The Hands that Break

This chapter adds supernatural elements from the Book of Hell series, also available on this site.

The concrete room had not changed.

The glass case was on the wall. Two taxidermied hands inside it, posed like they were praying. The machines sat dark under their lamps, pistons idle, mounts empty. The frame was stripped. The cot was against the far wall with a small blanket.

The girl was sitting on the floor in front of a steel table in the center.

Twenty-one. Naked. Hair tied back out of the way and her hands free. The book sat in front of her, old worn leather, no words on the cover. She turned one page, waited, read another. No one had told her what it did. They had told her to read it. To give the power to Maren.

In the side room, behind thick glass, Maren watched with several of her men.

She had a drink she was not using. The smile was the thin, customer-service one she used when a job was going well.

“She damages it, we cut her fingers off,” one of the men said.

“She won’t hurt it.” Maren said, eyes on the girl. “She does what she’s told.”

Another man nodded at the book. “You sure that junkie wasn’t selling you a paperweight?”

“He owed me. He was high enough to cry when he put it in my hand. Then he went off a roof before I could ask him where he stole it.” She turned the glass in her fingers, still not drinking. “I asked around. Enough people said the same thing. You don’t read it unless you mean it. And if you do, it gives you what you want most.”

On the floor the girl read another page. Turning back and forth trying to understand what order to read the pages in.

Maren’s smile held.

“That’s why she’s out there,” she said. “If the stories are nothing, I lose an afternoon. If they’re not, I didn’t touch it.”

The men laughed like that was competence.

The girl kept working. She did not look up at the window. She had learned there was nothing in the glass that helped her.

Another page finished.

Behind the glass Maren finally drank, small, pleased with the shape of her own caution.

The girl's head hurt.

The last page had one final sentence.

WHAT DO YOU DESIRE?

The girl was confused, but she answered like she thought she was supposed to. “Power?“

The air over the table ripped open with a wet metallic sound. Chains came through first. They spread through the room.

Los stepped out of the tear. Black leather in long panels. Blades at the waist. Paper-white skin. Cuts mapped across the face. The iron ring behind his skull, spikes driven inward. Lila followed, red leather, hooks still open in her shoulders and thighs, chains dragging with no far ends. Emily came last. Cracked metallic gold over her face and body, blood dried in the seams, spikes holding the fractures down her throat and chest. The torn mouth hole made her breath sound wrong.

The girl froze with her hands still on the book.

Los did not look at her.

He looked at the glass.

Maren was already on her feet. One of the men had a gun up. Another was reaching for the door like a door would help.

“We didn’t touch it,” Maren said. The smile tried to stay on and failed. “She did. I never laid a finger on it.”

Los looked at her without emotion.

“We are Los,” he said. “We answer the call of the Lexicon.”

The gun went off. The shot hit a chain and died there.

Chains took two of the men in the side room apart before Maren could make another sentence. A few ran for their lives, but Emily was on them. Gold limbs, a wet sound, and screams. The window between the rooms was suddenly just a thing with blood on it.

On the floor the girl shut her eyes. She kept her hands on the table so they could see she was not running. She stayed as still as a piece of the furniture she had been for months.

Lila did not join the killing.

She walked to the dark machines. Looked at the empty mounts. At the pistons. At the glass case on the wall where two dead hands were posed.

“A copy,” she said. Not loud. “Hell has the real thing. This is what a thief builds when he wants to play at pain.”

Then she turned away from it.

They came through the side door and put Maren in the middle of them. She hit the floor on her knees without being told. The thin smile was gone. What was left was the voice she used when she still thought talking worked.

“Please. I didn’t open it. I wanted it done right. I wanted—”

Los looked down at her.

“You willed it open,” he said. “It asked. You answered. We came.”

The tear in the air stayed behind them.

The concrete drank the heat from her skin. Maren lay strapped to the frame she had built for other people, the one that had held the father while she whispered through the glass, the one that had held dozens before him. Now the leather bit her wrists, her ankles, a strap cinched tight across her waist. Her knees were hauled wide for maximum exposure, and her clothes lay in a heap against the wall.

The case behind Los glowed. The severed hands inside twitched, responding to the presence of hell.

Maren found the voice she used for clients. The reassuring one.

"Please. I can pay. I can give you the girl. I never opened it. I was careful. I did it right."

