Archive of Our Own

It was the happiest day of Tadano Hitohito’s life. Komi Shouko was no more. Now she was Tadano Shouko, his beloved new bride. They’d had a small ceremony at noon, with their families and just a few friends. The party afterwards had gone on longer than they’d anticipated, everyone celebrating with them so happy that after six years of living together they were finally officially family. But eventually they were able to slip away from their well-wishers, needing to get to the train station on time. They were going to go on a five-day honeymoon, away from work and family and other forms of stress. Just the two of them.

“The train should be arriving soon, Mrs. Tadano,” Tadano said.

Shouko smiled. “That’s good to hear, Mr. Tadano.” They both giggled, giddy with the change to their family status. They were holding hands, and Tadano lifted their hands to plant a quick kiss on the back of Shouko’s hand, unable to resist the PDA even as it made him blush a little.

The speakers crackled with the announcement that the train would be arriving shortly, and they exited the warmth of the station to await the train. The cold winter air made them shiver, and they carefully skirted a few icy patches as they made their way to the edge of the platform with their luggage.

“Komi-sama!” someone wailed, and they turned to see an auburn-haired woman running toward them. With a start, Tadano recognized Yamai Ren, and his stomach sank. Yamai had been the bane of his existence in high school, obsessed with Shouko as she was, but they’d had blessedly little contact with her over the past few years.

Yamai ran up to them, skidding on an ice patch as she came, and stumbled to a halt in front of them. “Yamai—” began Tadano, but she ignored him and addressed Shouko.

“Komi-sama, I came as soon as I heard the news. You simply can’t marry this nothing of a man! You were always meant to be mine!”

Tadano always strove to be polite when dealing with others, but he had no patience for Yamai. He stepped between Shouko and Yamai, and said, “No, she’s no longer a Komi. She’s a Tadano. Tadano Shouko. My wife.”

“Noooo!” Yamai lunged at Tadano, startling him with the suddenness of her physical assault. He stumbled backwards, and tripped over a suitcase, bumping into Shouko as he went. Yamai dove forward, hands out-stretched as if to throttle him, but she slipped on an icy patch and fell hard against Tadano, who in turn fell backwards and shoved Shouko even further off-balance. She toppled off the edge of the platform just as the train was pulling into the station.

Tadano flailed a hand toward Shouko, desperately trying to grab her, to no avail. She gave a small, terrified scream as she fell, which was lost under the louder screaming sound of the train desperately braking, trying in vain to avoid her body on the tracks. The trains wheels made brief soft thumpity-thump noises as they rode over her body. Tadano and Yamai both screamed at the same time and rushed to the edge of the platform, their struggle with each other forgotten, but it was impossible to see anything between the side of the train and the platform. But even without seeing anything, they knew. There was no way anyone could have survived that.

It was the worst day of Tadano Hitohito’s life. Tadano Shouko was no more.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tadano lay on his bed—formerly their bed, his and Shouko’s—after the funeral, and stared sightlessly at the ceiling.

If only we had taken an earlier train, before Yamai got there…

If only we’d been at a more modern train station, with those automatic gates that block the tracks…

If only Yamai hadn’t found us there…

If only Yamai had never been born…

Yes. That one. He couldn’t correct Yamai Ren being born, but he could correct her being alive.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yamai Ren came from a wealthy family. And although they never showed their daughter much affection, they did get her the best lawyers money could buy. After all, having a convicted murderer in the family would have been embarrassing.

She was guilty of involuntary manslaughter at the very least, and possibly attempted murder (of Tadano). The train station’s security videos showed all of that very clearly, but her lawyers managed to get her sentence reduced to six months in a psychiatric hospital, to treat her “previously undiagnosed mental disorders.” She lost her job as the lead violinist in the Okayama City String Quartet, but really, that was the least of her worries.

Six months in an institution. Versus Shouko’s entire lifetime, now forever gone.

Six months. I have six months to prepare, Tadano thought. I’m going to need some place private and sound-proof. And a few tools.

He got to work.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yamai Ren came slowly to consciousness, her head pounding and her thoughts a muddle. She opened her eyes into a glare of bright light, then immediately shut them again, moaning against the throbbing pain that the light produced. She tried to reach up and cover her eyes, which was when she realized that her arms were bound out to her sides. Her eyes flew open at that, heedless of the light, and she looked down at her body. She was strapped onto some sort of padded table or contraption, her arms and legs and torso restrained with broad canvas straps around them, holding her in place. Her legs were spread in a V, her arms stretched straight out to the sides. Fear began to penetrate her confusion and pain, and she wondered how she’d gotten to where she was. The last she remembered was walking to the store, and hearing a familiar voice call out to her from behind.

She lifted her head and looked around, trying to determine where she was. It was an unfamiliar room, with bare concrete walls and no windows. There room was cluttered, like a storage space or basement. She could see cardboard boxes, a utility sink, what looked like a freezer chest, shelves full of dusty old books and junk and more boxes, and a dirty wheelbarrow. There was a shiny metal table next to her, looking out of place amidst the grungier clutter, all bright and silver. And it was covered with many bright and silver things, many of which looked sharp. Knives, scalpels, and saws, as well less sharp things such as as pliers and hammers and other tools she didn’t recognize. Her heart began to hammer in her chest, seeing those tools laid out so neatly there.

She tried to convince herself that it was just an ordinary workbench, for someone’s woodworking hobby or some such, nothing she needed to worry about. But she had a hard time believing that.

She heard a noise, and looked to her right to see a door open. Tadano Hitohito stepped into the room. He smiled brightly at her when his eyes met hers. “Oh, good, you’re awake. You were out longer than I’d expected.”

“Tadano! What the hell is going on here! Why am I tied up? Release me at once!”

He walked over to her and smiled down at her. She was made aware that the platform she was laying on was at his waist height, and he loomed over her, making her even more uncomfortable. “No, I don’t think I’ll be doing that. That’s not what you’re here for.”

“Here for? What the fuck does that mean? Release me!” she cried imperiously.

Without warning, his smile never wavering, his hand flashed out and slapped her cheek, hard. It rocked her head to the side and made her see stars temporarily. She closed her eyes and shook her head, stunned to silence.

“I don’t think you realize the position you are in, Yamai Ren. Yamai Ren, the murderer of Tadano Shouko.”

Terror seized her heart, and her eyes went wide as she stared up at him. The same slightly insipid, boringly average face she’d known in high school, some seven or eight years ago. He was still smiling, looking down at her.

“Did that hurt?” he asked, gently stroking her throbbing cheek where he’d struck her.

Still too scared to speak, she nodded. She wanted to cringe away from his touch, but she could only move her head so far. She could feel a bruise forming, her cheek swelling. Her neck was sore from being whipped to the side so violently.

“Good. That’s your first pain. It won’t be your last. Treasure this moment, Yamai, because it’s the best you’ll ever feel for the rest of your life. Every day will be worse. Every day will bring more pain. More terror. More sadness and loss. Every day will be worse than the day before. You think you hurt now? Just wait until tomorrow, when you’ll wish that you only hurt this much. Two weeks from now, this will seem like a holiday.

