Page 24 of The Madness Within

Not for him.

I used pliers.

One by one, I crushed his fingers like overripe fruit. The knuckles shattered like porcelain.

He howled.

I pulled teeth next, bare hands, no anesthetic, just purpose. His molars clattered to the floor like cheap beads.

Tendons snapped like violin strings as I dislocated both shoulders and let his body dangle wrong.

By the time I reached his knees, he was sobbing.

“God, I’m sorry,” he wept. “I didn’t want to kill them.”

I leaned close, breath cold and steady against his ear. “You’re not talking to God, Richard. He left this room long before you walked in.”

I let the shadows in then.

Watched as they peeled his skin in strips, feeding off the scent of guilt soaked into his marrow.

He died begging.

I cut him down after the last pulse. Wrapped his body like he wrapped his victims, plastic, duct tape, no name. Left him in a dumpster behind one of his favorite haunts, where he used to hunt the broken.

But I wasn’t done.

Lying near his body was my signature. A single black obsidian scale, sharp as judgment.

The cops found him two days later.

Folded. Packaged. Anonymous.

Like the girls he used.

Justice, signed, sealed, and delivered.

Madeline Grey – Drowned her infant.

They called her Saint Meredith.

Smiled at the way she rocked the bassinets. But I read the reports. The tiny bodies coded as SIDS. The ventilation tubes she ‘accidentally’ dislodged. The cardiac meds ‘miscalculated’ by decimal points.

Seven dead infants. All ruled natural.

All buried before the first suspicion had breath.

Her baby was just the one who made the news.

I got her off the hook.

Murder of an infant, her own.

They called it postpartum psychosis. Temporary insanity. She played it well. Tears like clockwork. Trauma rehearsed down to the last breath.

The courtroom ate it up like gospel.

I gave them the story they wanted, a mother undone by hormones and tragedy, not a murderer.

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