The girl winced but held still, eyes closed. The words echoed. Another person trying to trade her for freedom.

Los stood between her knees. He looked down at her cunt, at the trim professional wax job, at the muscle of her thighs straining against the straps. His face held no anger or lust.

"You wanted power," he said. "The flesh will learn what worship costs."

He let the words sit in the air. Let her feel the weight of them, heavier than the straps.

"So we answer."

Lila moved. Her chains dragged on the concrete, whispering like insects, and she circled the frame once, slow, taking inventory of Maren's body the way Maren had once inventoried the girl's. She stopped where Maren could see her without turning her head. Her mouth twitched. Not a smile. Something colder.

"You offered her a choice that was not a choice," Lila said. "You whispered into a tied man's ear. You told the girl it was her father's fault."

She completed the circuit, came to rest at the foot of the frame, and looked up the line of Maren's spread body with the detachment of a butcher assessing a carcass.

"How does it feel to be the thing people stand around."

Maren shook her head. The professional mask was gone, cracked off and left on the floor with her clothes.

"I didn't mean it like that. I wanted more. That was all. More."

"Yes," Los said. "That is the answer you gave."

Lila dragged the chair from the observation corner. The same chair Maren had sat in to watch through the glass. She positioned it facing the frame and sat. The leather of her outfit creaked. She opened it only where she needed it open, a slash of red at her hips, and she put her hand between her legs.

Her fingers moved unhurriedly, small circles, the motion of a woman who had decided this show was for her benefit. The spiked halo at her clit caught the light when her fingers passed over it, little glints of metal that matched the piercings waiting in Los's leathers.

"You do not get the hands," Lila said. Her breath was already changing, subtle, the rhythm deepening. "You do not get the girl. You get what you asked for. Attention."

Emily stepped into the space between Maren's knees.

The cracked gold of her mask came close enough that Maren could see her own face warped in the reflection, stretched and distorted like a funhouse mirror. Emily's tongue found her mouth first, pushing past her teeth, hot enough to burn, a leftover heat that had gestated in the concrete of Hell and come back out tasting of sulfur and copper. It moved down her throat, then traced a line to her breast and kept going, down her ribs, across the trembling plane of her stomach, to the inside of her thigh.

The tongue was too warm. Fever hot. It left wet trails that steamed slightly in the cool air of the basement. When Emily turned her head to change angle, the jagged rim of the mask bit. A cut opened at Maren's hip, sudden and bright, welling blood that looked black in the fluorescent light. Another at the soft place beside her cunt, the tender skin there parting like wet paper. Maren cried out and the sound had no authority, no command, just the cracked plea of someone realizing the script had been rewritten.

Emily did not hurry. She licked the blood she had made, the too-warm tongue dragging through the copper taste, and then she put that mouth on Maren's clit and held it there. The heat was focused, concentrated through the torn hole in the mask, a pipe that had learned to be a mouth. Gold scraped Maren's inner thighs every time Emily breathed, little cuts and abrasions that stung and then numbed in the heat.

Maren tried to keep begging. The words came apart on the second pass of that tongue, dissolving into gasps.

"Please. Please I can't..."

Los opened the leather at his hips.

His cock was already hard, thick and heavy with the weight of metal. The Prince Albert ring sat through the head, a heavy gauge of metal that caught the light, and ladders of bar piercings ran the length of him, top and underside, climbing toward the ring like rungs on a ladder. Each bar was a hard little ridge of flesh and steel. He put the pierced head against the mess Emily had made of Maren's cunt, against the wet heat and the smeared blood, and waited one second. Long enough for Maren to feel the cold metal against her rim.

Then he pushed.

The Prince Albert dragged over her entrance, hooked a spark of pain that lit up her spine, and then he was feeding himself into her, bar after bar, each ladder rung stretching her in ways she never imagined inside her body. He bottomed out in one long stroke and the ring kissed deep, pressing against the front wall of her cunt with a bright, ugly pressure that made Maren's mouth open on a sound that used to belong to other women in this room.

Emily stayed on her. The tongue was too hot, burning, licking around the place where Los was filling her, around the taut rim stretched around his shaft, up to the clit, and the heat made Maren's hips try to chase and try to crawl away in the same stupid, contradictory motion. The straps held her where the girl used to be. She was the wet hole being used for someone else's ritual.

