Page 98 of Beneath Her Skin

Kenneth won’t know what hit him.

9

“Honey! 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 whiskof 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.

---