Chapter 15 Amara
We cut through the brush, shoes squelching in mud, moonlight glinting off the metal in Julian’s jacket as he walks ahead.
Every few steps, he glances at me. I should be freezing in this ridiculous dress, but I feel nothing, not the chill or the scrape of branches, just the empty hum of adrenaline and the thump of my heart.
Julian’s hand is clamped around mine. His knuckles are split from whatever he was doing earlier this evening. I can’t stop staring at them, how the blood has seeped into the creases. It looks like war paint.
At the tree line, the world drops away.
We step into a clearing that’s all wrong, a gouge in the woods where the grass is flattened and the ground turns slick and dark.
In the center is a massive boulder, flat-topped and stained, lit up by lanterns perched on stakes.
Every shadow is doubled and tripled. I see shapes that don’t move and shapes that do.
A row of knives lies atop the stone—long, slender, gleaming, arranged in a line so perfect it looks measured by machine. Each blade is different. Some are curved, some straight, all of them honed to a shine so bright it burns in my eyes. In the center is a box with an old insignia burned into it.
Around the boulder, someone has planted a ring of thick wooden posts into the earth.
Eight in total. Tied to each post is a man, their bodies forced upright by layers of zip ties and ropes.
Their heads are bagged with coarse burlap sacks, tied with twine at the neck.
Under the sacks, I see movement—shivering, lolling, a slow rotation that’s worse than if they were still.
Some of the men are slumped, knees buckling, the slack held by the tape cutting into their wrists and biceps.
Others thrash in small, frantic motions, feet scraping furrows into the mud.
A few are in suits, but most are in silk pajamas.
One of them has shat himself. It’s obvious by the runny stain down the inner thigh of his pale slacks.
Another has vomit seeping out the bottom of his sack, the splatter pooling at his shoes.
The smell is sharp—ammonia, bile, the stink of humiliation and terror.
One of the men doesn’t move at all. His body is limp, head hanging at an unnatural angle, like a marionette with the strings cut. The rest are conscious, or nearly so. They make little mewling sounds behind the burlap, soft and pathetic.
I stop dead, all the breath sucked out of me. I can’t move, can’t think. Every nightmare I’ve ever had is alive in this place, wearing flesh and expensive shoes.
Julian doesn’t hesitate. He tugs my hand, and I stumble forward, feet dragging through the churned mud. He’s smiling, not with joy, but with the grim certainty of a man who’s already made his peace with violence.
He leads me past the first post. The man tied there is huge, shoulders straining the seams of his suit, arms flecked with blood where the tape has cut through skin.
His head jerks as we pass, the sack twisting to follow us.
A grunt pushes through the burlap, wet and hoarse.
I don’t know his name, but he’s one of them.
One of the men who signed my life away with a ballpoint pen.
We pass another. This one is older, hunched, his head cocked sideways as if trying to hear better. His sack is splattered with something dark—wine, maybe, or blood. His hands flex against the bindings, useless.
I want to look away, but my eyes keep bouncing to the knives. There are so many. I picture them being used, picture whose hands will hold them. The idea is both alien and familiar, like a dream I’ve had a thousand times but never remembered until now.
Julian’s grip tightens. My fingers go numb. He brings us to a halt near the boulder, right at the edge of the lantern-light.
For a second, there’s silence, the kind that presses on your eardrums until you think your head might burst.
And then, from behind the posts, a laugh breaks the stillness. It’s high and wild, too loud, like a hyena at a carcass.
Dahlia. She’s pacing behind the second post, a knife in each hand, the white dress she’s wearing smeared with mud up to the knees.
Her hair is wild, eyes glittering in the torchlight.
She’s watching the man tied to the post, trailing the tip of a blade up his arm, not cutting but close enough that he flinches at every pass.
A little ways off, Isolde is seated on a fallen log, legs spread awkward to make room for her pregnant belly.
The white of her dress is so thin you can see the shadow of her skin underneath.
She’s cradling her stomach with one hand and picking at the moss with the other.
Her eyes never leave the posts. I see her lips moving, a whisper to herself, a mantra, maybe.
Eve stands away from them all, by the line of trees, her arms crossed, a cigarette burning between her fingers. She watches everything, eyes sharp and unsmiling, the smoke curling up around her face. Every so often, she glances at the posts, then at the knives, then at me.
