The man didn't offer his name.
He just limped across the dim room toward a battered table near the window, where a dented metal bowl sat waiting.
He gestured to the chair opposite him.
"Eat," his voice was a dull scrape, the kind of tone that belonged to someone who'd spoken more commands than conversations.
Steam rose from the bowl in lazy coils, curling and vanishing in the half-light. The smell hit me first: heavy meat, onions softened to sweetness, a faint undernote of herbs.
My stomach responded with a hollow twist.
I sat.
My hands found the warm rim of the bowl before my mind thought about it. The heat seeped into my fingers, grounding me in a place that felt like it had no ground at all.
The first spoonful slid across my tongue, thick and oily, clinging to my teeth before heat burned down my throat. Hunger smothered caution for a moment.
The second scoop was slower. The broth pooling in the dented spoon, steam licking my face. I chewed a chunk of meat. It was tender enough to fall apart without effort, but there was a strange aftertaste.
Bitter, metallic, almost chemical.
The third time, my spoon scraped something solid at the bottom of the bowl.
I fished it up slowly, the broth parting around it.
A pale, veined sphere rolled into the center of the spoon. It turned in the liquid, and a cloudy iris stared up at me.
Grey.
Human eye.
My breath stopped halfway up my throat. The heat from the soup turned suddenly oppressive, suffocating. The eye swayed gently in the broth, trapped in its own slow orbit.
I set the spoon down with deliberate care.
My hands didn't shake... Yet.
When I looked up, he was watching me.
He leaned back in his chair, elbows resting on the arms, expression unreadable. His eyes never flicked to the bowl. They stayed locked on mine, as if the soup was just a test and my reaction was the real answer he wanted.
And in that stillness, I understood.
The faint sweetness under the meat wasn't seasoning. The heaviness blooming behind my eyes wasn't exhaustion.
It was poison.
Not enough to drop me instantly. Just enough to slow me down, soften my edges until I could be handled.
I let my gaze drop, as if accepting my fate.
My right hand slid from the bowl's rim to the edge of the table, fingers brushing something cold and solid. A kitchen knife lay there, forgotten or placed for convenience.
"You shouldn't have," I said, the words almost gentle.
His brow creased in the smallest flicker of confusion.
I was already moving.
The chair scraped back with a shriek against the floorboards as I lunged, my weight behind the knife. The point drove up under his ribs, sliding between them with sickening ease. I felt the knife punch through the resistance of muscle and sink deep into the soft heat beyond.
His breath exploded in a short, wet grunt. His hands clawed at my shoulders, nails raking over cloth, but there was no strength in them.
I twisted the knife sharply, once, to make sure. The motion dragged a low groan out of him. The sound of someone who'd finally realized he'd lost.
I stepped back, yanking the knife free. Blood followed in heavy pulses, spreading across his shirt in dark waves. He swayed, knees folding, body crumpling sideways until his temple hit the floor with a dull, final thud.
His mouth opened like he wanted to speak, but no words came.
I stared at him for a moment, chest heaving once, twice.
"Fool," I said, letting the word fall like a stone into the silence.
The knife was still warm in my hand. I wiped it clean on his shirt until the steel caught the light again, spotless, without spilling another drop.
And I left him where he'd fallen, the red pooling around his body and soaking into the warped floorboards.
The air was thicker now. Warm blood always made the room feel smaller, tighter.
The house was quiet, but not dead quiet. The walls creaked faintly, as if the structure itself breathed in shallow, cautious intervals.
I started with the room we were in.
The table was bare except for the empty soup pot, a few greasy bowls stacked beside it, and a mug with a dark ring at the bottom. A drawer in the side of the table yielded nothing but a broken lighter, a bent fork, and a handful of dull coins slick with grime.
Cupboards lined the far wall, their paint blistered from years of steam and heat. Most were empty, the shelves dusty.
One still held tins of food, their labels curling away at the edges. I ran my thumb over the paper: rust-stained, swollen slightly from moisture. The kind of food you keep for a storm, or for someone you don't plan to feed well.
But it is better than the soup.
The memory of that cloudy iris bobbing in the greasy broth turned my stomach again, but hunger had teeth, and it bit down hard now that the adrenaline from the kill was fading.
My hands moved without much thought: twisting the lid of a can until it gave with a soft, reluctant pop.
The smell that rose wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't human.
That was enough.
After I finish eating, I moved into the next room. The smell changed there: old damp, mold crawling along the edges of the ceiling. A sagging mattress sat in the middle of the floor, the blanket stiff with stains.
Clothes were scattered in piles, some clean, most not.
I nudged one heap with the toe of my boot.
Something hard clinked underneath a small tin box, locked but flimsy. I popped it open with the knife's tip.
Inside, a folded photograph, the image so faded it was barely shapes. A man, maybe him, standing in front of a tree. The rest was just blur. Beneath the photo was a roll of black tape and a single hypodermic needle capped in orange plastic.
No weapons.
No stash worth taking.
At the end of the narrow hall, I found a door I almost missed, heavy, set low into the wall, its wood darker than the rest.
A thick iron latch sat just above the handle.
It wasn't locked.
I slid the latch free. The hinges gave a slow groan.
The first breath of air that rolled up from below was colder, wetter. It clung to my skin like fog, and the copper sting of blood was unmistakable. My grip tightened on the knife as I stepped down.
The staircase was steep, the boards beneath me old and flexing under my weight. Shadows stretched along the walls, twisting with the sway of a single bulb swinging on its cord above the basement floor.
When I reached the bottom, I saw the stains first, dark smears across the concrete, splashes that climbed high up the walls. Hooks dangled from chains bolted into the beams overhead, some swinging slightly as if recently disturbed.
The workbench along the far wall was laid out in deliberate order: knives of all shapes, saws, hammers, every handle worn smooth from use. The edges caught the light in dull glints, each one rimmed with dried brown.
And then my eyes found the center of the room.
A heavy table stood there, its surface scarred and darkened. On it lay a body.
Or what was left of one.
Skin peeled back in uneven sheets, ribs opened wide like a cage pried apart, the chest cavity hollow. The eyes were gone, leaving only the dark caves of their sockets staring toward the ceiling.
Beside the table was a large bucket half-filled with cloudy liquid. In it, something pale floated just beneath the surface.
I didn't need to fish it out to know what it was.
The basement smelled like the soup had tasted.
And in that moment, I realized.
This wasn't just the man's basement. This was his kitchen.
Somewhere above me, a floorboard creaked.
"Dammit," I thought.