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9

“ H oney! I’m home!”

Judith lifts her head as Kenneth’s voice echoes through the house. She’s in the kitchen, cutting potatoes for the dinner she’ll cook for Gloria tonight when everything is finished.

The knife feels good in her hands.

The door slams from the front of the house. Judith slices a potato in half and then calls out, “In the kitchen, darling!” and listens as Kenneth’s footsteps grow louder in the hallway until she can hear him breathing behind her.

“How was your trip?” She sets the knife down carefully and turns to face him. He’s red-cheeked from the cold, his hair tousled from the wind. He grins, and even seeing him face-to-face, she still doesn’t sense the killer in him. He’s good at hiding it. Better, even, than she is.

“Exciting. Busy. I missed you, though.” He bustles into the kitchen and sweeps her into an embrace, complete with a chaste kiss on her mouth. Then he presses his hand against her belly. “How’s the baby?”

“We’re both fine, just like I told you we would be.” Judith peels away from him and picks the knife back up. Slices through the potato halves.

“What are you making for dinner?”

“A roast.” She tosses the potatoes in a pot. “To celebrate you being home.”

“I knew you’d have something planned.” He steps back. “I’ll leave you to it, all right? I want to go stretch my legs.”

The hairs on the back of Judith’s neck stand on end, and she looks away from the potatoes and out the big window at the snowy landscape outside. “Of course,” she says, tightening her fingers around the knife handle.

She listens to him leave, her senses crackling. It’s been almost a decade since she last did this—gathered meat, as her family calls it.

Judith tilts her head and closes her eyes. Kenneth’s footsteps thud softly. Then there’s the whisk of the sliding glass door opening and closing.

She slips the knife into her apron pocket and moves quickly through the house’s hallways, ducking into the living room just in time to see Kenneth cutting across the snowy courtyard toward the bomb shelter. A cold, thick anger surges up inside her. It’s not even directed at Kenneth, not really, but at herself—but how could she ever think he loved her or desired her? How could she not recognize that what he really wanted was the blood and violence waiting beneath the ground?

Especially since she knows firsthand what bloodlust feels like.

Judith doesn’t bother to put on a coat or gloves or scarf. She just steps into her snow boots and slides the door open, the winter wind making her skirt billow around her knees.

Kenneth’s footsteps are dark drops in the snow, and Judith follows them, slipping one hand inside her apron to hold onto the knife.

She’s surprised when she reaches the bomb shelter and finds the door open, brazen, as if Kenneth is so certain that she won’t follow him and find what he has hidden below.

Or maybe he’s just eager. It’s been a week, after all. And clearly, this is what he prefers.

A shout rings out from inside the shelter—Kenneth’s, it sounds like, and Judith shoves aside her bitter thoughts and scrambles down the steps, hitting the ground floor just as Kenneth bursts out of the cell with his hand clamped over his left eye, blood oozing between his fingers. Gloria was successful, it seems.

Good girl , Judith thinks.

Kenneth doesn’t see Judith at first; he’s too focused on stumbling toward the wall of blades, his anger palpable, rising off him like steam. Judith pulls the knife out of her apron pocket and throws it the way she learned as a child, the movements easy and familiar even though she hasn’t done it in years—like riding a bicycle, she supposes.

The knife embeds in Kenneth’s left shoulder with a wet thump, and he howls and whirls around, trying to grab it and failing.

That’s when he sees her. He freezes, one eye a mangled mess, the other wide with shock.

“No,” he rasps, stepping backward. “No, this isn’t what it looks like?—“

“What is it, then?” Judith strides around the perimeter of the shelter so she can pass by the cell—one glance tells her Gloria is alive, although she’s shaking with fear, her face speckled with blood. Judith turns her attention back on Kenneth, who’s inching toward the blades.

“What is it, Kenneth?” The question tilts into the east Texas drawl Judith worked so hard to erase from her speech. “Because it looks to me like you’re torturing women in our backyard.”

Kenneth’s good eye flashes, and he lunges toward the weapons, arm swinging wildly and knocking the blades around so that they clank against each other. He grabs one of the hunting knives, whirls around, and lunges at Judith. She expects it, though, and she ducks away and grabs the first thing she can get her hands on—an axe, the blade polished to a shine.

“You don’t know how to use that,” Kenneth snarls, clutching his knife awkwardly in front of him. He doesn’t know how to fight, Judith realizes. And why would he? He attacks his victims when he has them at their most vulnerable.

When Judith steps toward him, he flinches, then seems to recognize the weakness and manages to compose himself.

“I do, actually.” And then she proves it, swinging the axe toward him with every ounce of her strength. The blade lodges deep in Kenneth’s shoulder, and he howls and drops his hunting knife with a clatter as he falls to his knees and stares down at the blood pouring out of the wound.

“Wh-what the fuck?” he stammers out, wrapping his fingers around the handle.

Judith keeps her eye on him as she grabs the chain hanging from the ceiling and drags it forward. Everything about this feels familiar—the weight of the chain in her hands, the sound of the links clinking through the pulley. It feels familiar, and it feels good.

Especially as Kenneth watches her like he doesn’t believe what he’s seeing.

