Chapter 6
RETH
Flashback
Ipaint my face in silence.
The room is bare. No windows. No sound except my own breathing. I work from memory, not reflection. Black first—drawn straight across the eyes, thick enough to blur the edges of the world. It narrows my vision, forces focus. Turns everything ahead of me into target and space.
White comes next. Dragged down the bridge of my nose, cut clean across my cheekbones.
Precise. Symmetrical. Not decoration—correction.
It strips expression from my face, flattens it into something unreadable.
Something that doesn’t react. Last, I smear more black around my mouth, dragging it up the right side where the skin pulls tighter than it should.
The texture is wrong there, paint filling it easily, like it remembers what it was made for.
At first, the paint was a switch. Now the line between the two doesn’t exist anymore. The black, the white, the blood. It’s not a mask. It’s just me.
I don’t look in the mirror when I’m finished. I never do. Mirrors invite questions I already know the answers to. I don’t need a face. I don’t need a history, or permission. I just need hands that don’t shake—and mine don’t.
The phone vibrates on the counter. Once. Then again. I let it buzz a third time before answering, because timing matters. Because she notices.
“Yes,” I say.
Her voice comes through smooth, like she’s already settled in. Calm. Expectant. Possessive in a way that doesn’t need to announce itself. She doesn’t greet me. She never does. Names imply equality.
“He’s ready,” she says like a fact. As if the world has already complied.
“Yes.”
Silence stretches. I can hear her breathing—slow, measured—like she’s aligning herself with what’s about to happen.
“I want to see it.” Her words are quiet. Almost tender. “He owes me pain.”
I’ve reacted to that voice in every way a man can react to power. Fear. Hatred. Resistance. Submission. What’s left is absence. Now it doesn’t even reach me.
“Make it slow,” she adds, like an afterthought. Like she’s adjusting the temperature of a room.
I don’t speak. She doesn’t expect me to. This conversation doesn’t require confirmation. Her command is issued, and my obedience acknowledged. That’s all there is to our relationship—a voice, a task, a result.
The call ends without goodbye, leaving the distinct impression that whatever happens next is already catalogued, already consumed, already hers.
I collect the equipment without thinking. Camera. Tripod. Knife. The order never changes. Neither does the destination—an abandoned warehouse on the edge of the city, gutted and forgotten, already stripped of anything that could witness what happens inside.
He’s waiting right where I left him. Tied to a chair, naked, mouth taped, and eyes wild with recognition the moment he sees me. He knows who I am. That’s the first mercy. He understands exactly what this is.
I set the camera right across from him. Tripod steady. Angle clean. Focus checked. The red light blinks once, then holds. She’s watching now.
I imagine her settled somewhere warm. Glass of wine. Legs crossed. Elegantly manicured fingers stroking absently across the supple leather of her armchair.
I step into frame, and he starts to shake. The recognition in his eyes doesn’t diminish his fear but rather amplifies it. The familiar dread of acceptance, of knowing there’s no way out.
I crouch in front of him, bringing us eye to eye. His pupils track my face paint, and he tries to speak through the tape, words pushing uselessly against it—apologies, maybe. Promises. Men always think language will save them.
“You shouldn’t have fucking talked,” I say calmly. “You knew better.” His head jerks in frantic denial.
I stand and circle him slowly. Let him hear my boots. Let him feel how trapped he is. Fear has a rhythm, and once you hear it, you can conduct it.
My hand comes down on the back of the chair, fingers curling around the wood, then lean in close enough that he can feel my breath at his ear.
“She’s watching.”
His breath turns ragged, chest heaving against the restraints. He knows exactly who she is. Everyone does. That’s the part that breaks them fastest—not the pain, but the audience.
I step back into his line of sight and reach into my jacket.
The knife is small, clean, practical. There’s nothing dramatic about it.
I don’t brandish it. I don’t let it catch the light.
I just hold it steady, like an extension of my hand.
His eyes drop to it anyway. People always watch the wrong thing.
I set it down on the table beside him, just out of reach. Close enough to matter. Far enough to be useless. His gaze tracks it like a compass needle, breath hitching every time my hand moves near it.
I take a step back. Then another. Let the emptiness between us grow until he can feel it like a pressure. Empty air becomes the first cut—that hollow space where anticipation bleeds into terror. His eyes follow me, understanding dawning that the true pain lies in waiting for me to begin.
His breathing speeds up, his shoulders pulling tight against the restraints. The chair creaks as he tests it again, panic sharpening into something desperate. I can hear the calculation behind his eyes, the silent bargaining. If he hasn’t done it yet, maybe he won’t.
That hope is a mistake. I can see it dying in his eyes even as he clings to it.
I move to the corner of the room and crouch. Elbows on my knees. Hands loose. Waiting.
People think pain lives in impact. They don’t understand that the mind is a better torturer than I am.
Waiting becomes a physical thing, invisible hands pressing against the windpipe, phantom knives already slicing through skin that remains intact, the mind manufacturing agony from nothing but expectation.
He starts to shake, eyes flicking between me and the knife. Back and forth. Back and forth. Sweat at his temples. Breath gone shallow. This is the part she loves most. Not the blood. Not the end. This. The stripping. Every second that passes takes something from him—and she collects it all.
I tilt my head, studying him like a problem that’s already been solved. “You gave them names,” I say. “Routes. Accounts. You thought if you said enough, you’d get to walk away.” I shake my head once, slow. “There was never a version of this where you lived.”
I let the words hang there, heavy as wet rope, then stand without hurry, crossing the room in four slow steps.
