“Tiffany, you defiant child. If you so much as come close to failing me, I will drag you back into your concrete cell, tear you to pieces, and stitch you back until you are unrecognizable. Do you understand?”

“Okay,” she hisses, tears swamping her eyes. “Okay, okay. I won’t fail.” You sick fuck.

Pleased, he holds out his other hand. His nails are coated in her blood. He looks at the massacre, his face scrunched with repulsion, and wipes the mess away on her neck. She shivers from the feeling of a cold hand wiping warm blood.

“I can still smell the rot in your blood,” he growls. “It’s too bad.”

She is falling backward, her arms pinwheeling to gain balance until her spine thuds against the carpeted floor. She gasps for air, sucking in breath not only to fill her lungs but to stop herself from screaming.

The glass is back in place, window closed, only empty darkness finding its way through. On the sill is a pile of lollipops.

Her muscles collapse, sinking into the floor as her chest stutters with laughter. She can smell the iron from her blood, knows it’s soaking through the side of her shirt. That it will probably get into the carpet and she’ll have to spend hours laboring to clean it up.

But she doesn’t care. Why should she care? She might as well revel in it. She might as well laugh at it. Because no matter what she does, this is it. This is her life.

Oh, Tiffany. You already know. You were made so aware of it, it’s been carved into the flesh of your brain. You already know and it should be no surprise because you’re living in it now. You already know.

That dying is pain.

CHAPTER XX

Tugging and pulling and gripping and smushing and it’s all so complex. It’s all so greatly complex and I’m discovering it all. Discovering it like Daddy did with his sketches in graphite. This is it. This is what I look like on the inside. This is what Daddy looks like on the inside and it’s all so fascinating. It’s like peering into him—me, myself! It’s like understanding something so much deeper than how we work. Her hands are sunk, shoveling through meat and fat, yanking out organs and studying them, noting their placement, their shape and length, before tossing them onto her flattened blanket. She breaks down the creature’s spine, shucking off each vertebrae from the stem, each time producing the stench of rot that she no longer notices.

Everything inside is so complex and dense. So full and endless.

There’s really only one piece she’s particularly interested in. She’d already found it and left it off to the side while she finished the job, as if saving the best for last, but now that there is only a chunky ball of stomach and lungs that sighs out of shape before her, she turns to it.