Total pages in book: 160
Estimated words: 161615 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 808(@200wpm)___ 646(@250wpm)___ 539(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 161615 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 808(@200wpm)___ 646(@250wpm)___ 539(@300wpm)
Chapter forty-six
The Smell of Burning Flesh
Kenji
Three hours later, I stood in my war room’s shower, and the water was scalding.
I didn’t want to return to Nyomi covered in so much death.
Therefore. . .I must have stayed in that shower for another hour, letting the heat burn away the smell of smoke, gasoline, and charred flesh.
I'd scrubbed my skin until it was raw.
Changed into fresh clothes.
Brushed my teeth three times.
But some stains didn't wash off.
Some memories didn't rinse down the drain.
“I’m so sorry! I love you. I thought I was helping!” Mami screamed as the flames first touched her skin and began to crawl up her body like a hungry parasite, blistering everything it touched. The way her mouth opened—not to scream yet, but in pure disbelief, as if she couldn't understand what was happening.
Eyes bulged in their sockets, swelling outward. Then, clouding over with a milky film. Her arched brows crisped away in a puff of acrid smoke. Hairline receding in a wave of orange as her scalp bubbled, split, and charred.
And her gaze liquefied too.
I blinked hard, forcing myself back to the present where I was finally walking toward the bedroom.
The hallway stretched before me.
Quiet.
Empty of staff.
Just the guards remained and the twins.
Getting to my bedroom door felt longer than usual. Each step was a battle between the man I was trying to be and the monster I had become tonight.
The smell.
Sweet, sick, and wrong.
Burning hair and cooking meat.
The stench of urine and the chemical mixture of Mami’s perfume igniting from the flames.
And then the noises that would live in my nightmares. The sound of her skin crackling like pork on a hot grill.
The popping.
The sizzling down of her melting cheeks.
The way her fat liquefied and dripped onto the floor and plopped like bacon grease.
Sako had been screaming her name, thrashing against his chains, begging me to stop even though he'd already given me everything I'd asked for. . .
I shoved the image out of my head, stopped at the door, and gestured to the twins. “Get some rest.”
“Will do.” One nodded.
The other followed. “See you tomorrow.”
With the rest of the guards behind me, I stood in front of the door and held my hands in front of me, making sure they didn’t see them shaking.
No one could.
I'd hidden it well down in the prison. Had kept my voice steady, my movements controlled, my face carved from stone as I watched four people I'd cared for confess their betrayals and then suffer for them.
But now, alone in the silence of my own home, the tremors had started and wouldn't stop.
“Kenji!! Forgive me!!” Then, Sako’s tongue swelled and caramelized, pouring out of his mouth as his lips peeled back and skin gurgled. Blistered. Frothed and foamed, then fully opened like overripe fruit, and beneath it the fat sizzled, popped, and oozed like yellow custard between the cracks of red muscle and darkening flesh over-cooked and glistening in the firelight before it too began to blacken and curl.
And the obscene smell of rotten peaches filled the air.
I gritted my teeth, and yearned to press my palm flat against the door and steady myself.
One of the guards spoke, “Sir, are you okay?”
“Yes.” I sneered. “Give me space. I’m thinking.”
They took a few steps away and gave me their backs.
Breathe. Just breathe. You can’t go in there like this. She can’t see this.
I closed my eyes.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
I let out a long breath and my hands stopped shaking enough.
Mami betrayed you. She photographed Nyomi. And Sako was going to help your father take everything you loved. Do not shed one tear for their deaths.
The justification rang hollow in my skull.
Because I also remembered how my mother used to braid Mami’s hair and hum songs during bad storms because she knew Mami was afraid of thunder.
She’d been a sister to me, and now she was a traitor.
Somehow both things were true.
And I had burned her alive anyway.
Her eyes and mouth had stayed open.
Even as her face bubbled and boiled in the flames.
Even when there was nothing left of her features but blackened bone and the sick pop of bursting fluid.
Those empty sockets remained pointed in my direction.
Staring at me.
Accusing.
My stomach twisted.
You did what you had to do. They would have killed Nyomi. Would have taken her.
A cold shiver ran through me.
You didn't have to watch. You could have ordered it and left. But you stayed. You stayed for every second and forced yourself to watch.
I had.
Because if I was going to order someone's death, I owed them the weight of witnessing it. Owed them my presence, my attention, the fullness of my culpability.
That was the code I'd created for myself years ago.
I just hadn't understood until tonight how heavy that code would become.
Sako's confessions had come out in broken fragments between sobs. Names spilled from his mouth like gushing blood from a gaping wound.