“I don’t know if you believe in any gods, Yamai Ren, but if you do, you might want to make your peace with them now.”

With that, he turned and walked out of the room. The lights turned off a moment after he closed the door. The darkness was sudden and absolute, less painful than the bright light shining into her eyes, but more frightening. The sudden change jolted her out of her speechlessness. “Hey! Asshole! Come back here! Let me out of here!” she yelled. “Hey!”

There was no response, but a single little spot light on the ceiling turned on, focused on the silver metal table and its tools. She stared at the tools, dread churning her gut as they became more and more ominous in her mind.

She lifted her head and looked at her wrists, tugging and twisting them, trying to work free of the straps binding them in place. The straps on her arms kept her from having much freedom of movement, and she couldn’t get anywhere near slipping free of her bonds. She looked down at her sock-clad feet, and found that they were similarly restrained. There’s got to be some way out of this, she thought worriedly. But she suspected that the only way out involved access to locks or bindings below the table’s edge, far beyond her reach. She twisted her head and looked around, wondering if there was anything she could grab with her teeth, but there was nothing.

She let her head drop back to the table and sighed. Okay. I’m going to have to get him to let me out. Somehow. She had no idea how she’d do that, but she hoped an opportunity would present itself at some point. She thought of Tadano’s smile as he’d slapped her, and shuddered. It wasn’t solely the fact that he’d seemed to enjoy it that bothered her—it was the way his expression hadn’t flickered, hadn’t changed a bit as he struck her.

He’s lost it. He’s insane.

Fear began to build. She looked at the silver table with its sharp implements, and tried not to think of what a crazy person could do with those tools.

Someone will surely be looking for me. They’ll find me soon.

I hope.

Please.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some indeterminate time later, the main lights came back on, startling Yamai awake. She was surprised she’d managed to fall asleep, but there was only so long she could nervously contemplate the table full of tools. Eventually, she’d passed out.

“Good morning,” came Tadano’s cheerful voice.

She looked over to the door to see him entering the room, a cup of some steaming liquid in his hand. She was suddenly aware of two conflicting things—her very dry mouth, and her very full bladder. It galled her, but she tried to be polite, to assuage him, to get him to treat her kindly in return. “Would you let me up, please? I need to use the toilet.”

Tadano walked over and stood at her feet, making her crane her head a little to look down the length of her body at him. He took a contemplative sip of his drink—coffee, she could now smell—and shook his head. “No, you’re there for the duration.”

“The duration? What does that mean?”

“You’ll see.”

“Then how am I supposed to go to the bathroom?”

“There’s a drain under you, for rinsing away any fluids.”

She shuddered at that. What kinds of fluids? She could guess, but didn’t want to think about it too closely. “My clothes will get wet.”

Tadano set down his coffee and picked up a bulky-looking pair of scissors. “True. Let’s get those out of the way.” He started cutting her pants leg at the cuff, working his way up her calf.

“What are you doing!”

“Stripping you, of course. You need to urinate, and I need to get rid of your clothes before I rape you anyway.”

“What the fuck?”

He smiled at her as he continued cutting up the length of her leg. “It’s a traditional way to start torture sessions. Old-fashioned, I know, but it has its charms.”

“You’re going to rape me? But…but I’m a lesbian!”

Tadano laughed. “And how does that make any difference to me? Oooh, except, will I get to deflower you? Will I be your first?”

Yamai bared her teeth at him and didn’t deign to respond to that. “You don’t need to do this, you know. You can just let me go to the bathroom. I won’t give you any trouble.” After I bash your head in, anyway.

Tadano just continued cutting. When he came to a strap across her leg, he tugged the material of her pants up or down as needed to cut around it. Yamai tried to wiggle her legs out of his grasp, but she was too tightly bound to move much. He continued up to her waist, cutting through her panties at the same time as the pants. He smiled at her and held up the scissors. “These EMT trauma shears really get the job done, don’t they?” Without waiting for a response, he moved back down to her feet and repeated the process on her other leg.

He set the shears aside when he’d finished, and tugged and wriggled her pants out from under her, then pulled off her socks, leaving her lower half bare. Yamai burned with humiliation, having her privates exposed like that to this awful madman. The first man to ever see her naked, and it had to be him.

“Huh. I didn’t expect you to have a fully shaved vulva,” Tadano said musingly. He reached out and spread her pussy open, making her flinch. “Pretty labia, though.”

Yamai stared at the ceiling, face red, trying to ignore him. No man had ever seen or touched her there before, and her emotions were a mixture of shame and rage. I’m going to kill him, I’m going to absolutely fucking kill this asshole.

He moved up to her upper body and cut away her shirt and bra in short order, leaving her totally naked. “Oh, nice, you have pierced nipples. That’ll save me from having to do that later.”

She shivered, from more than just the cold. Now she was completely exposed and feeling even more vulnerable. He’s going to rape me? The fear of that warred with her rage and humiliation. He’d so easily and casually stripped her. And with little evident malice—he’d been methodical, almost clinical in his actions, which felt weirdly at odds with his announced intention of rape. Maybe he didn’t mean it?

Tadano stared at her tits for a moment, adding to her humiliation. “Your breasts are kinda scrawny, aren’t they?” he asked.

Yamai continued scowling at the ceiling, and wished she could cover herself. “I’m a B-cup. That’s not that small,” she muttered defensively. Which annoyed her—Why am I even bothering to defend myself to this asshole?

“Sure. Keep telling yourself that. Anyway, you may urinate now,” Tadano said.

Her gaze snapped from the ceiling to his face, startled. “What?”

“You said you needed to urinate. Feel free. There’s a cutout, and a drain beneath you.”

For the first time she noticed that there wasn’t any padding directly under her crotch—there was a gap in the platform she was strapped to. “I—I can’t—” She couldn’t believe how ridiculous the situation was. She was stark naked, threatened with rape, having her body insulted, and she couldn’t imagine peeing in front of this madman while laying flat on her back.

Tadano rolled his eyes. “Bashful bladder? Here, let me help.” He stood beside her and placed a hand on her abdomen over her bladder, and pressed. Hard. Yamai yelped in pain, and an involuntary squirt of pee flowed from her body. “See? You can do it.” He pressed harder, and Yamai whimpered in pain and disgrace. She finally let loose and the pee sprayed forth from between her spread legs, spattering a fair distance away from the platform she was bound to.

When she’d finished, Tadano said, “Well, I guess you really did need to go.” He sounded vaguely impressed, as if what she’d done was somehow remarkable.

Yamai gritted her teeth and looked away from him, fuming. He went over to the laundry tub at the side of the room and attached a hose to the tap. He turned on the water, and came over and hosed down the floor, then sprayed her crotch clean as well. Yamai yelped—the water was cold.

“Oh, sorry, was that cold?” Tadano asked, not sounding sorry at all. She glared at him and didn’t deign to reply. He chuckled, and coiled up the hose and put it away.

