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They were mine. I’d owned them since a Halloween party in 1987, when a friend presented them as a gag gift to me and this woman I was seeing, Sophie. It embarrassed us at first, but I cuffed her to my bedpost that night. I’d tied up other women with these cuffs and allowed them to shackle me. I’d bound Orson. Now he bound me. Fucking durable metal.

I sat up, facing him. Desperately and discreetly, I tried to pull the cuffs apart, and when my hands turned numb, I strained even harder. A man-burner named Sizzle in The Scorcher breaks the chain between a pair of cuffs while sitting in the back of a police car, and goes on to slay the arresting officer. Still pulling my hands apart, I recalled that deft little sentence: "The chain popped, O’Malley’s neck popped, and Sizzle climbed behind the wheel and shoved the officer into the wet street." It’s that easy. So break.

"You’re wasting precious energy," Orson said offhandedly as he studied a ding in the blade. "I couldn’t break them when you held the flame under my eyeball." He resumed stroking the blade, and his eyes fixed now on me. "A guy does favor after favor for you, and this is how you repay him. This betrayal."

My mouth ran dry; I had no spit.

"I don’t know what your definition of favor en —"

"It was all for you," he said. "Washington. Mom. We could’ve been amazing, brother. I could’ve freed you. Like Luther. I held the mirror up for him, too, you see. Showed him the demon. He didn’t spit in my face." Orson began pinching his cheeks and scraping the skin off his face with the knife, as if amused with the lack of feeling in his brittle epidermis. He bled in several places. "You came in my house," he continued. "While I slept in my bed. Tortured me." He stared into my eyes. "You scare me, Andy. And that should not happen."

"I swear —"

"I know — you’ll never come after me again. Andy, when a person knows their death is imminent, they’ll say anything. I was carving this guy up once, and he told me his grandfather had molested him. Just blurted it out between screams, like it might change something." He laughed sadly. "You gonna talk to me while I open you? Nah, I’ll bet you’re just a screamer."

Orson stepped down off the stool. The largest candle in the shed was a red cinnamon-scented cylinder of wax with the girth of a soup can. It sat on the shelf beside the back door, and he laid the knife blade over its flame and pulled the Glock from his waistband.

"Pick a knee," he said.

"Why?"

"Disablement. Torture. Death. In that order. It begins now. Pick a knee."

An extraordinary calm enveloped me. You will not hurt me. I came to my feet and found his eyes, invoking that irrevocable love that was our entitlement.

"Orson. Let’s talk —"

The hollow-point bored into the meat of my left shoulder. On my knees, I watched blood drizzle across the plastic. I smelled gunpowder. I smelled blood. I blacked out.

I stared up into the rafters, flat on my back on the plastic, hands still cuffed behind my back. I attempted to move my feet, but they were tied crudely with thick, coarse rope. One hundred and eighty-five pounds crushed into my ribs, and I moaned.

Straddling me, Orson took the knife off the red candle, which now oozed wax onto the plastic. The carbon blade glowed lava orange, and the metal secreted smoke.

I wore a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, and a shabby burgundy sweater. Starting at my waist, the blade cleaved easily through the layers of scorching fabric, all the way up to the collars at my throat. Then splitting the garments, he exposed my bare torso, the chest hair swaying in the tiny drafts effected by candles in this icy shed. Above the thudding of my heart, I thought I heard something on the desert, a distant whine, like mosquitoes behind my ear.

"Wow. Look how fast your heart’s palpitating," he said, placing his hand on my shuddering chest. He tapped my breastbone. "I’m gonna saw through that now. Anxious?"

When the knife point met my left nipple, I chomped my teeth and flexed every muscle, as though the tension might thwart