It’s not hard, seeing as how he slammed the basement door so hard it rattled the house, so I head down the stairs, following the sound of something being slashed apart and Knox’s grunts.
When I enter the basement room, there’s a large burlap sack suspended in the center of it, and Knox has a massive knife in one hand. He hacks at the sack with angry precision, hitting the spots that would probably be the vital organs if it was a person. The burlap is clearly something he doesn’t need anymore, just a vessel to take his aggression out on in this moment.
I smirk at him, folding my arms and leaning against the counter off to the side. “I thought you came down here to sharpen things,” I tease him. “This looks like the opposite of that.”
“I gotta get the knife dull first,” he grunts out, breathing hard as he slashes at the sack one more time.
I chuckle at that and glance around the basement. A few cabinets are open, and I look at all the stuff down here. “I can’t believe how much shit you have. How many different tools.”
He pauses his attack on the sack long enough to look over at me, and his grin is a little feral. “You wouldn’t ask an artist to paint with only a few colors. I can’t limit myself or my imagination. You never know when you might need a new tool.”
I smile back at him, drawn to the feral part of him like always. Today, I find myself feeling a little more violent than usual, all the pain inside me coming out in the need to destroy. The need to hurt those who hurt me.
I pick up a hook from the table and hold it up so he can see it. “Show me,” I say simply.
Knox’s grin widens, like he’s found his fucking soul mate. He stops hacking at the sack and comes over to me, taking the hook from my hand.
It’s silver, and decently sized. The hook part would fit in the palm of my hand, and there’s a handle on it, made of the same metal as the hook.
When Knox takes it, I can see that I was holding it wrong. He puts the hook between his index and middle fingers so that the handle part is against his palm, held in place by his thumb and the rest of his fingers when he curls them into a fist.
“This one’s nasty,” he says, and his voice drops down lower. I can feel the heat of him as he moves in closer, and smell the scent of sweat and blood that always seems to cling to Knox. “The hook is sharpened, right? But you can’t really tell. It looks like something you’d stab through, maybe to hang someone up or just cause them pain. And I do that, but that’s not all.” He drags the point of the hook down my chest, and I can feel how sharp it is. “Once it’s stabbed into somebody, it’s stuck there. If you wanted to pull it out, you’d have to rip through their flesh to get it, and that hurts even more. There are a lot of sensitive places on the human body that you can fuck up with something like this.”
I shiver against him, turned on by the feel of the cold, sharp metal running over my skin, and the idea of what he’s saying. I picture using it on Julian, having him chained to the wall in his own basement while I take the hook into his sensitive bits.
“More,” I tell Knox, sounding just a little breathless. “Show me more.”
The tall, tattooed man lights up at the request, his boyish grin at odds with his appearance and the deadly weapon in his hand. He puts the hook down and grabs a long poker next. It looks like something you would use to tend a fireplace with, long and metal with a wooden handle.
“Do you brand people with that?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. “Nah, that’s too easy. That’s what they expect when they see something like this. But I’m not setting a fire down here to heat it up to the right temperature, and I’ve got electric shit if I want to hurt somebody that way. It’s fun to fuck with their heads though. You pull this out, and they think you’re going to burn them, so they’re bracing for that, but then you flip it up on them. Just swing it,” He demonstrates, swinging the poker almost like it’s a bat. “And break some bones.”
I wince, imagining the feeling of that heavy metal rod slamming into someone’s leg or arm or back. “Ouch.”
“Yup. That’s the idea,” Knox tells me.
He puts the poker down and picks up a little box. Flipping it toward me, he opens the lid, and I look inside to see an array of differently sized fish hooks.
I don’t need to ask to know what he does with those. The hooks on the end are sharp and barbed, and I’ve seen enough nature shows on TV to know how they work. Putting them into a person is another one of those “causing agony on the way in and the way out” kind of things.
“You can’t really kill somebody with these,” Knox says. “But you can make them wish they were dead. If it’s somebody who really needs to suffer, sometimes I dip the hooks in hot sauce or lemon juice first. Just to really make it burn.”
“How do you decide?” I ask him. “If you want someone to die quickly or if you want to draw it out and just fuck with them?”
Knox shrugs. “Depends on Gage sometimes. What he wants done with the person. If we just want information, then I just hurt them until they’ll tell me anything I want to know, and probably some stuff I don’t too. Their credit card numbers, their social security shit. Anything, just to make the pain stop. If they’re fucked either way, then sometimes I draw it out anyway, really make them realize what they did before I kill them. That part’s usually just for me.”
“What would you do if you wanted or needed to kill them quick?” I ask him.
“There are a lot of places on a person where they’ll bleed out quick,” he says. He puts his hands on me, touching the places where I remember the major arteries and shit are located. “If it needs to be quick and neat, then you can always snap the neck or suffocate someone. Things that don’t leave a mark.”
“When you killed your uncle, was it slow or quick?”
“It was quick.” Knox grimaces. “Probably better than the fucker deserved, but I got what I needed anyway.”
I tip my head to the side, studying him. Tattoos crawl over nearly every inch of his exposed skin except for his face, and his shoulders are as broad as a linebacker’s. He’s got a little scruff on his jaw, and it makes him look wild and dangerous.
“What was it that you needed?” I ask.
“I saw the fear in his eyes.” Knox purses his lips, his expression taking on a faraway quality as if he’s reliving something from his past. “I saw that he knew he was about to die, and I know he knew why. And then I killed him, and he died with that fear burning in his veins.”
My jaw clenches, and I ball up my hand into a fist at my side. “That’s what I want for Julian,” I admit, my voice harsh with the force of my emotions. “I want to pick his life apart piece by piece and make sure he realizes exactly what he’s lost before I kill him.”
Knox doesn’t say anything, just looks at me, but I know he’s listening, and I know he understands.
So I keep talking, letting everything that’s been building up spill out of me.