The knife waits on the table. I lift it, testing its edge against the pad of my thumb.
His pupils blow wide and I can see the pulse slamming in his neck, fast and thready, like a trapped bird.
I lift the knife until the flat of it rests against his cheek—cold steel kissing fever-hot skin.
He tries to pull away, but there’s nowhere for him to go.
All he can do is sit there and suffer—which is exactly why we’re here.
Because she thrives on suffering. She soaks up fear like luxury, knowing her name is at the root of it.
I drag the blade down, trailing over his jawline, along the column of his throat where the Adam’s apple bobs violently. Past the collarbone. I pause at the first rib and press. Just shy of breaking skin. Just enough to feel bone beneath steel.
His sobs are muffled against the tape, so I rip it off because I know it’s what she wants—his screams. She wants to hear it. Feel it. Taste it. So I wait, allowing him to scream and cry until his throat is raw. It’ll please her. Pain is her currency, and she’s collecting with interest.
It’s when he runs out of breath that I slice.
Not deep. Just a shallow line across the meat of his pectoral, splitting skin.
Blood wells instantly, and he sucks air through clenched teeth, body bowing against the chair.
He’s not screaming, so I do it again, carving lines across his chest, sharp, each one deeper than the other until finally he wails.
It’s so loud, so shrill and thick with pain, I know she’s pleased.
I watch the red bead, then trickle, then run, and catch a drop with the tip of the blade, lift it until the blood beads on steel, then press that same tip to his lower lip.
“Open.”
He shakes his head—tiny, frantic.
I don’t repeat myself. Instead, I hook a finger under his chin, force his jaw down. He tries to pull back, but all it takes is one tiny cut at the corner of his mouth for him to realize keeping still is his safest option right now.
I lay the flat of the blade across his tongue and watch as his eyes roll, gag reflex kicking, but I grab his hair and hold him steady as I tilt the knife, the blade kissing his tongue with a surgical cut. A thin red line appears, then widens as blood wells up and fills his mouth with metal.
“Taste what betrayal costs,” I say softly. “Swallow it. Or I’ll make you chew the next piece.”
He chokes. Swallows. Tears track down his temples now, mixing with sweat.
I withdraw the knife and wipe it once across my shirt, then step back again, giving him room to feel the full weight of it.
His chest heaves in shallow, panicked bursts.
Every inhale pulls the fresh cuts wider, every exhale forcing a wet, choking sound from his ruined throat.
Blood smears his chin, dark against the paling skin.
He looks smaller already. Diminished. Exactly as she likes them—stripped of humanity, now just raw nerve and terror waiting for what comes next.
I reach into my leather jacket pocket and pull out a pair of pliers and a coil of fine piano wire. Nothing exotic. Nothing theatrical. Tools chosen for precision and duration, not spectacle. She doesn’t want theater. She wants endurance.
I pick up the pliers first. Simple. Familiar. Everyone knows what they can do to fingers, to teeth, to softer places. I don’t rush. I let him see me lift them, let him track the chrome gleam under the light. His eyes go impossibly wider. His pupils are black lakes now, drowning.
I crouch in front of him again, close enough that my painted face fills his vision. I tap the closed pliers lightly against his left index finger—once, twice, rhythmic. Testing. Teaching the rhythm he’ll learn by heart soon.
He jerks his hand back—or tries to, but the restraints hold. I catch the finger between the jaws anyway, gentle at first. Just enough pressure to pinch skin, to make the knuckle blanch white.
It’s the moment he pisses himself that I squeeze. Not all the way. Not yet.
His body convulses; the chair legs scrape concrete in frantic bursts.
A sound rips out of him—high, keening, inhuman.
I hold the pressure steady for five full seconds, counting in my head.
One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand. When I ease off, his finger has already begun to swell, bruising beneath the skin in a dark purple stain.
He’s sobbing again, great wet gasps. I move to the next finger without pause. Same pressure. Same count. Same scream. By the third finger, his voice cracks into something hoarse and useless. By the fourth, he’s barely making sound at all—just air whistling through clenched teeth.
She’s seeing this. Every twitch. Every tear. Every time his body convulses.
I throw the pliers on the floor with a loud clank and take the piano wire. This part is quieter. More intimate. But she’ll still get what she craves.
I loop the wire once around the base of his left pinky—the one I haven’t crushed yet. Tighten until it bites skin, then tighter still until I feel the faint give of flesh surrendering. His breathing stutters; he knows. Everyone knows what comes after the loop.
I twist, and the wire disappears into flesh with a soft, wet sound like scissors through silk.
A perfect crimson ring forms, each droplet beading in slow motion before racing down to pool in his palm.
Another half-turn and something inside gives—not quite a snap, more like the resistance of a green twig finally yielding.
His breath comes in whistling gasps through flared nostrils, and the veins in his neck stand out like cords as his head whips from side to side, eyes rolling white.
The fingernail turns the color of an old bruise while I watch. When the tip goes fully dark—when circulation dies—I stop and leave the wire embedded like a promise.
I lean in close again, close enough that my black-smeared mouth nearly brushes his ear. “I’m here to collect what you owe her…in pieces.”
His eyes meet mine—wild, pleading, already half-gone. There’s no fight left. Only the long, slow understanding that this isn’t punishment. This is ownership. And it’s only just begun.
I stand. Step back out of frame so she can see all of him—the swelling fingers, the wire tourniquet, the blood-smeared chest rising and falling in shallow, defeated rhythm.
The red light on the camera blinks steadily. She’s still watching. Still hungry.
And I still have hours of night left.