I looked at him once more. This time, much more carefully. My eyes scanned every part of him, slow, deliberate. I hope I was wrong. I hope I really, really was wrong. I kept repeating that to myself like it could undo what I was seeing. Like wishing hard enough would change the truth.
He looked like a mini giant, asleep and snoring. Each snore was loud, thick, guttural—moving the air itself, shaking it as if the room wasn't solid enough to hold it. A height of two and a half meters, maybe even more. He was spread out wide, like a piece of bread laid flat on a toaster—limbs flung, weight heavy and careless. His legs were wide open, like he couldn't be bothered to pull them in.
He was sleeping right on top of bottles of rum, the same alcohol he'd drowned himself in. And every small movement he made caused the bottle below him to creak. The sound was sharp, ugly. The shards of broken glass beneath him grinding into smaller, finer pieces with each shift of his body.
But no, I wasn't just looking at his physique.
I wasn't focused on how big he was, or how loudly he snored, or how he slept like he owned the floor. I was looking at his face. That's what held me. That's what froze me in place.
It looked exactly like the face of an average pirate out at sea. Weathered. Worn down. Hard lines carved deep into skin that looked like it hadn't seen fresh water in months. A dry face with even drier skin—tight, flaking, cracked around the mouth and eyes.
Then I focused on his mouth. My eyes locked on it, my breath caught. I was hoping—desperately—that there was no blood. I didn't want to see that. I didn't want to go to the extreme, not yet. Not if I didn't have to.
There was none. His mouth was dry. Dry and cracked, but clean. No red. No stain.
Then I looked at the wall of the cabin.
There were sick people in my world too. Monsters hiding behind clean suits and crooked laws. People with too much power and too little conscience. The kind who could do anything—anything—and walk away with nothing more than a fine. A slap on the wrist. Maybe even applause from the right crowd. While others—people who dared to look them in the eye, to challenge them, to exist in the wrong place at the wrong time—would rot in a prison cell, forgotten. Buried alive by the same system that handed monsters their crowns.
And I knew—knew—what those sick fucks loved more than anything.
They liked to display it.
They liked the show. The performance. The twisted art of it. It wasn't enough to hurt someone quietly, behind closed doors. No, they wanted to be seen. They wanted the world to know. To watch. To understand who held the leash—and who wore the collar. They liked the power. The untouchable shine of it. The feeling of being so far above everyone else that gravity itself couldn't drag them down.
As much as I prayed—begged—that this demon wasn't one of them, the truth burned cold.
He was.
Worse, even.
He was them, but without the illusion. No suit. No courtroom. No smokescreen of justice or press statements. Just raw, unfiltered sickness. A sicker fuck than any I'd ever known. In a world sicker than the one I once thought was the worst it could get. A world where people didn't just die—they vanished. Were taken apart, piece by piece. And left behind like a warning. Or a joke.
There was no need for a courtroom here. No trial. No cover-up.
Here, monsters didn't hide.
They snored on beds they stole. They drank from bottles filled with screams. And they didn't pretend to be human.
They knew exactly what they were.
And they liked it.
The walls were covered in trophies—if you could even call them that. Skins, skulls, guns, and swords lined the space like a twisted collection curated over years of violence. But it wasn't the weapons that made my stomach turn. It was the skins. The bones. The things that once belonged to the living.
One skull in particular caught my eye. Close to human, but not quite. The shape was off—longer jaw, too many teeth, or maybe just wrong in a way my mind couldn't fully explain. Not any land-dwelling or sea-dwelling animal I knew. I reached out, touched the skin tacked beneath it. It felt like leather, but not the kind you buy or wear. Something colder. Older. Something unnatural.
It wasn't normal. I could feel that. In my gut, in my bones. It didn't belong to any creature born of clean soil or salt water.
Then I saw it.
The human skull. Nailed to the skin like a signature. Like a stamp of ownership.
And suddenly the pieces clicked into place.
This wasn't some animal hide. This was human skin. Skinned, stretched, and displayed. And no matter how hard I searched the walls, the cabin, the shadows and floorboards and bloodied corners—I found nothing else. Not a single trace of her body. Nor the other girl before her, the one whose limbs had already been taken. No arms. No legs. No fragments tucked into corners or preserved in jars.
Gone.
I turned back to what was left of her.
She needed rest. Needed more than this horror, more than being left in a room of trophies like she was just another prize.
"I apologize," I whispered, my voice barely audible. "I couldn't make you whole before giving you the burial you deserved."
I carried what remained of her in my arms, slow, careful—like a parent would a sleeping child. Her torso was stiff, the blood long since thickened, coagulated with time. It soaked into my shirt, but I didn't care. I only held her closer. Shielded her from the stench of that room, from the gaze of that demon still feigning sleep.
She didn't deserve to be looked at like a thing.
I took her out of that nightmare, step by step, and laid her gently beside the sixth girl—the only place that seemed sacred in this rotting world. No stone. No coffin. But it was the closest thing to peace.
I rested her down softly, positioning her like she still mattered. Like she still had weight. Like she was still herself.
I stayed silent.
She deserved more than my grief.
She deserved silence.
She deserved rest.