“Seven years,” he whispered to her. “If you’re going to do anything stupid, promise me you’ll wait seven years before you do anything stupid?” he asked and Molly said yes, okay, even though all of her, bone and blood and brain, ached to disobey.

bottom-shelf whiskey, $125.50

Molly drinks in gulps, not sips, without pleasure, only an inchoate fury. The alcohol glimmers like a fire in her veins, almost enough to distract from the insurrection of her flesh, the mutiny of her marrow. Almost, but not quite.

She drains the first bottle in an hour, orders a second, a third. Halfway through the last, a man approaches, a milquetoast accountant with chins in duplicate, emboldened by booze. She does not protest his company or his conversation, nor does she argue the arm around her waist, the hand on her thigh; not even the smell of him, rank and oily with want.

At the end of the night, he says to her: “Do you want to get out of here?”

And Molly, burning inside the husk of her skin, burning with anger, burning with hate, replies: “Why not?”

room in a two-star hotel behind the bar, free

He lays her out on the white sheets like a bride. His touch is reverent, cautious. His fingers quiver. Molly sighs as he pushes her shirt up.

For a moment, she thinks blearily of giving in, of delighting in his layered softness, his eager attention, the way his mouth, wet and hot and hungry, climbs the rungs of her ribs.

She twists fingers in his damp, thinning curls and he moans as she pulls at him, inhumanly strong. Molly lets one small, sleek smile escape before the change eddies across her, skin and fat sloughing in ripples, dripping gore atop the sheets.

He shrieks, high and thin, even as Molly’s bones rewrite themselves in the language of carnivore lusts, muscles growing long and lupine. Her skull crunches as jaws lengthen into a muzzle, and teeth into knives.

Too late, he attempts to run.

She lunges.

He screams.

entrails, free

He is delicious, meltingly tender from a lifetime of inaction, marbled with broad strokes of fat. Better than wagyu, Molly thinks, as she cracks his sternum like an egg. Better than sex, she sighs, as she pries loose pustulant alveoli. They burst on her tongue, copper-sweet.

She nuzzles between coils of intestines, finds the cooling gelatin of his liver, slurps it down. She has missed this so much. The years, bland, thin into nothingness, replaced by the damp, salty pleasure of fresh offal.

So much better than anything else she has tasted in these last years. Better than this human helplessness. Better than this waiting, this endless counting of the hours and the weeks and the attoseconds until she is free.

private investigator, $598

“She has a daughter,” he says reproachfully. “An eleven-year-old girl who needs her mother.”