Lila watched from the chair. Her fingers worked herself in small, mean circles, the spiked halo grinding against her own clit with each pass. She stared at Maren's face, at the way it was crumpling, at the tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. When Maren looked back, desperate for some mercy, Lila let her see it. The boss of the room getting wet on the show. The customer-service smile was gone. This one was hungrier, darker.

"There," Lila said softly. Her voice was breathier now, the words coming between strokes of her fingers. "That is worship. We do not stop because you asked nicely."

Los fucked her like a machine. Each stroke dragged the ladders out, the bars catching on her rim, tugging, and then he fed them back in, the ring punching that bright pressure against her front wall with every thrust. Maren's cunt had to learn the new rhythm, had to accommodate the steel moving through it. She was loud now, grunting, the sounds torn out of her without her permission.

Maren's begging intensified. It was joined by sounds, broken syllables, and the noise of her body being overwhelmed.

"Wait. Wait, that's... fuck. I can't. I..."

She turned her head. Away from Lila. Away from the woman getting off on her degradation, fingers working faster now, hips lifting slightly in the chair. She tried to hide her face in her own shoulder, tried to find some privacy in the last moment of her dignity.

A chain took her by the throat.

It was one hooked into Lila's thigh, snaking away from her skin, not enough metal to choke her out but enough to stop the choice. It pulled, tightening, until Maren's head was dragged back, forced up, until all she could see was Lila, fingers working the spiked halo, faster now, eyes locked on her face.

"Take it," Lila said. The words were clipped, short, Lila getting close herself, riding the edge of her own orgasm while she watched Maren's. "You wanted to be the center. Be it."

Maren came on a stroke that seated the ring deep, the metal kissing her cervix, while Emily's mouth stayed clamped on her clit, that too-hot tongue flicking, the gold mask cutting fresh lines into her thighs. It ripped through her. Her body betrayed her, clenching around the ladders, around the heat, around the fact of being used in her own frame while the case of stolen hands stared from the wall with their twitching fingers. The sound she made was not a command. It was just a woman breaking open in front of an audience she could not control.

Lila came, quieter, teeth clicking together, eyes on Maren's face like she was taking stock of what they had done.

Los pulled out slowly, the piercings dragging against her swollen, oversensitive rim, each bar catching and releasing. Emily's tongue stayed a moment longer, too warm, tasting what the room had made of her, lapping at the wetness with a lazy thoroughness that suggested she might start again if given leave. The girl had not opened her eyes. The book sat quiet on the table. The tear in the air pulsed, waiting for the part where they took Maren through it and left the rest.

The chains took Maren off the frame like she weighed nothing.

She had time to scream once in the concrete, a long raw sound that started as a word and ended as just noise, and then the tear swallowed her. The sound continued. It thinned. It kept going somewhere else, a long scraped note fading down a hallway that was not in the building, not in this world, a scream that would echo in Hell's concrete for as long as she lasted.

Los turned toward the dark that was left of the door.

Emily turned to look at the girl at the table. The girl sat with her eyes screwed shut, hands white-knuckled on the steel. Bare. Small in a room full of things that used to belong to other people.

“She has nothing,” Emily said. The gold made it rough. “She’s broken. The way I was. We could take her.”

Los did not stop walking.

“No.”

“She didn’t choose any of this.”

“She did not choose us,” Los said. “Hell receives. It does not collect.”

Lila’s chains dropped against the floor. She looked at the girl the way she had looked at Linda, which was to say long enough to be tempted, and then she put it away.

“I can ruin a woman on a floor and the book will not care,” Lila said. “I cannot carry this one home. That would make us the thief.” She glanced at Emily’s mask. “You know what that costs. You coughed it up.”

Emily’s hands flexed at her sides. She wanted to touch the girl. The heat in her mouth had nowhere to go.

Los was already in the tear.

Lila followed. Emily stood a second longer, gold face turned toward a girl who would not look back, then she went after them.

The air knit shut.

The book sat dead on the table. The case was lit. Blood on the side-room glass. Bodies where the men had fallen. Maren’s scream were gone now.

Time passed. Enough that the girl understood no one was going to tell her to open her eyes.

She did it anyway.

The room was the same room. She was alone in it. The hands in the case were praying. There was no window with a woman in it. There was no father in the chair.

She started crying. It came out quiet, like she was still trying not to be a problem.

She whispered into the empty room.

“Dad.”