Page 100 of Beneath Her Skin

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 saysfucking. “They’re just urges,” he says. “I can’t help—I’dneverdo 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’tmatter.” 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 evenhuman, 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.”

10

Iscream and plunge the knife into his belly, startled by how much resistance his muscles put up, like his body is trying to fight back against me. He howls and kicks outward, and I leap to the side to avoid getting hit, dragging the knife sideways in the process. A terrible, musty-copper-sewage odor floods through the bomb shelter, and something dark and ropy bulges out of the cut I made.

I gag, stumbling backward. Judith, though, is completely unbothered. She gazes coolly at her husband with an expression of utter disdain—an expression I’m used to seeing directed at me instead of the husbands who did the betraying in the first place.

It’s refreshing, that Judith breaks the pattern.

“Judith,” he whimpers, his voice small and pitiful. He pushes at the cut like he’s trying to shove his insides back in, but they just squelch between his fingers. Blood splatters against the cement and steams on the cold air billowing in from the open shelter door.

Judith ignores him. She turns to me, her gaze soft. “Are you all right?”

“Bitch!” her husband croaks out. She rolls her eyes.

I nod, even though I’m biting back nausea. The smell is awful, and his blood is hot and sticky on my skin. I don’t know how she can stand it.

“Do you want me to kill him?” she asks gently.

I swallow and take a deep, long breath. Then I let myself look past her, at him. The man who tortured me for three days. He looks like meat.

“Judith, please,” he begs, and Judith’s eyes glint a little, almost like she’s having fun.

“Shut up,” she says, looking at me but talking to him, a coy smile on her lips. It should be disturbing, but honestly—it’s kind of hot. Especially with the way her green eyes shine against the blood smeared across her pretty face.

I can’t let myself think on that, though.

“Judith!” he moans.

“Stop saying my name.” She whirls around and plunges her hand into the cut in his belly, burying it up to her wrist. Then she looks him right in the eye, twisting her arm a little as awful wet squelching sounds come out of his body—sounds I can barely hear over his screaming or my own heartbeat.

Judith wrenches her hand out in a spray of blood, and she’s holding a shiny pink rope, which she pulls and pulls, dragging it out of him. “I never told you how I learned to gut pigs when I was growing up,” she says calmly.

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