“Will do, sunshine.”
I smile as I lower my phone and scroll through text messages from friends and colleagues, opening the message from Jack as I contemplate sending a question mark reply to the chess and skull emojis he sent shortly before he arrived, only to close his text once more. My attention is on my device as I move to replace the Brentwood award in its position next to the grainy photo of my mom.
Except I miss the shelf.
My heart plummets faster than the heavy teardrop of glass. I fumble to catch it but it slips from my fingers, and all I can do is watch as it hits the cold tile floor and shatters into a thousand glittering shards.
The blackness of my impending flashback is immediate. It eats the periphery of my vision, consuming the present, hurtling me toward the past.
I place a palm on the wall. My heart riots. My blood heats. I try to turn away from the broken glass littered at my feet to keep myself here but I already know it won’t work. And worst of all, I’m not alone. I’m about to be at my most vulnerable with a wolf in the shadows of the room across the hall.
The last thing I see as my vision narrows to a pinprick of light is Jack straightening, his head turning, his deadly gray eyes meeting mine.
The next voice I hear is the demon who haunts me.
The Silent Slayer.
“Shh, shh. Quiet now, baby.”
The sharp tip of a blade rests against my skin, its point steady between my ribs. I'm lying on the cream carpet in the living room of my childhood home. My body quakes as I press my lips shut between my teeth until they bruise and bleed. I know what’s coming. My lung already rumbles in protest of every breath, the first blade lodged deep in its spongy cavern. It shudders with each blood-filled inhalation. “You know what happens if you make a sound,” the man whispers.
He pushes my head to the side, my cheek tear-streaked and burning as he presses it to the carpet. I meet my mother’s lifeless eyes. Her blood still slips from her parted lips, her severed tongue a dark horror in the shadows of her mouth.
My stomach roils. I choke down a sob, swallowing bile and fear and despair. When I press my eyes closed, the image is still there. Mom’s unseeing eyes. Terror etched deep into her flesh as though it clings to her bones like a phantom, lurking beneath her slack features.
I open my eyes as the man’s hot palm slides across the sweat coating my skin. He presses my cheeks between his fingertips until they ache against my teeth.
He turns my face to the other side.
My dad struggles where he lays on his stomach next to me, his hands bound behind his back and to his ankles, the gag in his mouth wet with exertion and distress. There’s fury in his eyes. Panic. He tries to worm closer to my side but the man who holds me in his grip kicks my dad away.
“Now, now,” the man says, letting go of my face to pull an ancient camcorder from his jacket pocket. “Don’t make a sound or you know how much worse his punishment will be.”
The red light of the camcorder blinks on, its soulless glass eye indifferent to my suffering as it curates every expression on my bruised and swollen face. My breathing quickens. My heart thunders. I try to focus on those three little letters beneath the flashing red glow. I pour every drop of my consciousness into them. Rec. Rec. Rec.
The knife slips between my ribs.
I don’t make a sound. Not as the blade slices through every filament of muscle and flesh. Not as it pierces my lung. Not as this man slides it in a slow procession to bury the steel to the hilt. I swallow every desperate urge to scream and beg, to plead for the pain to stop. I will not let Daddy down like I just did Mom.
But my dad, he can’t stop himself from fighting for me.
For every scream I swallow, my dad begs around his gag. He thrashes against his bonds. His muffled words are a desperate chant. Please, not my girl. Over and over, his pleas repeat like flashes that echo the blinking red light of the camcorder. And when the second blade is sunk into my chest and the man sits back against his heels to record the handle quivering next to its twin, I look at my dad, his tears so much worse than my own.
The red light blinks out.
The scent of blood and cheap drugstore body spray floods the hot air between us as the man leans close to my ear. I struggle to trap my silence in the heat filling my throat. “You did so well, baby,” he whispers, his breath and his words a sticky film that layers over my muddled senses. “Such a brave girl to stay so quiet.” Stubble scrapes the angle of my jaw as the man drags his lips across my skin to press a kiss to my cheek.
The man’s weight lifts from my body. I shake my head violently, my only sound the rumbling breath in my injured lung as I beg him with nothing more than a desperate, pleading look.
He smiles.
“Daddy though…he was not such a good boy,” he whispers as he straddles my father’s back. My dad struggles to buck him off and manages to unseat our assailant for just a moment. But that moment is nothing more than a breath of time, no longer than the beat of a heart.
The man whips a hammer free from a frayed leather loop on his belt.
It’s this exact moment when I learn an important lesson, that time is so very cruel.
Time will slow at will, forcing you to remember every detail of something you would give anything to forget, like the worn patch of wood on the handle of a hammer, or the desperate cry of your father, or the shine of the tears in his eyes. It forces you to witness the flash of the living room lights on the burnished metal of the hammer’s blunt head. You might not be able to remember the last time you told your parents you loved them, but time will be there to make sure you recall the sound of the sickening thud as the hammer strikes your father’s temple, or the color of the blood that sprays across the cream carpet.
Time slows to ensure you never forget how powerless you truly are.
And I am utterly powerless. Powerless to do anything but to absorb every detail of the vicious assault until my mind finally starts to shut down.
The images and sounds blur and distort until a wave of cold air coats the sweat and blood on my skin. When my vision clears, it lands on the vacant expression on my father’s dying face. There’s a wet, rhythmic gurgling as my father’s last breaths spasm in his chest, his severed tongue discarded on the carpet between us. But there’s another sound, one on the other side of me, a choking, gasping plea beneath a menacing whisper.
“You are sloppy. An amateur. Unworthy. And this is my domain.”
It takes a monumental effort, but I turn my head toward the sound.
My assailant is on his knees between my mother’s body and mine. He struggles to pull a wire away from his neck. Another man is behind him, dressed in black, leather gloves tight against his knuckles as he pulls the wooden handles of a garrote back toward his chest.
He’s beautiful. So beautiful. Older than me but still young, maybe mid-twenties. Dark hair, high cheekbones, a subtle smile on full lips as he watches his prey struggle in his grip. He’s a fierce angel. Focused and determined. A savior, delivering the justice I can’t.
He tightens the garrote further and whispers again to the man in his grip.
“Your bones will be nothing more than a substandard trophy on my wall, but I will take them all the same.”
My assailant fights back harder at those words. The angel moves with him, a fluid grace inhabiting every mirrored motion. His sole attention is on the throat trapped in his unrelenting grip. He doesn’t even seem to register my existence. It’s like he doesn’t hear my labored breathing or feel the weight of my watchful gaze.
He doesn’t notice the tiny piece of paper that escapes from his pocket.
