Lib Novel Page 8
“Psychotic?” Nathan chuckled, the sound dark and hollow in the expansive room. “No, Abby. I’m just resourceful.”
He turned away from me, focusing on the grim task at hand.
“Resourceful,” I muttered under my breath, disbelief mixing with a macabre curiosity about the man before me. Nathan ‘Fangs’ Zhou, the philosopher who tended orchids and chopped up bodies with equal finesse. The contradiction of him was dizzying, and yet here I stood, in the belly of his brutal world, feeling more alive than I had in years.
“Let’s get started,” he said, breaking into my thoughts. And so, we did.
The sound was sickening—a wet crunch followed by the mechanical whir of the blade biting through flesh and bone. It should have been horrific, the gore and the visceral reality of it all. Yet, as I watched Nathan work with clinical detachment, I found myself strangely calm, almost methodical in my assistance.
“Hand me another bag,” he said without looking up, his hands covered in a slick crimson that was thin as paint. “They’re biodegradable; every piece needs to be wrapped. Speeds up the process.”
I did as I was told, suppressing the bile that threatened to rise at the coppery stench filling the air.
“Seriously, don’t throw up,” Nathan said, looking into my eyes. “Trust me. It’ll make it worse.”
I turned away, taking a deep breath. “Right.”
As I watched him move, efficiently segmenting what once was a person into manageable pieces, a morbid thought struck me—I was witnessing a grotesque form of artistry.
“How do you stop yourself from throwing up?” I asked him. “Do you think of this as…I don’t know, some twisted kind of gardening?”
“Exactly. Plants need to eat,” Nathan replied, his tone deadpan as he dropped another piece into the bag I held open. “And I’m just helping them along.”
“Right,” I said, though the joke fell flat, heavy in the silence between us.
Minutes stretched into half an hour, and we worked in sync, a silent understanding developing with each passing second. The task was gruesome, but it was also quick, efficient—Nathan knew what he was doing, and disturbingly, so did I. I only needed a little direction and found myself a natural.
“Have you done this a lot?” I finally ventured, my voice sounding foreign in the dense silence of the basement.
“More than I care to admit,” he answered, pausing to wipe his brow with the back of his arm, leaving a smear of red on his tanned skin. “But it’s part of the business. When you’re the Serpent’s son, you don’t get to choose which tasks fall to you.”
“Nature of the business,” I repeated quietly, pondering the weight of his words.
“Something like that.” He met my eyes for a moment, and I saw the hint of something deeper, a flicker of regret? Resignation? It was gone before I could decipher it, hidden behind his stoic mask once more.
“Does it ever get easier?” I asked, breaking our rhythm as we prepared to load the body into the composter. The question hung between us—morbid curiosity mixed with fear.
Nathan didn’t flinch, his voice steady. “It’s not about it getting easier. It’s about doing what needs to be done.”
There was a cold finality in his words that made me shiver, but not from fear. There was something profoundly disturbing yet compelling about Nathan—the way he could talk about philosophy and tend to his orchids with gentle hands, then turn around and be this…executioner.
“How do you reconcile the two?” I blurted out. “The philosophy major, the gardener, with this?” I gestured to the grim scene before us, to the man who had once nearly ended my life and now…fuck, I didn’t know what now. I thought he loved me, but maybe not anymore.
Nathan paused, his dark eyes locking onto mine. “Life is complex, Abby. We’re all just trying to find balance.”
We resumed our task, lifting the various pieces of Matthews’ body into the composter. As we did, Nathan’s gaze lingered on me, filled with an unspoken question.
“Are you good?” he asked, his voice low.
I met his gaze, taking a moment to look at Matthews’ face one last time. “Matthews was always a creep,” I confessed, surprising myself with the ease of my admission. “He hit on me, asked me out nonstop, objectified me…told me that the best way to get a better assignment was to sleep with him.”
Nathan’s brow furrowed. “Did you?”
I shook my head. “No, but he kept putting me in situations where it was harder and harder to say no,” I said. “I guess I didn’t really think about that until just now.”
“Then I’m glad he’s gone,” Nathan said simply, his tone devoid of remorse.
Nathan’s hand brushed against mine as he secured the lid onto the composter, a touch that sent a jolt through me—I thought he would recoil, but he didn’t.