Chapter 7
Him
We expected her to hide.
To cry.
To unravel, piece by fragile piece, under the weight of what happened in the woods.
A lesser woman would have. A smarter one might’ve.
But our Little Horror doesn’t seem to know fear the way most people do.
She doesn’t retreat. She performs. She doesn’t cry—she dances.
Peels her clothes off to music that bleeds anger.
Strips herself bare like she’s daring us to watch. And we did. Every second.
The phone buzzes against the table, a quick vibration that draws our attention immediately. Snatching it from the coffee table, thumb already swiping over the notification. Her channel. She’s live. Again.
She’s walking down a sidewalk when the screen loads.
Hair up in that infamous black bow she loves.
A faded wolf graphic muscle tee with the sides cut low and her sports bra barely visible.
Black high-waisted shorts cinched with a thick belt that hugs her waist just right.
An oversized flannel hangs off her shoulders like she forgot to care.
Heavy black combat boots hit the pavement with every confident step.
The kind of look that says she doesn’t need anyone’s approval and isn’t asking for it either.
But we know better. She's dressing for us. She just doesn't realize it yet.
“I’m kinda nervous, guys,” she says, flashing a smile at the camera.
“I’ve done small scenes like this before, but I really wanted to push myself.
So my friend Kira volunteered to help me out.
I’m headed to her now. Fuck, I’m excited.
Fair warning, though…if you have a weak tummy or don’t like shots, this isn’t for you. ”
The chat explodes. Theories pour in.
RedRightHand: Is she getting a piercing?
PervyPixie: Nipple needles?? Please nipple needles.
GothDaddy69: She’s gonna bleed. I feel it.
CreepCreepCreep: Injecting ink or some shit.
DadIssuesUnresolved: I'm not ready. But also don’t stop.
She enters a shop, the jingle of a bell barely audible as she points the camera to the floor. Clever little thing. She’s hiding where she is. Doesn’t want anyone tracking her in real time.
“Hey, babe,” she says off-camera. “Thank you so much for doing this.”
“No problem, A,” the woman responds. Her voice is warm, familiar with her. “You know I’m a fan. But also, you helped my bestie’s little girl come out of her shell so much. She’s thriving this year. We both know it’s because of you, because of how you treated her.”
The praise tightens our chest. Not for the child. For her. Our woman. She’s soft when she needs to be. Sharp when she wants to be. She deserves a life without cameras and creeps and tip goals flashing in neon on a screen. She deserves to be safe. Safe from everyone but us.
“Shall we start?” the other woman asks.
“Sure,” Agatha says. “I’m so freaking nervous. But excited.”
She climbs onto what looks like a tattoo table, setting the camera to focus on her thigh. The angle is perfect. All we can see is the curve of her skin, soft and pale, slightly trembling.
Then the needles come into view.
Not tattoo needles. Not piercing hoops. These are sterile, capped medical sharps—long and thin, with no syringe attached, just the glint of steel and a stopper to keep them in place once they pass through.
The woman beside her holds the first needle between her gloved fingers and gently pinches the skin of Agatha’s upper thigh.
There’s a brief hesitation, a breath held.
Then she slides the metal in at a shallow angle, threading it through until the other end pushes free on the other side.
Like a barbell. A makeshift ornament made of pain.
What the fuck.
She does it again.
And again.
Each one a violation and a decoration. A stitch in a ribbon we can’t yet see.
Our girl flinches at first. We notice the twitch of her foot, the flex of her thigh.
But she doesn’t cry out. She breathes through it.
Brave Little Horror. She lets Kira press the next one in.
And another. Ten. Fifteen. Her breathing shifts.
Heavy. Slow. Controlled. We recognize that sound. We’ve heard it before.
She’s enjoying this.
By the twenty-fifth needle, a moan slips out.
When the thirtieth slides into place. “Can you guys tell what it is yet?” she purrs, adjusting the camera with shaking fingers. “Fuck, Kira. It’s so cute. A bow. To match the one I always wear in my hair.”