He returned to the table, and picked up a black oblong object. With a start, she realized it was an electric barber clipper. “Wha—” she began, then cut herself off. He isn’t really going to…

“You’re not completely naked yet,” Tadano observed. He smiled and switched on the clippers, their harsh buzz setting her teeth on edge. “I’m glad you shave your vulva, that makes things easier. Now let’s get rid of the rest of this pesky hair.”

“No!” Yamai blurted, to no avail. She tried to twist her head out of his reach, but of course could not go far. She wasn’t terribly vain, but she did like her hair. The thought of losing it all was distressing.

Tadano clamped a hand to her chin and held her head steady with an iron grip. “Don’t move, or I’ll cut your scalp,” he warned, staring into her eyes, and she froze.

The clippers slid across her scalp, and she realized he was cutting her hair down as short as it could go. Cool air wafted across her scalp as swaths of hair fell away. She fought back tears of rage and sorrow, at losing this part of her identity. This is just one more thing to get you for, you asshole, she raged internally.

When he finished, he set down the clippers and then looked at her appraisingly. “There. Now you look like a proper prisoner. Which is what you should have become for murdering Shouko.”

Her stomach twisted at that reminder. She didn’t agree that she’d murdered Komi-sama, but there was no denying that she had been a party to her death. Despite six months of therapy that had tried to break her obsession with Komi, she still felt grief and loss at the reminder that the woman she had worshipped was gone.

“But now you’re my prisoner, instead. Soon enough you’ll wish you’d been sentenced to a real prison.”

He went back over to the sink and spent a couple of minutes with his back to her, doing something she couldn’t see. When he turned back, he was holding a large rubber bag with a hose attached. He walked back to the platform where Yamai was bound, and hung the bag from a hook that was dangling from a rod overhead.

“What the fuck is that?” asked Yamai.

“An enema bag. I’m going to give you an enema.”

Yamai stared at him, revolted and aghast. “Why?”

For some reason, Tadano looked abashed. “Um. Well, I do plan to rape you. Rape all of you, I mean. All of your holes. But I’m…a bit squeamish when it comes to anal sex, unless it’s clean.”

Yamai’s jaw dropped, then she burst into slightly hysterical giggles. “You won’t rape my ass…unless it’s clean?” The thought of being anally raped was disgusting and appalling, yet somehow this incongruous requirement of his was just too much. Or maybe the tension of the whole situation had finally gotten to her. She couldn’t help giggling. I shouldn’t be laughing. He’s going to rape me! This isn’t funny! Except…it was. Kind of. The fear she felt just bubbled out in hysterical response. And when he looked even more embarrassed because she was laughing at him, she just laughed all the harder.

His face bright red, he muttered, “Yeah, yeah…” and bent to fiddle with something under the platform she was laying on.

Her laughter cut off with a startled yelp when he raised her leg, still attached to the platform. “What the hell?”

Tadano smiled at her, apparently glad to be back in control. “I spent several months modifying this thing to be flexible enough to do everything I want it to do. I even learned how to weld! It started out as a gynecological surgical table, but it’s so much more, now.”

He moved to her other leg and lifted it too, and now she was laying on her back with her feet in the air, much like any other gynecological examination table. Except instead of simple stirrups to rest her feet in, this one had multiple straps around both her calves and thighs, preventing any freedom of motion.

Tadano stepped between her legs and pulled the hose from the bag over, and Yamai was horrified to feel him probe her asshole with the nozzle. She clenched her buttocks tight, trying to block him. He gave an annoyed little huff at that, then reached over to the table beside him and grabbed a tube of lubricant. He lubed up the nozzle, and slid it between her asscheeks, the lube allowing it to slide in against her will. Then he angled it correctly to slip into her asshole, and Yamai cursed as she felt the long slender tube slide up her ass.

“There. Now let’s get you all cleaned up, hmm?” he said cheerfully. He twisted a valve at the top of the tube by the bag full of water, and Yamai felt warm water start to flow into her colon. “We’ll give you a few minutes to fill up. Two or three liters should do the trick.”

Yamai’s whole body clenched at the intrusive feeling in her ass. “Two or three liters? That’s insane! I’ll pop like a water balloon!”

Tadano shook his head. “No. It’s on the high side, but doable. You may experience some cramping, but that’s not my problem.”

She gritted her teeth and flexed her ass, trying to push the tube back out. Without success. “And then I’ll have to…to get rid of it all.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’ve got a bedpan ready for you.”

“Then why the fuck didn’t you use that before when I had to pee?”

“It was more fun to watch you get embarrassed about spraying across the room. I was impressed by how far you reached.”

“You’re not going to make me squirt this across the room?” she asked sarcastically.

Tadano rolled his eyes. “No, thank you, I clean up enough excrement at work.”

“What? What the hell is your job?”

Tadano cocked his head and regarded her, looking puzzled. “You don’t know what I do?”

“Why would I know that?” She’d only cared about Komi-sama; she hadn’t kept track of what this worm had done with his life.

He shook his head. “I’m a nurse.”

Yamai couldn’t help but glance over at the table with the shiny metal objects. The very medical looking objects. Tadano noticed her gaze, and nodded. “I’ve picked up a few toys here and there over the past seven months.”

“The past seven months?” She was trying to distract herself from the bloating sensation in her gut with conversation.

His expression went flat, his eyes as emotionless and pitiless as a hunting shark’s. “Ever since you murdered Shouko. I’ve been preparing for you.”

Yamai tried to meet his gaze, but couldn’t. She shivered in fear and closed her eyes, blocking out that unnerving stare.

He’s been preparing for me. Preparing what?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Using the bedpan to expel all the water and shit was as humiliating as she’d anticipated, but the pressure in her bowels was too extreme to even consider not doing so. Tadano dealt with the bedpan and cleaning her up afterwards professionally, in a detached clinical manner, not even commenting on the smell. Maybe he really is a nurse. She heard a toilet flush nearby as he emptied the bedpan, and he returned a few minutes later, presumably after having cleaned up.

She glanced over at him as he reentered the room, and gasped. He was naked, except for sandals on his feet. His cock was limp, flopping between his legs, and she tried not to stare at the disgusting thing, but she couldn’t help but focus on it. Is that thing going inside me next?

That thing went into Komi-sama all the time, she realized, and felt queasy at the thought.

Tadano stepped in between her legs and stroked his cock, and Yamai lifted her head and watched in horrified fascination as it grew larger. She’d known, intellectually, that men’s penises got bigger when aroused, but she had no experience with them. His cock had originally seemed disgusting but potentially endurable while flaccid, but it was rapidly becoming larger and more threatening. She didn’t know enough about men to realize that this was one area in which the “thoroughly average” Tadano Hitohito was not, in fact, average. He was several centimeters longer and thicker than average. The thought of something that large penetrating her was awakening a new kind of terror in her. She’d had lovers who liked to play with dildos during sex, so she was no stranger to penetration, but she’d never been fucked by anything so large as Tadano’s cock.

She fought hard not to hyperventilate. Komi-sama endured this all the time. It’s not going to kill me. It’ll just be unpleasant. I can survive this.

Tadano rested the tip of his now fully hard cock against her spread-wide labia, and smiled down at her. “Ready?” he asked cheerfully.

