Love's Inferno

Chapter 11- A Freak Box Called an Office

Dante

I had to handle this, manage him, just right. 

Throughout the day I'd made an alarming amount of mistakes which was uncharacteristic (and jarring) but all of them would pale in comparison to the one I wanted to make now. 

I wanted a bloodbath. 

I wanted the kind of bloodbath which would even make Uncle S. squeamish. I wanted to exsanguinate his body but not before I'd made him into something unrecognisable. I wanted to hear his bones break individually in a symphony only I could orchestrate. I wanted to break his bones methodically so that they would strategically rip through the encasing of his skin and protrude haphazardly like cloves hurriedly stuffed into the cross-hatched skin of a Christmas ham. I wanted every snap to be audible to his ears and mine. And I wanted to slowly file away at the exposed nerve endings while he was awake. I wanted to beat his kidneys so badly that he'd suffer from momentary paralysis. And in that paralysis, suffering from the anticipation and inability to move, I wanted to slice the soft of his belly while he watched. I wanted to peel away his flesh like the lid of a yoghurt and then I wanted to reach inside of his body and pull his guts out. I wanted to disembowel him- which he would survive. You can still survive that if it's done with precision. And then I wanted to string them around his neck like a necklace. I wanted him to watch him attempt to vomit at the sight and smell of his own intestine. I wanted him to be so weak he could barely do that. I wanted him to try and shut his eyes to it all and then? Then I wanted to strip him of his eyelids, a fraction of an inch at a time until he was blinded by the arid air and crusted blood. And then blinded, when he could only beg in an incoherent whisper I wanted to feed him maggots. I wanted to release the flies and leave him to decay in his own pile of shit. 

But I couldn't do that yet. 

I couldn't scare her. 

He already had.

 That's what incensed me in a way that made me dangerous. I knew very few factual truths about Shiloh but one of them was that she wasn't easily scared. I knew this from the first night we met. I had watched while she defended herself, at a disadvantage, against a complete stranger. I had seen her might. I had seen her rage (primarily aimed at me) first hand and that's what incensed me. Not the fact that she had been routinely enraged at me throughout the day, but the way that her fight shattered at the sound of his voice. 

I was still uncertain if Shiloh knew who I was, what I was, but I knew with complete certainty she wasn't the type of woman who could be easily intimidated. I knew she wasn't the type of person who easily gave in to fear. If she were the fearful type she wouldn't have entered my apartment, dared to continue living across the way from me and she most definitely wouldn't think of lying to me. If she was lying, she was hedging her bets in the face of potentially grave danger. We don't even have what could be categorized as a relationship but the one we do have, for conversation's sake, wasn't exactly good. That means that she would rather take the risk of incurring my suspected wrath than move out. She would rather, potentially, live across from a covert mobster and gently tend to his menace of an uncle (who is equally if not more dangerous) than move out. And I was aggravated. I hadn't had a chance to ask Uncle S. why she had moved in and why he called it a favour but I could take an estimated guess; it had something to do with McCarthy. 

McCarthy who in her mind was more of an immediate threat than me- her neighbour. 

I opened the door and looked at him, I mean really looked at him for the first time. And I worked hard, very hard, to hide my rage and repulsion at what I found.