It’s all real. I’m here. I am a girl in a white dress at the center of a massacre, and no matter what happens next, I won’t leave this place the same.
The weight of it lands on me, full force.
I freeze, every cell screaming to run, to disappear back into the dark, but my feet are glued in the muck.
I feel the attention of everyone in the space—the girls, the men at the posts, the men moving at the edge of the lanterns—like the light is a hand, pressing me forward.
Julian lets go of my hand. He leans close, lips to my ear, and whispers, “You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to.”
Oh, but I do. I have to. I need to see.
“I have to make sure your special guest is good. I’ll be back in a minute.” He steps away, leaving me alone in the cold light.
Across the circle, one of the men begins to weep. The sound is muffled, but I know it for what it is. I wonder which one is my father. I wonder if he’s already thinking of what will happen next, or if he’s still clinging to the fantasy of survival.
In the center, the knives gleam, perfect and untouched.
I stand there, breathing as quietly as I can, and wait for the world to end.
My teeth clack as I shiver. None of them react. For a moment, I wonder if I’m the only one who feels the weight of the thing that’s about to happen. Maybe this is just another day to them, another party with a theme.
But I know… it’s not.
On the other side of the posts, the Feral Boys finish with the last of the captives.
I recognize them by their silhouettes. Bam, broad and swaying, uses his elbow to force a man to his knees before strapping his ankles with duct tape.
Rhett moves slower, almost gentle, as he wraps a roll of plastic around the waist of a groaning, shuddering Board member.
Colton zip ties his hands behind the wood and puts one around his neck, the man wheezing as he ties it tight.
Julian comes back to me, steps right into my bubble of air, and I can’t help but inhale his smell— soap and blood and the sharp, bitter edge of whiskey. He doesn’t ask if I’m okay. He just watches me shake.
He reaches out, catches my chin in two fingers. His touch is gentle, almost reverent, and when he tilts my face up to look at him, it’s the softest he’s ever been.
His thumb strokes under my jaw. "Breathe," he says. Not a question, a command.
I try. My breath is ragged, shallow, a gasp caught between two worlds.
"What—what is happening?" My voice sounds small, half-swallowed by the dark. Maybe I want him to lie to me, but I know he won’t.
He leans in, his forehead to mine, mouth barely a whisper. "We’re doing what we promised. It needs to end, Amara. They won’t stop. You can watch, look away, or take your life into your own hands at the end of a knife. I won’t force you either way.”
His words ripple through me. They’re not a shock. They’re a confirmation of everything I’ve tried not to believe. The knives, the sacks, the white dresses.
It’s a ritual of another kind.
Julian watches my face for a reaction, and when he sees I won’t run, he lets me go. His hand lingers for a second at my throat before he steps back.
Dahlia snorts, flicking a bead of blood off her thumb. "She doesn’t get it yet," she giggles. "She will."
Eve flicks her cigarette into the dirt, grinds it out with the toe of her boot. "She’s smarter than you, Dahlia. She just isn’t as bloodthirsty."
"Yet," Dahlia says, licking the red from her thumb.
Isolde doesn’t look up. She just hums, rocking gently on the log, lost in her own little orbit. Rhett stands behind her, rubbing her shoulders and whispering something into her ear.
I want to protest, to say I don’t want to be here, but I don’t. I can’t. I want to see. I want to watch it happen.
Across the circle, one of the men begins to sob in earnest. The sound is ugly, helpless, the sound of a man who knows he’s already dead.
Julian slips behind me, arms wrapping around my waist. His body is so warm it burns through the chill. He puts his mouth to my ear and says, "It’s okay to be afraid.”
But I’m not afraid.
Not really.
I am something else—something raw and jagged and hungry.
I fix my eyes on the knives, the way the moonlight beads and runs along the steel. I wonder which one will be mine.
I wonder whose blood I’ll get to see first.
Staring at the men strapped to their posts, I burst into a giggle. I want to memorize everything about them—the way their chests rise and fall, the way the sacks clench tighter every time someone gets close, the way they look so stupid covered in mud and blood and piss and shit.
Fuck sympathy, these aren’t men, they’re monsters who didn’t expect to have an expiry date.
I’m studying each one, not out of mercy, but because I want to know who will break first. Who will piss themselves again. Who will scream and beg and make it all worth it.