She bared her teeth at him and snarled, “Fuck you.”

He blinked, as if startled by this hostility, then he stepped back and slapped his forehead in a comedically overly-dramatic gesture. “Oh, of course! It’s your first time! It’s my responsibility to make sure that you enjoy this.”

She scowled at him. “What? What the fuck? Enjoy getting raped?”

“Yes, yes, I know, I’m sorry, I’m being an inattentive partner.”

Yamai was utterly baffled by his words. Tadano turned away, his erection bobbling ludicrously as he did so, and picked up something from the silver table. It took Yamai a moment to recognize what it was, despite the fact that she owned one herself—it was a cordless massage wand. He isn’t really going to…

Tadano walked back over to stand between her legs and flicked on the vibrator. “Here, this should help,” he said, as he applied it to her clit.

“Shit!” Yamai convulsed, to have a vibrator applied to her so suddenly, without warmup or foreplay. It was too intense, painfully overstimulating, and she snarled more obscenities at Tadano. But he didn’t seem to mind, he just kept the vibrator firmly in place, despite the minimal writhing she was able to do while strapped down, struggling to get away.

And, after the initial shock had worn off, the vibrations began to be less annoying. More stimulating. Yamai’s heart fell. I am not going to get turned on by this asshole! But, alas, her body seemed to have different ideas. It didn’t help that she used a similar massage wand fairly often on herself—her body was used to responding to this kind of stimulation. She felt her pussy getting wetter, her clit more engorged and sensitive the longer that Tadano held the wand in place. Fuck fuck fuck, I will not come in front of him, she cursed at herself.

She scowled at his gently smiling face, forcing her hatred for him to the forefront of her mind, trying to fight down arousal. But she could feel her nipples harden, her face and chest flush with excitement, a purely physiological sexual response being involuntarily forced out of her in this most non-sexual of situations. He’s going to rape me! Assault me! This is not the time to be having an orgasm!

But it was a losing battle. Less than five minutes later, she felt a familiar glorious contraction in her cunt, heat swelling and flowing outward and making her twitch and gasp. She tried to keep still, to keep her reaction off of her face, so as not to let him know that she’d just come. But his smile acquired a sharper edge, and he murmured, “Ah, so that’s what you look like when you’re coming.”

She burned with humiliation. And still he kept the vibrator in place, slowly moving it around her vulva and mons, stimulating her in different places so she didn’t go numb. Arousal built again, more quickly this second time, and just as she was on the verge of coming a second time, he shifted the vibrator aside and slid his cock into her.

She squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to feel anything. He thrust gently into her, like a lover, not a rapist, and kept the vibrator focused on her clit, moving it in small circles, varying the stimulation. She was appalled to realize that she was about to come again, despite the sheer awfulness of the situation. She bit her lip and fought down the arousal, tried to distract herself by thinking about other things. Like the fact that he’d so casually mentioned torturing her. That he planned to rape her ass and her throat. But the vibrator was relentless in its stimulation, drawing her attention back to her cunt. And his cock, god help her, felt better than any dildo had ever felt, warm and softer than hard plastic, even as the fact that a man was inside her utterly repelled her. No. No, I refuse to come, I won’t come.

As if reading her mind, Tadano leaned forward and whispered to her, “Do you feel that? You’re about to come, aren’t you? You’re coming while getting raped. You’re a shameless fucking slut, who comes on her rapist’s cock. Come for me, you bitch. Come as you get raped. You’re worthless trash who doesn’t deserve any better than this.”

She knew it wasn’t her fault, that the arousal she was feeling was a purely physiological response, forced by the vibrator, not an emotional one. She didn’t actually enjoy getting raped. But humiliation swept through her with her second orgasm, and she choked back a sob at the horror of it all. Again she twitched and convulsed, felt her cunt spasm around his cock, and she was ashamed. Tears leaked from her eyes.

Tadano gave a soft satisfied sigh. “Ahhh, yes, that’s it, you worthless stupid cunt. You’re someone who comes while getting raped. Because you know it’s what you deserve.” His smile, normally so gentle and kind, was frankly evil. Reveling in her degradation.

His words were so strangely at odds with his usual style of speech—up until now he’d been formal and polite, not this crude vulgarian. She felt like she was seeing another side of Tadano. Or maybe this was the real Tadano, the one who hid behind that mask of civility.

The one who blamed her for Komi-sama’s death. Who’d promised to torture her.

As her orgasm faded, all arousal ebbed away with it, and she felt like utter filth, hollow and empty. I came while getting raped.

Tadano set the vibrator aside and pulled back, and for a moment Yamai hoped that he was done. But instead, after a long moment with just the tip of his cock inside her, he plunged his cock full-hilt into her in one fast brutal thrust. It was then that she discovered that up until that point he hadn’t yet fully penetrated her, she hadn’t experienced the full length and breadth of his cock. Now he stretched her out and filled her beyond anything she’d ever experienced in her life.

A gasp of a scream escaped her. She hadn’t intended to scream, she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, but the sudden penetration, the unaccustomed dilation of her cunt forced the sound from her. He slammed into her hard, then pulled out and drove himself into her again, even deeper. He picked up speed, thrusting faster and harder into her, as if trying to drive his cock through her body. He grabbed her thighs and pulled himself deeper into her as he slammed into her over and over, bestial and raw. She felt something inside her tearing, a stinging, burning sensation.

“Stop it! Stop! You’re breaking me!” she screamed. She thrashed to the limited extent that the straps holding her down allowed, trying futilely to dislodge this phallic intrusion.

Tadano’s unnerving smile disappeared and his thrusting paused for a moment. “Breaking you?” he hissed. “Like Shouko was broken by the train, into a half dozen bloody pieces?” He bared his teeth at her, frightening her even more. “This is nothing. I haven’t even begun to break you. But I will. You too will be in pieces before I’m done with you.”

He resumed fucking her even harder than before, relentlessly pounding into her. His cock bottomed out in the depths of her cunt, causing a sharp stabbing pain deep inside her where she’d never felt anything before. She babbled, she begged, she pleaded with him to stop, but he seemed to be beyond reach. His eyes were closed, his normally kind face a rictus of hatred as he raped her. Finally she gave up speech and lay there numbly as he poured his rage into her body through his cock.

Eventually, he shuddered and groaned as he came. It felt as if he managed to drive his cock into her a painful centimeter more, his cock swelling larger. Some distant part of her felt disgust at the sensation of him coming inside her, but mostly she felt relief that he was done. That it was over.

Well, this one is over, anyway. She shuddered. She was no expert on male anatomy, but she thought that men couldn’t come more than once an hour or so. So maybe she’d get a respite before he moved on to her ass and mouth.

After panting for a few moments, he lifted his head and opened his eyes. “Well. That was one.”

One out of how many? she wondered fearfully.

“Let’s move on to your ass, shall we?”

She was surprised to see him pick up the tube of lube that he’d used on the enema nozzle and apply it to his cock. Why…? she wondered.

