“Despite what you think, Aeron, I’m not stupid. I’d no sooner have asked you to take part in my ritual than I’d have made you milk and cookies.” He reels this off casually while he checks Leo’s cuffs. “If you were going to kill this cunt, you’d have done it already.”
A scrape of a groan cuts my throat again. It’s that word, kill, the casual way it falls off his tongue. It means different things to both of us; for me, no more blood. Or pulse. Or Leo. I’ve seen life fade beneath my fingers before, though trust me, fade is really the wrong word—it flees from pain in leaps and bounds, there one minute and then long gone the next.
I find myself hoping she’ll go quickly. That he’ll be gentle. He doesn’t know what she likes.
“Perfect. Now.” Blood Honey gets to his feet and wipes his palms on his filthy pants. “Time to get this show on the road. Any last words for your thing here?”
This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.
“Leo?” I push out.
She winces. Shudders.
“Leo, I love you,” I tell her. The words are foreign in my mouth and they don’t sound right; she recoils softly into the floor as if she’s been impaled by a feather. What I’d give for a gun right now. I’d figure out how to shoot the damn thing with blind luck and my teeth.
Blood Honey rolls his eyes. “Would you listen to him, Cock Sleeve? What a hero. What a guy.” He gets to his feet, bends at the waist, and then hauls her over his shoulder. She flails like a rag doll—a bound one, defeated and hopeless. The chains of her cuffs rattle as he lumbers past.
I can’t watch.
Can’t.
I’ve never tasted this kind of failure. Even when Rachel went to hospital and my mother found it, I still had money and power and use of all four fucking limbs. Now…well, money doesn’t really matter, does it?
I roll a scream around the back of my throat, prepare to launch it, but it cracks and splinters on the way out. I can’t even make a noise. Jesus.
The door slams closed. Flies buzz louder, and in the wake of silence, a smell hits my nostrils: decomposing meat. Sunshine illuminates the wooden walls of the water villa, the cobwebs glowing in soft gold clusters and those black birds, the sharp-beaks, cawing to themselves as they land on the window ledge to peer in.
“What the fuck are you staring at?” I croak at them.
One bird cocks his feathered skull at me, as if to say, I don’t know, *. The label fell off.
“Aeron?” yelps a small voice.
For a second, I could’ve sworn it was the bird, but then the suitcase rattles under the table and the voice comes again.
“Aeeeeeron….”
Oh, Jesus fuck. Now, I remember.
“Ash…?”
“Aeron!” he cries. “I need to get out!”
“I know.”
The suitcase erupts in sobs. “Please let me out, let me out!”
But I can’t. I can’t do anything, and I’d rather be dead than sit here and admit it. This is what he wanted to give me, my ‘real’ father: a far worse fate than his hacked up victims. He wants to take everything and everyone, but it’s not enough to make me watch as they suffer; no, that’s far too fucking easy for a brick wall like me.
“Aeron,” Asher weeps. “Please, please, please, please…”
“I’m coming,” I manage. “Just…just give me a sec and I’ll be right over.”
Would you have told him the truth? I thought not. Maybe I’m a little more like you than I knew.
He is jack in the box. Black box. And God, I know how that feels. Is this what empathy feels like, this feral craving to rip off your own skin?
“How long?” he wails.
“Just a moment.”
“I wet my pants,” he whimpers. “Don’t tell me off. I’m real sorry.”
“I wet my pants too, buddy.” I try to shove a laugh out but there’s nothing. Fuck all. “I won’t tell you off about anything. I promise.”
“Are you in a suitcase too?”
“No.”
“Then—” He cuts off at the sound of footsteps. “Oh noooo…”