Sure enough, with the right lighting and the right angle, the pattern becomes obvious. The needles curve into the shape of a large bow across her thigh—metal glinting like polished thread pulled through flesh.
We can hear a camera shutter. Kira must be documenting it. Agatha is grinning now. Drunk on endorphins. High on her own pain.
She turns the camera back toward her flushed face, sweat shining at her temple. “What did you guys think? Love? Or no?”
ThighHighPriest: Ten outta ten would kneel to worship that thigh.
JennyBean69: ARE YOU EVEN HUMAN WTF
CryptCummin: You’re fucking insane. I’m obsessed.
HolySpite: Find Jesus. You make me sick. Disgusting.
That last one… earns our full attention.
When she reads it. We see it… the way her face falters.
Just for a second. A fraction of a breath. But we see it. The sting.
Someone’s words cutting deeper than any needle ever could. And then she smiles again. She closes the live with a wink and a little wave. “‘Til next time, my dark sluts.”
The screen goes black. But we’re already moving.
HolySpite.
We saw the pain in her eyes. She hid it well, but it was there. And for what? For doing something bold? Something brave? Something beautiful?
That user will pay for it. We know how to find them. We didn’t waste four years learning how to breach firewalls and break encryptions just to let cowards like that go unpunished.
She wants to pretend she’s not scared?
That’s fine.
We’ll take care of the fear for her.
And maybe then, she’ll finally look at the shadows in the trees and understand what we already know.
She was made for us.
She just hasn’t realized it yet.
HolySpite.
We lock onto the name like a heat-seeking missile. Hiding behind a screen, thinking it’s enough. Thinking anonymity is a shield. It never is. Not from us.
The laptop is already open. Fingers move fast across the keyboard. The silence in the room sharpens. We don’t need to speak to know what comes next.
First, the username. Cross-reference with chat archives, old streams, comment history, and activity timestamps.
We are already in the logs, while back tracing the IP from the livestream logs Agatha keeps on her end, even if she doesn’t know she does.
We’ve seen her computer. We know how her backup folder syncs.
HolySpite's address narrows in faster than it should. Amateur. College student. Male. Lives alone.
Perfect.
We’re already moving.
He lives in a rental house just off campus. The siding is warped and faded, the lawn dead and patchy, littered with fast-food wrappers and crushed cans. A single porch light flickers overhead, casting shadows against the peeling door.
We stand outside for a moment, watching through the gap in the blinds.
He’s in his chair, slouched forward, headphones on, one hand wrapped around his cock like it owes him something.
The screen glows with her face. He pauses to rewind, clicking back to the part where she moans around the needle sliding into her thigh. He watches it again. And again.
It isn’t the act that disgusts us. Everyone touches themselves. It’s the hypocrisy. The way he gets off on her pain, her power, her vulnerability, then spits poison into her chat like he has the right to shame her afterward. He worships her in secret and wounds her in public.
We knock. Just once. Not too loud.
We watch through the break in the curtain on the window to the left of the door as he freezes then pulls his headset down around his neck.
He shuffles toward the door, still tugging up his shorts, irritated and distracted.
When he opens it, his face shifts to confusion.
We keep our expressions calm. Neutral. Friendly enough to lower his guard.
“Package for Noah Spivey?” we say, lifting an empty envelope.
He blinks, glances at the porch, then back at us. “Uh… yeah, that’s me.”
“Perfect.”
Then we move.
The door swings inward, slamming against the wall behind it. He stumbles backward, arms flailing for balance, and slams into the chair. His laptop crashes to the floor, screen still frozen on Agatha’s face.
He doesn’t have time to scream. Not yet.
We’re already inside, hauling him to his feet by his shirt.
We drag him toward the kitchen, his feet trailing behind him on the dirty tile.
He kicks out once, makes a pathetic noise behind the tape we press over his mouth, but it doesn’t matter.
The old table in the center of the room is covered in trash and sticky crumbs.