Then she stopped wondering as she felt the head of his cock pressing against her asshole, a relentless pressure. She squeezed her buttocks tight, clenched her sphincter, tried to deny him entry.

“The more you resist, the more it’ll hurt when I enter you,” Tadano said conversationally. “If you don’t want a ripped anus, I’d suggest you relax and let me in. I’m willing to contribute some lube to avoid tearing, but you have to do the rest.”

Yamai gritted her teeth, but she saw no escape from the situation. He was correct. Against all her instincts, she struggled to relax her asshole, to allow him to enter her—to rape her—without causing physical injury.

The feeling of his cock sliding into her ass was even more repellent than when he’d fucked her cunt. The stretch burned, and she felt like she had to take the world’s largest shit. Her sphincter involuntarily flexed against his cock, trying to push him out, to no avail. As he grunted and bottomed out, his cock fully buried inside her colon, she felt a sharp stabbing pain deep inside her belly. He’s too damn big!

“Fuck, you’re even tighter than Shouko,” Tadano muttered.

Yamai’s eyes went wide. Tighter than Shouko? He fucked Komi-sama up the ass? She was horrified at the notion. Tadano laughed at the dismayed expression on her face.

“Oh, yes, Yamai, your beloved Shouko enjoyed anal sex. She was actually quite the kinky girl. You might be amazed at some of the activities she enjoyed.”

Yamai squeezed her eyes shut, wishing she could similarly block her ears. No, I don’t want to know that! She grimaced as the pain in her asshole competed with the horror that her imagination was providing her, of Komi-sama enjoying this kind of lewd activity with this worm of a man.

“Do you know, we sometimes shared our bed with other friends? Men and women?” He chuckled. “That’s right, Yamai, your beloved Shouko had sex with other women. And quite enjoyed it. The only reason she never fucked you wasn’t because she wasn’t interested in women, it was because you’re so revolting. You weren’t worth her time. You were beneath her,” his words ending in a hiss. “You worthless piece of shit.”

And with that, he began to slam his cock harder, faster, and deeper into her ass, every thrust provoking that sharp stab of internal pain. She bit her lip, and again tried to bolster herself by thinking, Komi-sama endured this; I can too. It didn’t help much.

He pounded away at her ass even longer than he had her cunt, and Yamai recalled hearing that men took longer with each successive orgasm to come. She shuddered; what would it be like by the third round? How long would it take? Maybe he’ll be satiated by then… she mournfully hoped.

At last, he shuddered and groaned again, burying himself deep in her ass. Her ass was sensitized enough from all the abuse that she could feel his cock twitching inside her as he came. She also shuddered, for very different reasons.

Tadano pulled out of her ass, and she felt enormous relief at having him out of there. “Haaah. That’s number two. So to speak,” he said. “On to the next hole.”

Tadano did something to the side of the table, and suddenly the support under her head dropped away. With a startled eep! of surprise, Yamai found herself with her head tilted backwards, neck stretched out taut, staring upside-down directly at Tadano’s glistening cock. She swallowed bile at the sight of the organ that had just raped her. Twice.

“I’m going to fuck your throat next,” he said casually. He picked up a scalpel from the silver table and admired the shiny edge of it for a moment. “Now, I’m sure that you’re thinking that this might be a good time to bite me—maybe even bite my penis off, if you’re strong enough.” He smiled down at her and laid the blade of the scalpel gently against her carotid artery. She could feel her suddenly frantic pulse shivering the thin skin there against the cold metal blade. “You could do that, I suppose, but it would be the last thing you did before I slit your throat.”

Yamai’s stomach roiled with fear, her attention hyper-focused on the faint sensation of the blade resting over her carotid. Suddenly Tadano’s cock wasn’t the most threatening object in the room. Despite having just been raped twice, this very palpable and visceral threat of imminent death ratcheted up her nerves even higher. She felt ashamed as tears of fear formed in her eyes, but she blinked rapidly, trying to will them away, not wanting to show him her fear.

For a long moment, Tadano just stared down at her, his gentle smile unnerving. “If you were smart, you’d bite my penis and die. But I’m betting that your will to live is still too strong. You still have hope that you’ll somehow escape.”

She closed her eyes and shuddered. He’s right, I do still have hope, she thought despondently. I won’t bite him; I won’t commit suicide by cock. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut for a moment, then opened them and glared up at her tormentor. Her rapist. I’m going to live to kill this motherfucker if it’s the last thing I do. She gave a tiny nod—a very tiny nod, not wanting to move her throat against that razor sharp blade. She resigned herself to this further violation. She opened her mouth and glared defiantly back up at Tadano. She had a moment of brief—very brief—satisfaction at seeing him looking startled at this submission, then his smile widened and he stepped closer, shoving his semi-flaccid cock into her mouth.

The taste was the first thing she noticed—it had just come out of her ass, after all, and, despite having had an enema to clean her out, it still tasted faintly like shit. She gagged before it even got very deep inside her mouth, but Tadano didn’t notice or care. Underlying the fecal taste was an acrid musky taste that she didn’t recognize, but after a moment she realized it must be the flavor of semen. That peculiarly masculine flavor revolted her even more, and she by had to tighten her throat to keep from vomiting.

She really wanted to bite down, to hurt Tadano as much as he’d hurt her, but—she could still feel that blade resting gently, ever so gently, against the side of her neck. So she (mentally) gritted her teeth and chose to bear with it. I’ll get my revenge on him eventually. Later.

Her jaw ached at how wide she had to open it to accommodate his girth. She was surprised that he wasn’t as violently energetic as he’d been when assaulting her cunt or ass—he was thrusting slowly, gradually penetrating her deeper and deeper, not burying himself to the balls in one go. She gagged and choked, but she was slowly becoming used to feeling his length in her throat. She didn’t know if this was some residual gentleness on his part, some deeply ingrained sense of what was and what was not proper during sex, or if he had some other reason for moving slowly. But she wasn’t about to question it.

But he did keep going deeper and deeper. The gross wet sounds of his cock sliding in and out of her throat echoed in her head, louder because of proximity than when he’d raped her cunt and ass. She gagged, swallowed, and gagged again. He started going deep enough to block off air, and she began to grab desperate inhalations whenever he pulled back out.

It took ten minutes of gradual progress, but eventually he had the full length of his cock buried in her throat. She closed her eyes, not wanting to stare at his balls, pressed against her nose and eyes. There was no avoiding the acrid masculine smell of his balls, alas.

She could feel her throat bulging out around the phallic intrusion. Tears of humiliation and pain burned in her eyes, and oxygen began to grow scarce as he held his cock still, buried full length in her. She wanted to protest, to push him away, whip her head away, but her restraints and the sharp edge against her carotid kept her motionless. She tried to scream, I need air!, but all that came out was a whining noise.

Just before she passed out, Tadano pulled back, and Yamai sucked in great gasping gulps of air, the gray fog of hypoxia fading away.

“Very good,” said Tadano, sounding pleased. “Now let’s kick it up a notch.”

