Page 94 of Beneath Her Skin

A chill vibrates down my spine. “I don’t get it.”

Judith takes a deep breath, her chest rising and falling. “I grew up in a family of murderers,” she says. “I tried to escape them. Instead, I wound up—” She cuts herself off, and I have no fucking idea what to say to any of this. “Well, you know who I wound up with.”

She looks at me again, and there’s that fire in her gaze, so bright that I feel it, too.

“Have you killed someone before?” I whisper.

Judith doesn’t move. “Yes.”

I suck in my breath and fight the urge to run out into the snow. She might have given me wool pants and a cashmere sweater, but I’m still barefoot and weak and starving.

“Many people,” she adds, as if that makes it better rather than worse. “Most of them probably didn’t deserve it.” Judith’s eyes narrow. “But Kenneth does.”

I can’t breathe. Iknewthere was something fucked up about her.

So why aren’t I running?

“That’s how I know I can kill Kenneth,” Judith adds. “And how I know you have the right to your revenge.”

I stare at her, my fear burning away into something else. Because let’s be honest: she’s giving me something I fantasized about more than once in the last three days. After he left me, bleeding and aching, the images would play over and over in my head: Biting his ear off while he was inside me, then grabbing one of his blades and gutting him open. Cutting off his dick.Slicing out his tongue. Breaking his legs and whipping his back the way he whipped mine.

But I knew that if I tried any of it, I’d be dead.

“You’re serious about this,” I say, soft and shaky.

“I am,” Judith’s eyes flash, and her hand drops down to her belly. “Know this, Gloria: I’m going to kill him regardless of what you want. When he’s dead, you can go. I’ll be long gone. I know how to hide from the cops.”

She stands tall and firm. She doesn’t look like an elegant housewife. She looks like a goddess of rage, strong and terrifying, ringed by the light of the fire.

“Why the fuck would I go to the cops?” I finally say.

And at that, Judith only smiles.

7

JUDITH & GLORIA

Gloria makes good progress over the next few days. Judith watches her carefully, pulling on the old lessons from her childhood about how to keep an eye out for escaping livestock. She doesn’t want to use her family’s typical methods, which are much too close to what Kenneth enjoys, but she also can’t risk Gloria leaving the house before Kenneth is dead. It will squeeze too much pressure around her plans if she has to worry about the authorities intervening.

So she keeps one eye open, and one ear up, as her father would always say. Fortunately, the snowstorm buried the house, muffling everything and making it easier for Judith to hear every creak and footstep. Gloria, for her part, tends to stay close. She’s cautious but not fearful. She moves slowly. She seems to watch Judith as much as Judith watches her.

That does make Judith feel strange, being so seen. And it also makes Judith feel strange how brazen Gloria is in front of her. When she insists that Gloria sleep in her bedroom, she expects Gloria to protest. Instead, she only shrugs and says, “That’s fair.”

“I can sleep on the floor,” Judith offers, but Gloria looks at Judith the way she does, like she finds Judith surprising.

“That bed is enormous,” Gloria says. “And I’ve dealt with worse.”

Judith can only imagine. But she is still acutely aware of Gloria’s presence beside her each night, her warmth and scent—softly floral, like hyacinth—suffusing through the thick flannel sheets. Gloria sleeps in her borrowed panties and nothing else, and she strips down every night as Judith tries to look away, politely, and fails.

Because Gloria is beautiful, with large full breasts and long, athletic legs that she always kicks up as she rolls into bed, as if she’s admiring her toes in the soft yellow lamplight. Her hair, now that it’s washed and clean, is curly and wild and falls in graceful swirls over her slim shoulders. She’s smiled twice in the three days since Judith found her, a sly wicked smile that makes Judith’s heart leap up in a way it once did for Kenneth.

Kenneth.

She should have seen what he is the second she laid eyes on him. Maybe it’s because she wasn’t expecting to find another killer at the little liberal arts college where she fled to escape the dark rituals of her family and the taste of human meat. Meat she helped hunt, meat shelearnedhow to hunt from her grandfather, who showed her how to set clever little traps along the highway, and from her mother, who would use a long-range rifle with a specialty scope she ordered out of a catalog.

Killers live in the woods, away from civilization. That’s why Judith came to the East Coast, all those cities strung together like beads. And then the first city boy she fell in love with turned out to be a murderer—and a crueler one than the killers in her family. A crueler one than her.

They didn’ttorturetheir meat, after all. Judith’s mother bought the rifle and the scope for that reason—the promise of an instant death from a distance.

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