We clear it without speaking. Takeout containers hit the floor.
Bottles roll into corners. The legs of the chair screech against the linoleum when we yank it into place.
He struggles as he’s forced down into the chair, but panic makes him clumsy. We tape his ankles to the legs of the chair. Then we pull his arms back behind the chair and wrap more tape around his wrists until his fingers go white.
He cries when the bag we brought with us is opened. Not loud. Not yet. Just shallow little sobs under the gag, like he knows something awful is coming and can’t stop it.
We hold up a needle.
Long. Thin. Surgical steel. The kind used in medical piercing.
He thrashes harder.
“You watched her moan while these were going into her skin,” we say quietly.
“You watched her breathe through the pain, watched her body respond to every single one. You stared at her with your hand around your cock like she was something to be consumed. And then you spat bile into her chat. You called her disgusting. You told her to repent. You told her she made you sick.”
The first needle slides through the meat of his thigh.
He arches off the chair, but the tape holds. The scream behind the gag is muffled but raw. We pause. Let the pain simmer. Let him feel the truth in his own body.
“She turned pain into art,” we say. “You turned it into a weapon.”
The second needle goes into the other thigh. Slower this time. We watch the skin stretch, the puncture bloom, the tremble starts in his knee and crawls up into his belly.
We take our time.
Needles through his upper arms. Through the soft skin above his collarbones.
The tremble becomes a full shake, and still we don’t speak again.
There is no point in telling him anything else.
He understands now. He understands the difference between someone choosing pain and someone having it forced on them.
He understands the weight of what it means to mock someone for being brave enough to turn pain into performance.
We thread the last needle behind his ear. It slips in with barely any pressure, but he sobs like we’ve gutted him.
Then we crouch in front of him. We meet his eyes.
“She wore hers like a bow. You wear yours like a confession.”
We take a photo. One quick shutter. Not to share. Not to gloat. Just to remember.
Then we press the blade under his ribs.
The tip bites into skin, and we feel the resistance of muscle underneath. He screams behind the tape, his body bucking against the chair, but we keep the motion steady. This isn’t for rage. It’s not for chaos. This is for clarity, for reckoning, and for balance.
We angle the blade upward. The resistance is different now, thicker, denser.
The organs shift beneath the pressure, warm and slick.
Blood rushes out in a heavy flow, hot and fast, soaking the waistband of his cheap shorts.
His eyes widen. They don’t blink. They shine with terror that’s finally real, not projected from behind a keyboard. That’s where the truth always lives.
“She shared her pain with the world and owned every second of it. You used it. Mocked it. Spit on it. You tried to break her with a single line,” we whisper in his ear.
His head thrashes, but his strength is leaving him. The color drains from his face, sweat slicking his forehead, mouth stretched beneath the tape like he wants to beg for mercy. There is none coming. Not from us. Not tonight.
The knife cuts higher.
It finds his lung first. The wheezing that follows is heavy and ragged, a rattling gasp that sounds like a balloon deflating underwater.
The panic in his body grows wild. His feet tap the floor like they might find traction.
They won’t. His hands are bound tight behind the chair.
There is nowhere to go. Nothing left to do but bleed.
There is a moment when the breath stops.
Just a flicker of silence before the final snap.
Then his spine arches once, sharp and violent, and he sags.
The life leaves his eyes, the pupils fixed and empty.
He slumps forward, chin to chest, mouth parted like he still wants to say something.
The blood keeps coming, but slower now. It spills over his lap and onto the floor in thick, syrupy rivulets.
We step back and turn, walking back into the living room, where the laptop still lies open on the floor. Her video is paused, her eyes bright with power he never deserved to witness.
We carry it back into the room, set it gently on the table beside his slumped body, and angle the screen toward him. It feels right, making her the last thing he sees. Even in death, he should have to look at her.
She’s smiling in the video, unaware of how far we would go to protect that spark in her eyes. She doesn’t know yet that her strength inspires blood.
But she will.