Chapter 46
Chapter forty-six
The Smell of Burning Flesh
Kenji
Three hours later, I stood in my war room’s shower, and the water was scalding.
I didn’t want to return to Nyomi covered in so much death.
Therefore. . .I must have stayed in that shower for another hour, letting the heat burn away the smell of smoke, gasoline, and charred flesh.
I'd scrubbed my skin until it was raw.
Changed into fresh clothes.
Brushed my teeth three times.
But some stains didn't wash off.
Some memories didn't rinse down the drain.
“I’m so sorry! I love you. I thought I was helping!
” Mami screamed as the flames first touched her skin and began to crawl up her body like a hungry parasite, blistering everything it touched.
The way her mouth opened—not to scream yet, but in pure disbelief, as if she couldn't understand what was happening.
Eyes bulged in their sockets, swelling outward. Then, clouding over with a milky film. Her arched brows crisped away in a puff of acrid smoke. Hairline receding in a wave of orange as her scalp bubbled, split, and charred.
And her gaze liquefied too.
I blinked hard, forcing myself back to the present where I was finally walking toward the bedroom.
The hallway stretched before me.
Quiet.
Empty of staff.
Just the guards remained and the twins.
Getting to my bedroom door felt longer than usual. Each step was a battle between the man I was trying to be and the monster I had become tonight.
The smell.
Sweet, sick, and wrong.
Burning hair and cooking meat.
The stench of urine and the chemical mixture of Mami’s perfume igniting from the flames.
And then the noises that would live in my nightmares. The sound of her skin crackling like pork on a hot grill.
The popping.
The sizzling down of her melting cheeks.
The way her fat liquefied and dripped onto the floor and plopped like bacon grease.
Sako had been screaming her name, thrashing against his chains, begging me to stop even though he'd already given me everything I'd asked for. . .
I shoved the image out of my head, stopped at the door, and gestured to the twins. “Get some rest.”
“Will do.” One nodded.
The other followed. “See you tomorrow.”
With the rest of the guards behind me, I stood in front of the door and held my hands in front of me, making sure they didn’t see them shaking.
No one could.
I'd hidden it well down in the prison. Had kept my voice steady, my movements controlled, my face carved from stone as I watched four people I'd cared for confess their betrayals and then suffer for them.
But now, alone in the silence of my own home, the tremors had started and wouldn't stop.
“Kenji!! Forgive me!!” Then, Sako’s tongue swelled and caramelized, pouring out of his mouth as his lips peeled back and skin gurgled.
Blistered. Frothed and foamed, then fully opened like overripe fruit, and beneath it the fat sizzled, popped, and oozed like yellow custard between the cracks of red muscle and darkening flesh over-cooked and glistening in the firelight before it too began to blacken and curl.
And the obscene smell of rotten peaches filled the air.
I gritted my teeth, and yearned to press my palm flat against the door and steady myself.
One of the guards spoke, “Sir, are you okay?”
“Yes.” I sneered. “Give me space. I’m thinking.”
They took a few steps away and gave me their backs.
Breathe. Just breathe. You can’t go in there like this. She can’t see this.
I closed my eyes.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
I let out a long breath and my hands stopped shaking enough.
Mami betrayed you. She photographed Nyomi. And Sako was going to help your father take everything you loved. Do not shed one tear for their deaths.
The justification rang hollow in my skull.
Because I also remembered how my mother used to braid Mami’s hair and hum songs during bad storms because she knew Mami was afraid of thunder.
She’d been a sister to me, and now she was a traitor.
Somehow both things were true.
And I had burned her alive anyway.
Her eyes and mouth had stayed open.
Even as her face bubbled and boiled in the flames.
Even when there was nothing left of her features but blackened bone and the sick pop of bursting fluid.
Those empty sockets remained pointed in my direction.
Staring at me.
Accusing.
My stomach twisted.
You did what you had to do. They would have killed Nyomi. Would have taken her.
A cold shiver ran through me.
You didn't have to watch. You could have ordered it and left. But you stayed. You stayed for every second and forced yourself to watch.
I had.
Because if I was going to order someone's death, I owed them the weight of witnessing it. Owed them my presence, my attention, the fullness of my culpability.
That was the code I'd created for myself years ago.
I just hadn't understood until tonight how heavy that code would become.
Sako's confessions had come out in broken fragments between sobs. Names spilled from his mouth like gushing blood from a gaping wound.
