37. PSYCHO
ariella
My three besties—Athena, Sadie, and Refayla—hang from the ceiling over a pool filled with three hundred piranhas, my temporary starving pets for vengeance.
Their limp bodies are whipped bloody before I suspended them above the water.
I step back, momentarily struck by the art I’ve carved into their skin.
Bloody strokes. Open flesh. Trembling bodies matching perfectly with the bass of Dolls by Bella Porch blasting through the speakers.
The girls pant in ragged bursts, still not fully recovered from the cocktail of adrenaline I kept injecting into their veins.
I needed them to be fully aware. I wanted every second of this etched into their corrupted souls.
I tied them up and whipped them every day since I dragged them here—little breaks, nothing generous. One lash for every tear they ever made me shed.
I whipped them and cried. I was losing the only three people I ever called best friends. Then I whipped them more, for the tears they were making me shed.
Seven thousand and twenty-nine.
That’s how much each of them earned.
The fun part? I made them count. One mistake meant five extra lashes. That’s how we reached this extraordinary number.
It was supposed to be much less, but my besties seemed to love making mistakes—no wonder they tried to mess with the Keinston.
And now here they are… stripped of every scrap of fabric, just like how they tried to strip me bare.
“You wanted to test my character?” I chirp, tossing my hands out dramatically. “Here you go. A psychopath!”
“You’re a monster,” Athena spits.
A diabolical laughter rips out of me—raw, vicious, bubbling up from a place they helped create. “Bitch, please. Try looking in the mirror,” I manage between the hysterical edges of it.
I inhale slowly. Let the madness raging inside me settle like dust.
“Now, now…” my smile sharpens. “Ready to become the feast for these lovely babies?” I ask sweetly, already reaching for the lever that lowers them.
The fish are restless beneath them, swarming on the surface. They’ve smelled blood. They know what’s coming.
For a second, I let myself believe they understand my language, and they eagerly want to avenge their little master.
“Please, Ari, don’t do this. We were just being funny with you,” Sadie whimpers—the mastermind of the little bullshit prank, the coward who still thinks she can rewrite history at the edge of death.
I cut her off with a scoff. “Funny? Didn’t sound funny when you said…
” I air-quote, tilting my head, “I needed a friend, and you were too friendly, gullible, and na?ve. And now I don’t need a spoiled princess anymore because I have both Athena and Refayla, who also dumped you because once again…
you’re nothing more than a pathetic crybaby, a loser drama queen,” I recite the sentence word by word.
Color drains from their face, faster than the blood dripping from their fresh wounds.
“You called me a slut,” I remind softly, almost tenderly, “because guys liked approaching me more than they ever glanced at you.”
A sob breaks free just by speaking the word.
Then I look at the last one with teary eyes—Refayla. She keeps her gaze glued to the floor, terrified that eye contact alone might provoke me into whipping her again.
“You said I was the earth to your moon,” I say to her, new tears flow freely down my cheeks. “Yet you never stood up for me. Not once. You just sat there when Athena said I deserved this. Did our friendship really mean nothing to you? Was it always one-sided?” my voice shakes with restrained rage.
I breathe harshly through my nose and point at Sadie. “She said I deserved to be treated like trash just because I have a very specific type in man and I wanted to wait for him. You said I’d be a whore if only I didn’t have the money, and maybe I’d sell my cunt for fun.”
My glare sharpens, fresh tears falling free. “You three wanted to test my fucking character. You thought making a prank account and catfishing me would work. That I’d fall for your cheap little tricks and send nudes just because I’m a sixteen-year-old hopeless romantic girl.”
The words scrape raw from my throat. I pause, chest heaving, breath shaking with the force of it.
“Well, guess what, bitches…” a slow, satisfied grin unfurls through my red-rimmed, teary eyes. “For you, I happen to find my man.”
The grin drops in an instant from my face, leaving something far more sinister behind. “But I’m afraid you won’t be present at my wedding like we initially planned.”
I glance between them—weighing, choosing who deserves to live to remember.
Both of my hands curl around the levers, pulse steady now with the final decision. With that, I yank down two of the three levers.
Athena and Sadie crash into the water, their bodies hit the surface with a wet plop.
Screams explode through the room, mingling perfectly with the crescendo of music—sharp, shattering, tearing across my eardrums as they thrash wildly.
It doesn’t matter. Panic is useless in the jaws of something hungrier than them.
