whatever he planned.
I bent down to see whatever else was in the bundle and came up with booties to slip on over my shoes, but there was more than one pair. I held them up. “Why are there so many?” He winked at me as he held up a pair from his own bundle, then proceeded to lift up each leg of the table, placing it in and setting the table back on the floor with a thud. “Wow.” I was impressed. I doubted there was much he hadn’t thought of, and from what I could tell, other than the knife and the razor, there was nothing in the room that a construction worker wouldn’t have on hand. Except for the body.
I put the hat on over my hair and slid back into the large gloves. Everything was large and baggy on me, but I was fully covered and protected. Brent picked up the razor and stepped to the head of the table. With quick efficiency, he grabbed the guy’s thinning hair and started shaving it off, tossing each handful into the bucket. When he was done, he set the straight razor back down and picked up the knife.
I watched as he cut the clothing off the man, dropping it on the floor behind him. When he got to the man’s underwear, he looked over at me, making me roll my eyes. Men. “Just do it. Trust me; I don’t plan on looking at his junk.” He grunted in annoyance but sliced through the cloth before adding it to the rest of the pile. Even though I didn’t want to, my eyes drifted to the man’s penis, making me grimace when I took it in. I knew I didn’t have a whole lot of experience with penises, but his was ugly. Small and shriveled, it didn’t look anything like my men’s did.
I darted my eyes away from the sight and met Brent’s that were narrowed on me. I threw my hands in the air. “What? It was there! Trust me; I’m not impressed. If that were the first dick I ever saw, I’d probably swear them off for life.” It was his turn to roll his eyes as he picked up the pliers and stepped back to the head of the table.
“What are you doing now?” The man was stripped naked, his hair shaved off, and Brent looked like he was about to start removing teeth.
“There are few things that pigs won’t eat. Hair and teeth are two of them.” He gripped the pliers, fitting them to the first tooth. With a hard yank and twist, it was pulled out. He held the tooth up and clamped in the pliers. “They can’t digest them, which means if their pen was ever searched…”
“It would be full of human teeth.” I watched as he dropped the tooth into the can of liquid. I swallowed hard, saliva filling my mouth and acid churning in my stomach. I took a deep breath and pushed back the nausea that wanted to take over.
It took him several minutes, but eventually, every tooth was removed from the man’s bloody mouth. I had been battling the urge to run outside and bathe a tree in my vomit but jumped in alarm when the man began to stir. He let out a pitiful moan, his hand trying to reach up but dropping back down to the plastic.
“Brent,” I whispered with wide eyes. The guy wasn’t restrained in any way, and I was scared that he would jump off the table and run out the door.
“Don’t worry, dollface. He isn’t going anywhere.”
I stepped back against the wall and watched as Brent carefully and methodically made the man suffer while reminding him of why he was there. Before the man stopped breathing, he was nothing but a moaning mess, begging for forgiveness that would never come.
As I stood there watching the systematic torture of this stranger, I learned many things about myself. I learned I didn’t have the stomach for torture and struggled to keep my nausea under control the whole time. I also learned that I didn’t equate Brent with the Castle Killer. Brent had told me he enjoyed killing these people, the murderers of innocents. But watching him, I didn’t think that was true at all. Brent was serious the entire time, not smiling. He didn’t taunt the man as he hurt him. What he did was calmly explain what he was doing and why, as if he were teaching a class. The man had zero doubts as to why he was about to die.
If there was a glint of anger in Brent’s eyes, I could hardly blame him. He’d been through a lot in his life, lost a lot. There was no joy in what he did. Perhaps he had some sense of satisfaction that there would be one less monster in the world, but he didn’t enjoy the pain he caused, not in the way a cold-blooded killer would.
Ultimately, I realized that I could accept that this man walked a razor-thin edge of humanity. Could I accept that Brent did very bad things for very good reasons? That his morals were firmly in the gray area?
