Page 120 of Cursed
I position the pliers on his pinky finger.
“I’m doing this because you touched Sadie. Because you hurt her. And she belongs to me now.”
Another snap. Another scream.
“The difference between us isn’t that I’m better than you. It’s that I’m honest about what I am.”
I set down the pliers and pick up my phone, taking several photos of Mercer’s bloody, tear-streaked face. I’ll need these later.
“She still has nightmares about you,” I tell him, selecting a particularly graphic image. “Even with me beside her, sometimes she wakes up terrified. That ends tonight.”
I walk to my laptop, sending the images to a secure server. Once I’ve finished with Mercer, I’ll create a special encrypted file that only Sadie can access. She’ll find it when she runs her weekly security scans. Nothing too explicit—just enough for her to understand that Thomas Mercer no longer exists.
“She’ll never know exactly what happened to you,” I explain, returning to my tools. “But she’ll know you’re gone. That’s my gift to her. Now, shall we continue? We still have four more fingers to go, and then we will move to other parts of your body.”
Hours pass like minutes when I’m absorbed in my work. Thomas Mercer has proven to be a surprisingly resilient canvas. His screams faded to whimpers long ago, replaced by the wet, gurgling sounds of a man whose body understands death is coming before his mind accepts it.
I’ve worked methodically, transitioning from fingers to toes, from superficial cuts to deeper incisions. The warehouse floor is slick with bodily fluids—blood, urine, vomit. The smell would bother most people. I find it unremarkable.
“You know what’s interesting about pain?” I ask, wiping blood from my scalpel. Mercer’s eyes roll in their sockets, struggling to focus. “It’s the body’s most honest language. Right now, yours is telling quite a story.”
I’ve carved patterns into his chest—nothing artistic, just systematic lines that expose the muscle beneath the skin.
“Your kidneys are failing,” I observe, noting the yellowish tint to his skin. “Shock is setting in. The human body is remarkably resilient until suddenly it isn’t.”
His lips move, forming words without sound. I lean closer, curious.
“...sorry...” he manages to whisper.
“Apologies are social constructs,” I reply, selecting a larger knife from my table. “They’re meaningless to me.”
I stand directly in front of him, studying his face. His features have become almost unrecognizable after hours of my attention. I feel nothing looking at him—no satisfaction, no disgust, no pity. Just the calm certainty that I’m completing a necessary task.
“It’s time,” I tell him.
The knife slides across his throat in one smooth motion. The carotid artery opens beautifully, spraying crimson across my face and chest. The warmth of it is pleasant against my skin.
Mercer’s eyes widen one final time as his life pumps out in rhythmic spurts. I step back, watching the arterial spray pattern form across the concrete floor. It’s mathematically predictable, the way blood pressure decreases with each heartbeat until the flow weakens to a trickle.
I simply observe as the light leaves his eyes.
I watch the last of Mercer’s blood pool beneath his chair, my breathing steady and calm. This isn’t the first time I’ve taken a life, but it’s the first time I’ve done it for someone else.
For Sadie.
She doesn’t know I tracked down the man who haunts her nightmares, who violated her and left scars deeper than the ones I carved into her skin. She’d never ask this of me—her moral compass, though bent, still points truer than mine.
But I’ve seen how she’d sometimes wake in the middle of the night, her body rigid with fear, eyes searching the darkness for a threat that wasn’t there. I’d hold her until the trembling stopped, until her breathing synchronized with mine. And in those moments, I’d make silent promises.
This is me keeping that promise.
Some might call this love. I wouldn’t know—the emotion is still foreign to me, a language I’m learning through Sadie. But I recognize the fierce protectiveness that burns through my veins. The cold certainty that anyone who hurts her deserves exactly what I’ve done to Mercer ten times over.
She’ll never know the details of what happened here. Only that the shadow that’s haunted her is gone.
I begin cleaning up methodically. The body will disappear. The warehouse will burn. Nothing will remain to connect me to this.
This is my gift to her. Not flowers or jewelry or empty words.