Before Yamai could even wonder what he meant, he plunged his cock back down her throat, fast and forceful, any regard for her comfort gone. He leaned forward and grabbed a breast with the hand not holding the scalpel, and squeezed tight, using it as a handhold to pull himself deeper into her. She gagged and convulsed, unable to get away from his attack, grabbing quick tiny sips of air each time he pulled back out of her throat.

He grabbed a nipple piercing and twisted it, yanking on it and pulling it tight. Yamai was momentarily distracted from the pain in her throat by the fear that he was about to rip her piercing right out her nipple. But he didn’t go quite that far, though he pulled it farther than she or any lover ever had before. Had she been less pain-wracked, she might have been amazed that her nipples could stretch that far without tearing.

He’d already come twice; as she’d feared, this third time took him much longer than the first two. Yamai discovered that she could get numb to being orally raped, the monotony of the pain and the borderline hypoxia combining into a weird trance-like state of boredom. Or maybe she was just dissociating, trying to escape what was being done to her. After fifteen minutes of pain, Tadano groaned in what was becoming a revoltingly familiar way and froze with his cock buried down her throat, pulsing and pumping cum directly into her stomach. As her consciousness faded from lack of oxygen, she had a vague sense of gratitude that he was coming directly down her throat, so at least she didn’t have to taste his cum.

Orgasm over, Tadano pulled his cock out of her mouth, and Yamai gasped and coughed and gagged, air returning to her starving lungs. She tried to lift her head to keep the mucus and saliva from dripping from her mouth up her nose, coughing and sneezing and gasping all at the same time, her body unsure which part of breathing to prioritize.

Her breathing gradually settled, and she opened her eyes. She lifted her head and snorted, blowing snot and slime and, dammit, cum, out of her nose, trying to clear her airways. She looked up to see Tadano standing over her, smiling happily.

“Y’know, in our unit on domestic violence and sexual assault, they taught us that rape is mostly about power, not sex. I hadn’t really fully understood that until now,” Tadano said. “I mean, I can’t think of a person I’d be less sexually attracted to than you, yet raping you is really quite…invigorating.”

Yamai grimaced, less than thrilled to be part of this personal insight of his. She wished she could wipe the cum and mucus off of her face. Hell, she wished she could move her hands for any reason. She flexed her hands, at the ends of her restraints, impotent, unable to touch or affect anything. The restraint over her wrist kept her from doing anything other than flexing it up and down. Her arm muscles—all of her muscles—were sore for having been held stationary for long.

“I’d initially planned to do this just today, to kick things off as it were, but maybe I’ll come back to this from time to time.”

Yamai felt her stomach clench at how casually he said that, that he’d be raping her on a regular basis. For however long she remained trapped here. Well, I’ll just have to find some way out of here sooner than later. Not that she had any idea of how she was going to accomplish that. Her previous night of fighting and stretching against the straps restraining her had proved terrifyingly fruitless.

“Well.” He reached down and stroked his cock, and Yamai was appalled to see it was fully erect again. “Shall we continue with where we started?”

“How—” she began, then cut herself off. She knew she wasn’t an expert on male anatomy, but surely coming three times in an hour should be enough to satiate anyone, shouldn’t it?

Tadano smiled. “The wonders of modern pharmaceuticals. A double-dose of Viagra is quite stimulating.” His smile became more of a sneer for a moment. “You didn’t think I’d really be able to get it up to you without chemical assistance, did you? I’d be more likely to get aroused by a pile of dog shit.”

He moved back between her legs, and shoved his cock back into her cunt. “I’m pretty sure I’m good for another five or six rounds, at least. Let’s get to it, shall we?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was seven rounds, all told. He worked her body round-robin, going from her cunt to her ass to her mouth and then back around. Early on she closed her eyes and just tried to ignore what was happening, to not react at all to what he was doing. For some reason he never employed the vibrator again, which was a relief. She wondered why he didn’t, didn’t try to humiliate her more by making her climax during rape, but she wasn’t going to question her luck. (Weeks later, she would remember this, and realize that that was the last time she felt any kind of physical pleasure—which was its own sort of torment.)

With every climax, it took him longer to come the next time, which just stretched out the ordeal ever longer. Her cunt was aching, feeling stretched and ripped, her asshole felt like it was on fire, her jaw was cramping and her throat sore beyond all belief. Her stomach roiled in the grossest kind of upset stomach, her thirst and hunger not sated by the loads of semen she’d been forced to swallow. Her face was covered in saliva and snot and cum, which bothered her the most.

“Well. That should be enough of that for one day,” said Tadano, after he came for the last time in her cunt. He stood back and wiped his cock off with a towel, and Yamai wished he would use it on her. But she had too much pride to ask.

Tadano licked his lips and smiled down at her. “Now for act two.”

The unholy light in his eyes caused a spike of fear to run through Yamai’s body. What now?

Tadano pulled a blue latex glove from a box on the table, then turned to her, glove in hand. “You’re not allergic to latex, are you?”

“What? No.”

“Good. I don’t want you escaping from me that easily.” He pulled on the glove with ease, further convincing her that he really was a nurse. He moved back to between her legs and held up his blue hand, flexing it a few times making a fist. “Now that you’re properly warmed up and lubed up…”

Yamai had only a moment of horrified realization about his intentions as he moved his clenched fist toward her crotch. “No!” she shouted, but to no avail.

Tadano aimed his fist at the entrance of her cunt, and punched. Hard. It felt like getting kicked in the crotch, and she gasped in pain. “Nuts, that didn’t work,” he muttered, then unclenched his fist to bunch all his fingers together in a long point. He tucked his thumb in between his fingers, then placed the tips of his fingers against the mouth of her cunt, and shoved again.

Yamai screamed as this time his whole hand slid into her. She felt something tearing as he entered her, stinging and raw and wrong. She spasmed and thrashed against her restraints to the limited extent she could, to no avail.

“Oh, don’t be a wimp,” Tadano chided her. “Babies’ heads are larger than this.” She could feel his hand—inside her—shift as he clenched his fist again. She wanted to throw up. Having his cock inside her was somehow less invasive, less terrifying than his having a hand inside her. Cocks were meant to go into cunts; hands were not. He had his hand inside her like she was some kind of puppet. A meat puppet that he was free to manipulate as he willed. Looking down the length of her body, she could see her abdomen ripple and bulge, external evidence of his hand moving inside her.

And then it got worse, as he began to slide his clenched fist back and forth inside her, pushing deeper, past her cervix into the fornix of her vagina. Stretching out parts of her that had never been stretched before. He pulled back out again, her labia stretching further than they’d ever stretched in her life as his clenched fist came half-way out of her. She’d thought that several hours of being raped had rendered her numb to being penetrated, but she’d been wrong. She gritted her teeth, trying to keep her reactions silent. She didn’t want to scream, didn’t want to give him that satisfaction. But tears of pain formed in her eyes even as she fought down her whimpers.

“Oh, look, here’s your cervix,” he said, and Yamai felt something she’d never felt before—someone grabbing part of her body from the inside. He squeezed and wriggled her cervix around, producing a pain like the world’s worst menstrual cramps. He laughed—the bastard laughed—as she gasped involuntarily at the sensation. It was invasive, violating, and just plain weird—not like any other pain she’d ever experienced before.