Thirty more fucking names.
Thirty more snakes hidden in my organization.
Gardeners.
Cooks.
Guards.
A whole network he'd been managing for fifteen years while pretending to be my friend.
Sighing, I checked behind me and realized the guards took several more steps back, but I caught the glance that passed between them.
Quick.
Uncertain.
Uncomfortable.
I'd seen these men gut enemies without flinching. Watched them clean blood from their knuckles like it was nothing more than dirt. But something on my face tonight made them look away.
Perhaps, even monsters recognized when they were standing too close to the abyss.
My jaw ached from clenching.
From holding everything in.
I'd burned Sako's father alive in front of him. The old man who had wept silently through his son's entire confession. The man who had nodded once—just once—when Sako mouthed "I'm sorry" through his broken jaw.
The pregnant sister, I'd released. She'd screamed and screamed as they dragged her away while I torched her husband, and Sako had vomited against the ceramic tile.
One mercy.
That was all I could afford.
I reached out, my hand hovering over the handle.
Arata had stopped screaming by the time Totoro’s flames kissed his mother's nightgown.
He just. . .watched.
His body had gone rigid against the chains, every muscle locked, his eyes fixed on the small woman who had raised him. She was still confused—had been confused since they'd dragged her from her bed.
Her milky eyes couldn't see well in the harsh fluorescent light, and she kept asking where she was, why it was so cold, why her sons were crying.
She never got an answer.
The flame caught the cotton first.
A small bloom of orange at the hem.
Almost pretty.
Almost gentle.
Then it climbed.
"Mama," Arata whispered.
Just that.
Just her name.
She didn't scream at first. The confusion held her still for two eternal seconds—her aged mind trying to process why she was suddenly warm, why there was light crawling up her body, why her skin felt tight and then tighter and then. . .
The screaming started.
But it wasn't hers.
It was Arata's.
A sound I'd never heard from a grown man—high, keening, broken. His throat tearing itself apart as he thrashed against chains that wouldn't give.
His wrists splitting open against the metal, blood streaming down his arms, and he didn't notice, didn't care, because his mother was burning and he couldn't reach her.
His brother just stared in this broken way, watching his mother's grey hair ignite into a flaming halo.
Her lips peel back from her teeth.
Her nightgown melted into her skin.
Her frail hands clawed at the air, reaching for sons who couldn't save her.
And I watched Arata break.
Not his body.
His mind.
I saw the exact moment it happened—the light leaving his eyes, something fundamental snapping behind them. His screams cut off mid-breath, and what remained was silence.
A shell.
A man-shaped thing staring at the blackening remains of the woman who had given him life.
His lips were still moving.
Mama. Mama. Mama.
But no sound came out anymore.
The rest of the families were burned alive, before I set flame to the traitors. They had to see what they’d done, before they met their deaths.
All the parents.
The college boy.
Dead by fire.
Screaming to the end.
Ashes.
Tons of ashes.
And the smell of burning bodies.
I should have showered longer. Should have scrubbed harder. My Tiger will smell the death on me. She'll see it in my eyes. She'll know what I am. She’ll want to run.
On the other side of my bedroom door, Nyomi was there.
Clean.
Warm.
Untouched by what I’d just done.
Everything I wasn't right now.
She already knows what I am. Doesn’t she?
I turned the knob, pushed the door open, and walked in.
The lights were low. Moonlight streamed through the windows, painting silver streaks across the floor. And there, curled in the center of our massive bed, my Tiger slept.
Nyomi.
My heart clenched at the sight of her.
She lay on her side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, her braids fanned across the pillow. The sheets had slipped down to her waist, revealing the soft curve of her shoulder and the elegant line of her neck.
Beautiful.
So fucking beautiful it hurt to look at her.
Sako's father had wept the entire time. Quiet tears streaming down his weathered face as his son confessed to years of betrayal and began spitting out every name.
The old man hadn't said a word.
Hadn't begged or pleaded.
Just wept and shook his head.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
Stop. Stop. They’re dead. It's done. Stop.
When I opened them again, I focused only on Nyomi. Let her steady breathing become my anchor. Let her warmth pull me back from the edge of whatever pit I was falling into.
I moved closer, my bare feet silent on the floor.
On the nightstand beside her, a book lay open and face-down. I recognized the cover immediately.
When the Dragon Swallowed the Moon.
She must have been reading it before she fell asleep.