On The Bound

Chapter Fifteen.

The snow falls harder. When Jackie Taylor is inside her mouth, grinding against her teeth into digestible atoms, Sade's real thoughts are dangerously close to her tongue. She can remember three key principles in church:

1.) The body is a temple, but hunger is a prayer.

First, Lottie opens the cabin door for Sade as they step outside, their gazes trailing the thick smoke curling from Jackie's toasting body. The heat from the pyre bends the air, twisting the trees into fluid strokes, as if they were figures in a half-finished painting. Sade's vision blurs at the edges, smudging like oil on canvas. She smells jasmine—heady, intoxicating.

Her hands drift over a supple date, its skin soft and yielding beneath her touch. But when she blinks, the fruit is gone, replaced by the rough ridges of pineapple skin pressing into her palms. It feels real—too real. Soot drifts down like black snow, speckling her hair, clinging to her lashes.

Shauna steps forward, one hand pressed against her growling belly, her voice distant, reverent.

"She wants us to."

Lottie stands beside her, silent, watching the way Shauna's blade glints in the moonlight before sinking into Jackie's crisping flesh. The scent of roasted meat fills the air, richer than it should be, thick enough to coat their tongues. Sizzling fat drips onto the fire below, hissing like a whispered secret. Love is stored in possession and teeth.

Sade's vision tunnels again, and suddenly, they are all draped in the fabrics of royalty. They're all at a table now. The snow keeps falling. The table is expanding, full of grotesque meat, fruit, and Jackie. Golden headpieces catch the flickering firelight, jewels nestled against their throats like votive offerings. They are saints and wolves alike, their hunger sharpening their teeth into points.

Sade is dressed in red.

The only one in red.

Her gown pools around her feet like spilled blood, her ears adorned with rubies that gleam like the cuffs of the universe. The others wear white and gold, their hands unmoving, hungry. Their eyes shine with devotion, with longing, and Jackie. She thinks of art—the kind that hang in chapels, that tell stories of sacrifice and salvation.

She thinks of Christ in crimson, the color of martyrdom, of blood spilled for others. And as Shauna raises the blade again, Sade wonders which part of the painting she belongs to—the sacrifice or the feast. God broke pieces of his flesh with his people, did he not?

If she bites down, if she swallows, if she lets Jackie dissolve into something softer, more loving, is it communion or sin? She thinks of the Last Supper, of bread broken and wine poured, of a God who said this is my body and meant it.

The perfume intensifies, wrapping around her like hands, like a whisper at the nape of her neck. She blinks, and the fire dies. Jackie's charred frame shifts in the dying flames. The inviting scent of jasmine curdles into something more. Sade picks at the fruit, inspecting it. Golden flesh splitting beneath her touch, juice dripping down her wrists like something more viscous, something warmer.