He let go of her cervix and drew his hand back partially out, stopping with the widest part of his fist just at the entrance to her cunt, maximizing that horrific stretch. He twisted his fist in a semi-circular motion, and Yamai was certain she felt something tearing again. Looking down, she could see vivid red on the blue glove, confirming her fear.

Then, without warning, he shoved his fist back into her, hard. Punching the inside of her cunt. There was no avoiding screaming at that sensation, of being pummeled internally. He pistoned his fist rapidly in and out of her several times, brutally punching her innards, bruising her vagina from the inside. Her pride broke in the face of that pain, and she wept and begged for him to stop, but that just seemed to egg him on even more. By the time he slowed to a stop, her screaming and pleading had faded into mindless whimpers.

He pulled his fist out of her, and she gasped in relief at having that huge intrusion removed from her.

Her relief was short-lived as then he punched her clit, sending an electric surge of pain through her body that would have made her convulse and curl up in a ball if she hadn’t been so tightly tied down. She couldn’t even scream, the pain was so great. She just wheezed out a whistling breath, pain pulsing and running through her body in a horrible rhythm. As the initial shock faded, she was too tired and worn down to scream, she just cried softly.

“Well. That was even more fun than fucking you,” Tadano said cheerily. “Positively inspiring, which I didn’t think was physically possible at this point.” Yamai opened her eyes and was horrified to see that he was erect again, standing by her head. No, enough, not again… she moaned silently to herself. But he didn’t lower her head back or lay the scalpel against her throat, he just stroked himself for a minute until he came all over her face, a hot disgusting musky-smelling mess. Some cum dripped into her left eye, making it burn. He wiped the tip of his dripping cock off on her cheek, then said, “Good night, Yamai Ren. Tomorrow, the real fun begins.”

This time when he left, he left no lights on, and the darkness was absolute. Alone, broken, aching in places and in ways she’d never ached before, she cried herself to sleep. At least the tears helped rinse the cum out of her eye.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tadano Hitohito was a trained medical professional. He knew that his behavior was not normal. He knew he was not mentally well. He just found it difficult to care. Occasionally his commitment to his carefully planned out course of action against Yamai Ren wavered, and he considered seeking psychiatric help.

But then he would look at the wedding photos. Of Shouko and himself so joyous and happy, ready to spend their lives together. And then he’d look at the crime scene and autopsy photos of Shouko. In pieces, shredded by the train, and his resolve firmed. This is no more than what she deserves. “I’m doing this for you, Shouko,” he murmured to himself.

Deep down, he suspected that Shouko would disapprove, that she would want him to forgive and move on with his life, but he found that impossible to do. She took you from me. I’m going to take her…from herself. That thought made him smile. It wasn’t a very nice smile, but it was a smile nonetheless.

I’ve got a full month. I can make this—make her—last that long. He’d taken a leave of absence, and had said he’d come back to work in a month. Work had been reluctant to part with him, but they understood that he was hurting, that he needed some time to work things out. They just didn’t know how it was that he intended to work things out. They had no idea it involved so many sharp objects, and so very much screaming.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By morning, her whole body ached, not just her abused cunt, asshole, and throat. She’d been held strapped down in the same pose for over a day, and her muscles cried out for movement of any sort. She flexed and strained against her restraints, trying to at least get some blood flowing that way, but the relief was minimal. She found herself hoping that, whatever that asshole had planned for today, it at least involved moving her into a different position.

Whatever he has planned… She shuddered. Getting raped had been beyond horrible, but he’d said that that was just the beginning for what he had planned for her. She couldn’t help but remember that shiny silver table with its sharp and shiny tools. In the dark, unable to see anything, her imagination filled that table with more and more objects of terror.

She had no sense of time, in the total darkness, but she felt like she’d slept a reasonable amount of time, eight hours or so. She’d been surprised that she was able to sleep so soundly, but she’d been so worn out by the previous day that she slept the night through. Pain and fear were exhausting.

And at least while I was sleeping, I wasn’t worrying about what comes next. She tried to calm herself, tried not to let her imagination run away from her and terrify her, but it was difficult. I’m in the hands of a madman.

The lights snapped on just before the door to the room opened, blinding her temporarily. When she finally opened her eyes, Tadano was already standing between her legs. “Good morning! I trust you slept well?”

She ignored him, overly aware that he was between her legs again. Not again…

“Wow. That’s quite a bit of bruising and swelling,” Tadano said conversationally. He spread he outer labia apart, and whistled. “Your clitoris looks twice as big as it did yesterday!” Yamai winced as he fingered her, his every touch made her bruised flesh throb even more than it already was. He picked up a flashlight, spread her cunt open and bent over to peer inside her. She stared up at the ceiling, face burning and fuming at this visual invasion.

“Hmm. Extensive bruising, some minor abrasions, nothing too serious. I’ve seen postpartum women with vaginas in worse shape than this. You should heal up just fine.”

Tadano stood back up and set down the flashlight. He unzipped his pants, pulled out his already erect cock and thrust it into her without warning. She gave an involuntary gasp at the pain, then gritted her teeth against reacting, but a small whine escaped her. He noticed that, and laughed, his every thrust into her producing a sharp jolt of pain. She wondered if her pussy would ever be the same again.

Thankfully, he didn’t last long, slamming his hips into her with a low groan and the by now distressingly familiar sensation of his cock pulsing and pumping more cum into her. She shuddered at the feeling. He pulled out, wiped himself down, and zipped back up.

“That’s not a bad way to start the day,” he said cheerfully. She bared her teeth at him but didn’t deign to reply.

He bent over to do something she couldn’t see. She took a deep breath, and forced herself to speak. She hated talking to him, hated asking him for anything, but a full day without food or water broke through her inhibition. “Can I have something to eat or drink?” she managed to rasp out. Her voice was still hoarse from having her throat fucked for hours on end the previous day, and her mouth was bone dry.

He stood back up and blinked at her, as if startled by this notion. “I fed you three rather large loads of semen yesterday,” he said, somehow making it sound as if that was a perfectly reasonable response.

She gritted her teeth and glared at him. “That’s hardly a meal,” she whispered harshly. “And I’m thirsty.”

“Oh, well, that I can help with,” he said, and he lowered the platform under her head. He unzipped his pants again and pulled out his now flaccid cock. He picked up a scalpel, laid it aside her carotid, and said, “Open wide!” with a smile.

She didn’t want to, but she opened her mouth, and he placed his limp cock in her mouth. It tasted revoltingly like her pussy and his cum. “Ready for your drink?” he asked.

What? He couldn’t mean—

But he did. He started pissing into her mouth, and she coughed and gagged, revolted by the salty bitter flavor. It tasted worse than cum, which was saying something. She spat it out, let it drain out of her mouth, but with her head tilted back like that the piss just started spilling into her nose and eyes, burning, smelling foul, and gagging her, blocking both of her airways, which made her panic. In desperation, she began to frantically swallow, and sniffled mightily, trying to clear her nose enough to breath with Tadano’s cock in her mouth.