On top of that, the pool is deep, the sides rim slick with a chemical sheen that makes climbing out impossible.
“Oops,” I murmur, cracking my neck.
My hand flies to my lips dramatically. “I forgot to say goodbye,” another sob breaks free.
With that, I’m bawling my eyes out, holding on to the nearest wall so I don't fall on my knees.
Through the tears blurring my vision, I watch the clear water cloud into a violent red. The piranhas swarm in a frenzy, ripping through flesh as if it were nothing but soaked paper.
Above them, Refayla hangs suspended, shrieking so hard her vocal cords are about to tear apart—screaming as if it’s her body being shredded below.
I don’t look away even as I sob, wiping away tears to give space for new tears to flow down. Not until there’s nothing left—until the pool calms, the monsters disguised as fish slow in their frenzy, their bellies full and glinting with satisfaction.
Refayla’s voice finally gives out, collapsing into a rasp that barely counts as sound.
Only then do I pull her sideways and lower her carefully to the ground. She’s about to fall on the ground, but I hold her steady at the last second.
“Rafayla,” I tightly hug her bloodied body, smearing blood on my brand-new Prada.
I don’t register her wincing—too busy crying.
“The only reason I’m letting you live,” I speak through tears, breaking away just enough to meet her eyes, “is because if it weren’t for you, they would’ve kept playing their sick little game until I broke.”
I tilt my head slightly, watching the terror settle deeper into her bones. My watery eyes meet her dead, traumatized ones.
“And because someone has to remember what happens when they try again, right?” I try to give her a soft smile.
I untie her wrists and toss a cloak over her whipped skin. The fabric swallows her shaking form.
“Please be careful and don’t let others mess with me. I can expect this from my bestie,” my voice comes out too soft. “Cuz you see, I’m so sensitive to being heartbroken,” I place my hand on my chest and blink dramatically.
“The exit’s there,” I point to a small door leading into a dark corridor stretching toward the woods.
“Open your mouth, and you’ll learn that what I did to my besties was just the starter,” the warning comes with an unsettling warmth.
Then I gently push her forward, careful not to hurt her beaten skin—toward the dark, toward her future, toward whatever version of hell she’ll walk into with what’s left of herself.
The occasional lapping of water from the insatiable piranhas is the only sound echoing through the now lifeless room.
Conveniently, the girls have already been declared missing, presumed dead for days. Their funeral is tomorrow.
I told Asher I’d prefer to prepare fish myself for their grieving families.
And the fish just so happens to be the piranha that ate their daughters off the face of the planet.
I should probably thank him for securing this massive pool and three hundred piranhas for me to feed and burish myself here at the dungeon of Nico Trivosky, the heir of the Russian Bratva who happened to be too close to Asher.
It’s been a week since I kidnapped my besties from the bar where they went for partying after the prank.
It didn’t take much effort to guess where they’d go—they only ever used to invite me along because of my last name.
Now I understand it was never friendship. It was for access that they made friends with me. To get free entry to every luxurious location in the city, they decided to play with me.
So, after I finished bawling my eyes out in my room, I followed them. And there they were—Paradiso Del’Inferno, also founded by Nico Trivosky.
The place they only got into still being underaged was because I’m a Keinston and my brother is a hotshot there.
Being a Keinston did me a huge favor once again. It wasn’t difficult to tip the bartender to spike their drinks, and voilà—they’ve been tied and trapped in the little den underneath the bar ever since.
Two days later, I dumped their bloodied clothes in a public trash bin, making their families believe they’d been brutally butchered—which, now, two of them finally are.
Suddenly, I feel a presence behind me. I don’t flinch. I already know who it is, even though I didn’t hear him coming in.
“I knew you wouldn’t do something out of the goodness of your heart,” Asher says, not entirely amused.
He’s hinting at how I cried over the ‘loss’ of my friends and asked him to get me the fish for their funeral meal.
I sob, “Learned from the best,” but say it through a wide smile.
“That’s a lot of work for something you pretended didn’t matter at all,” he says after a beat of silence, his gaze lingering a second too long on the pool.
Then, almost casually, he says. “Mind telling me what made you do all this?”
“I prefer to keep my business to myself,” I answer flatly.
“Come on,” he says, elbowing me. “I’m not just your elder brother but also someone who helped you out to those—” he motions at the tank full of piranhas, “—fish. I deserve to know, kiddo.”
“Don’t kiddo me.”