“We can talk about this,” he says. “Please, Judy, think of the baby?—”

The word baby sends an incandescent rage slamming through Judith’s body, and she screams and loops the chain around Kenneth’s neck. He lets out a strangled scream as she heaves him forward. Or tries to. He’s heavy when he’s dead weight.

“Gloria!” Judith shouts. “I’ve got him! I need your help!”

Kenneth screeches and fights back against the chain around his throat with his good hand. The axe slides out of his shoulder with a squelch and clangs against the cement floor as Gloria steps out, cautious, in that ridiculous transparent lingerie.

“Help me,” Judith spits out through her clenched jaw, and for a moment she thinks Gloria isn’t going to do anything, that she’s going to run. But Gloria looks at Kenneth—bleeding, thrashing, pathetic—and smiles.

It’s the fourth smile Judith has seen from her, and it lights Judith’s belly up from the inside.

“What do you want me to do?” Gloria moves up next to Judith and the two of them stare down at Kenneth, his face red and shiny from the chain cutting off his air.

“Drag him up so I can get to his back.” Judith tilts her head toward the pulley. Gloria lifts her gaze to it, then goes a little pale. But she does pick up the loose chain behind Judith. Together, they pull on it, their combined strength enough to jerk him up to his knees.

“Please!” Kenneth shrieks, froth of sit speckling his lips. “Please, we can talk about this.”

“Hold him in place,” Judith says, feeling more calm than she expected. Gloria nods and clutches at the chain, her whole body braced as Kenneth tries to thrash out of his bindings.

Judith walks around behind him and grabs the meat hook hanging from the ceiling. Kenneth thrashes harder, but Gloria manages to keep her grasp on him.

“Do you want to talk, Kenneth?” Judith drags the meat hook toward him. He screams again, kicking wildly, but she thrusts the hook into the meat of his back, making him scream and arch up, as if he might pull himself out. But Judith has experience with meat hooks, and it’s in there deep.

“Let’s pull him up,” she tells Gloria, who’s staring at Kenneth with revenge in her eyes.

It’s beautiful. She’s beautiful.

“I could strangle him,” Gloria says, sounding slightly dazed. “Right here.”

Kenneth howls in protest and whips his body back and forth against the hook, making the chain around his neck rattle. Gloria yanks back on it, cutting him off.

“Is that what you want?” Judith walks over beside her and pushes back a lock of sweat-soaked hair that’s fallen in Gloria’s eyes.

Gloria doesn’t answer right away. She just stares at Kenneth, her arm muscles straining beneath her skin.

“I want him to suffer,” she whispers.

Judith smiles, butterflies fluttering in her belly. “Then help me hoist him off his feet.”

Gloria nods and drops the chain. Kenneth slumps forward on the hook, gasping in air. Judith takes Gloria’s hand and leads her over to the other end of the meat hook’s chain, which has been wrapped around a bar jutting out of the wall. Together, they drag it up until Kenneth dangles about a foot off the air, twisting and shrieking, trying to bend his arms backward so he can get off the hook.

Judith grabs the chain from around his throat and unwinds it, then holds it loosely in her two hands. Kenneth stares at her, tears shining in his good eye.

“There,” Judith says sweetly. “Now we can talk.”

“Put me down, you fucking cunts!” Kenneth shouts.

Judith hurls the chain into his stomach, making him double over and wheeze. Blood splatters across the floor.

“What is this, Kenneth?” she says. “You told me it wasn’t what it looked like. So what is it?”

Kenneth lifts his head, blood and tears streaking over his cheeks. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Why do you have a torture chamber in our fucking bomb shelter?” Judith shoots back.

He flinches when she says fucking . “They’re just urges,” he says. “I can’t help—I’d never do this to you, Judy. You’re precious. I only do it to whores.”

“Fuck you,” Gloria spits.

A hot, vivid anger rises in Judith’s chest. “I’m not more precious than her,” she says coldly. “Or any other woman you’ve killed while I’ve been cooking and cleaning for you. How many have there been, Kenneth? What do you with with the bodies?”

Judith knows she shouldn’t ask these questions. His answer is only going to stoke her rage further, and she needs to remain calm to do this right. She knows that. But she also wants that rage. She wants to feel it coursing through her bloodstream, wants it to guide her hands as she cuts him into pieces.

“Judith, they don’t matter .” Kenneth swings on the meat hook, still trying to get himself free. She lets him have that hope, for now. “You’re the one that matters. You’re the mother of my child! They aren’t even human , really?—”

Something flashes in the edge of Judith’s vision, as bright as a sun flare. And then Kenneth is screaming and kicking and spraying blood all over the front of Judith’s wool dress.

Gloria steps back, shaking. She’s completely drenched in blood, a sight that makes Judith hot and distracted. She’s also clutching the kitchen knife Judith brought into the shelter, its blade dripping. The cut she made was across Kenneth’s chest, deep enough to spray blood but not deep enough to kill.

“I’m a person, you fucking cunt,” she snarls at him.

Gloria takes deep breaths like she’s trying to calm herself. She’s the most beautiful thing Judith has ever seen: an angel of death, a vision of violence.

“Gloria,” Judith says coldly. “Keep going until he’s dead.”