Thome looks at the Russian’s throat. He’d love to hear her neck snap. After he’d cut off his father’s cock and stomped on it. While Thome’s father reads aloud paragraphs from his will, Thome watches the snot-kitten and his life go by.

His father’s silence when he had disappointed him. The complete deprivation of love. The periods of punishment spent in the cellar. The first animal he had to kill, and how he threw up and dirtied his father’s hunting kilt. Everything Thome remembers is tied to an off-putting sort of rot. The only thing not rotten in his life is

PETER

Who by now is lying on the sofa downstairs in Thome’s room, pretending to be asleep. He pretends to be asleep so he can think over how he can mount the cameras the hackers gave him. Who doesn’t want to open his eyes anyway because he’s tired of all the shit here.

Peter’s nearly translucent eyelids twitch. When Thome enters the room.

“You know how elegant you look, like you’re from another universe, it unnerves people when they see you.” Thome is deeply moved by the romantic and simultaneously worldly sentences that flow out of him—“But it doesn’t help you, does it? No?” he continues. “You little rent boy, you baby hustler, you look like you’re not even human. That’s why people stare at you. As if you never smell bad or get dirty, inside or out, that’s why they stare at you, and they probably want to tear you to bits because you make it clear to them how debauched they are.”

Thome kneels in front of the sofa. His voice has gotten quiet. As if he could mar the perfection lying before him with his voice alone. Peter’s shirt is a bit rumpled, leaving his chest muscles visible. The right collarbone, the line from his neck to his upper body. Thome gulps, sweats and wants to lick, and suddenly understands why meat eaters react so aggressively to vegetarians. This urge to consume something living can nearly drive one mad. Thome feels close to Jeffrey fucking Dahmer again and is thinking of a refrigerator full of body parts when the doorbell rings. Why would it ring now, just as he’s thinking up a recipe to perfect the flavor of Peter’s neck? “Shit,” Thome whispers and goes to the door.

Peter hears him talking to another man, and now, now is the moment. Peter hides the cameras in the room, and when he is finished with that—Thome enters the room with a redhead.