"This one's for the gas station." I close the metal around the knuckle. "For sitting in your truck and waving at a woman you were terrorizing. For making her feel watched in a place she goes every week."
Creedy is shaking now. Sweat running down his chest, his face contorted, the bravado stripped clean.
"Please." The word comes out broken, wet, garbled around the saliva pooling in his mouth.
His chin is slick with it.
His bare chest is heaving, covered in sweat and the red bloom of Bloodhound's punch, and the man who practiced his smile in parking lots is begging with a face that looks nothing like the one Saylor's mother saw at her door.
Creedy doesn't get patience.
I twist, slower this time.
I want him to feel every degree of rotation, the way Saylor's mother felt every second of his grip on her forearm in a parking lot where she was supposed to be safe.
The knuckle pops. His finger bends sideways at an angle nature never intended, and the sound he makes is something I'll carry with me for the rest of my life and never regret.
The howl is louder this time. Raw, guttural, bouncing off the kitchen walls. Ounce steps to the window and checks the street. The neighborhood sleeps.
Bloodhound crouches in front of Creedy. Their faces are inches apart.
"You're going to leave Morgantown." Bloodhound's voice is the flattest I've ever heard it. No emotion. No heat.
"Tonight. You're going to get in your truck and drive until West Virginia is in your rearview mirror, and you're not going to stop until you've put five hundred miles between yourself and every woman in this town."
Creedy is sobbing. Snot and tears running down his chin, his destroyed fingers curled against the chair arm at angles fingers aren't meant to bend.
"If we hear your name again." Bloodhound stands. "If we hear Dennis Halstead's name connected to anyone in Morgantown. If Saylor Bell or her mother so much as feel a shadow they can't explain, we won't come to your kitchen."
He leans down one more time.
"We'll come to your grave, and we'll put you in it."
Ounce cuts the zip ties. Creedy slumps forward, cradling his right hand against his bare chest.
The fingers don't look like fingers anymore.
Swollen to twice their size, the skin stretched tight and darkening to a purple so deep it's almost black at the joints.
The index and middle finger bend outward at angles that make my stomach tighten even though I'm the one who put them there.
He doesn't look up. Doesn't make eye contact.
The man who smiled in parking lots and waved through windshields is curled in a kitchen chair in his own sweat, holding his hand.
I set the pliers on the table and stand up.
My hands are steady. I hate them for it the same way I hated them during the compound breach, except this time the steadiness isn't ignorance. It's certainty.
We leave the way we came. Single file through the broken front door, down the frozen sidewalk, boots on pavement in the dark. Nobody speaks.
The ride back to Morgantown takes forty minutes.
I think about Saylor's mother in a gas station parking lot, watching a truck she recognized and feeling her stomach drop.
I think about Saylor against her Honda, sliding to the asphalt, her legs giving out because a man used her father's name like a key.
I think about what my hands did tonight and I don't feel guilt.