His bladder had been full enough that she was forced to drink for almost a minute, nausea fighting against the vile influx of urine. When he finished, he pulled his cock out of her mouth and wiped the tip off on her scalp, making her shudder. She didn’t know why, but that casual use of her head to clean the last drip of piss off his cock was somehow more disgusting than drinking it. “There. Now what do you say?”

“What?”

He slapped her face, on the side that was already bruised and sensitive, and said, “What do you say when someone gives you something to eat or drink?”

She gaped up at him, stunned and disbelieving. He lifted his palm again, and she blurted out, “Itadakimasu! Thank you!” She hated herself for saying thank-you for something so vile, but she didn’t want to be hit again. Her cheek throbbed.

Tadano dropped his hand and smiled approvingly at her. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it? It’s important to maintain good manners, even in difficult situations.”

Yamai felt rage suddenly surge through her body. He’d just pissed in her mouth after raping her, and he dared lecture her about manners? “Difficult situations?” she spat. “Difficult fucking situations? Are you fucking kidding me, you asshole? Untie me and I’ll show you a fucking difficult situation!”

Part of her was afraid that he would slap her again for her bad manners, but he just laughed. “Oh, Yamai, I’m going to have such fun with you!”

Tadano chuckled and moved around her, doing something mysterious to the connections and straps that held her in place. He clipped a cable to the cuff around her right wrist, then a second cable to her left wrist. Similar cables were attached to her ankles. Then he bent over and manipulated something under the table. She felt the pressure of the straps holding her down loosen, and she felt a surge of hope—was he about to let her up for something? Could this be a chance to get away?

Then Tadano flipped a switch on a nearby wall, a motor hummed, and the cables on her wrists began to retract, lifting her up. Tadano continued unbuckling straps from her body as it slowly rose to the vertical, lifting her off the table.

The first thing she felt was relief—her body had been aching from being held immobile in one position for over a day, and moving into a new position allowed muscles to unclench and blood to flow to new places. Then she began to feel pain in her shoulders, as the full weight of her body was finally suspended from her wrists. She writhed her body, tried to kick out, to hit him, but the cables at her ankles held them in place.

Tadano rolled the platform she’d been laying on aside, and she was left hanging suspended in mid-air, arms and legs spread wide. It felt like blood was rushing to the backs of her legs, arms, and buttocks, tingling where her body weight had been compressing her flesh for so long. The renewed blood flow was a relief, but also painful, like half of her body had been asleep.

Tadano walked around her slowly, inspecting her with a detached clinical air, which creeped her out. He prodded her ass and shoulders, and she flinched. “Hmm. I’m going to have to watch out for pressure ulcers,” he said absently, as if to himself. “Didn’t think of that.”

He walked back around to her front, and Yamai stared down at him. For the first time, her face was higher than his, suspended in the air as she was. She bared her teeth and spat at him, but he sidestepped the spittle and it fell to the floor. “Naughty, naughty,” he said lightly. “You don’t have enough fluid to spare, even with what I gave you to drink.”

Which was true; her mouth, tasting vile, was still parched.

“But don’t worry, I don’t want you to die of thirst. Or hunger. So there will be an evening meal tonight. And it won’t even be urine flavored.”

Yamai gritted her teeth, but she had to swallow against the sudden surge of saliva that flooded her mouth at the thought of food. Real food, hopefully with real drink. On the one hand, she had no desire to eat anything this asshole made for her, but she knew she needed to keep her strength up. She needed to be fed and strong enough to escape, when the opportunity presented itself.

“So. As I told you yesterday, that was just the warmup. Today is when the real fun begins.”

Yamai’s stomach churned with nervous tension. Getting raped multiple times and fist-fucked was just a warmup?

He stared at her, a thoughtful expression on his face. “Which would be better, blindfolded or not?” he mused. “On the one hand, the suspense of not knowing what’s coming adds a nice spice to it. On the other, seeing what I’m about to do might be good for ratcheting up the fear levels. Hmm.”

Yamai gritted her teeth, her stomach clenched with fear. For herself, she’d rather be able to see what this asshole was doing, see what was coming, but if she said that, he’d probably do the opposite, so she remained silent.

“Blindfolded it is,” said Tadano at long last.

Dammit.

He stepped behind her and wrapped a long black cloth around her head. For a moment she hoped that it would be some kind of loose-weave cloth, that she could partially see through, but he’d chosen his material well. She saw nothing but a sliver of light above and below her eyes at the edges of the blindfold. No details of any sort.

He’d been right about one thing. Not seeing what he was doing, not knowing what was coming, was its own kind of terror. She heard him moving around the room, rummaging in boxes or drawers for something. He hummed quietly to himself as he did so, a jaunty little tune, which was…annoying. It’s bad enough he’s going to torture me. Does he have to sound so damn chipper about it?

“Let’s see, front or back?” he murmured.

Front or back of what?

“Yes…right about here…” She heard his footsteps, strained to figure out where he was moving to. Hoping for some clue to what he was planning. She heard a sharp crack!, a noise she was unfamiliar with, but the sudden sharp noise made twitch and her heart race.

Crack! The noise repeated, but this time it was accompanied by a line of pain across her back. She screamed, her muscles all tightening against their restraints, making her jump and sway a little as she hung suspended in the air. That was a whip!

Tadano laughed. “Oh, nice reaction.” Crack! The whip struck again, across her ass this time. She jerked, impotently, grinding her teeth against a scream. “What a lovely red line,” Tadano said.

Crack! The whip struck her again, and a small whimper escaped Yamai despite her resolve. The pain was sudden and intense, and left behind a line of stinging pain that burned.

There was a pause, and Yamai wondered if he was already done with whipping her. I should be so lucky. Still, she could hope. But as the pause stretched out, with Tadano silent and motionless, her nerves began to wind tighter and tighter. What the hell is he doing? She was panting in reaction to the pain, her mouth still dry despite her “drink,” and she wondered if he was getting something even more horrible than a whip. Her whole body tensed in nervous anticipation.

Crack! Crack! Crack! Three stripes of pain were laid in quick succession across her back and ass, the pain made all the worse by how tense she was. She jerked and flailed in her bindings, struggling to pull her hands or feet free, anything to escape this pain and this madman.

Tadano seemed to find his rhythm, and now the whip began to strike her in a steady, pain-filled tempo. She lost her resolve and began to scream, though she managed to not beg him to stop. That much pride she managed to keep for herself.

After a couple of minutes and several dozen blows, Tadano stopped, and Yamai could hear him panting too. “Phew! That was quite exhausting!” Tadano said. “Guess I’ve been skipping my upper body workout.”

Yamai didn’t care about his workout routine, but she hoped that that meant he was done, at least for now. She felt his hands at the back of her head, then light flooded her eyes as he removed the blindfold. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then slowly opened them, getting used to the light again.

Tadano was standing in front of her again, smiling up at her. “There, I bet that helped restore some circulation to your backside, eh?” She glowered at him, unable to think of a sufficiently scathing response. Her back, ass, and thighs throbbed where they’d been whipped, and she was pretty sure she felt some blood trickling down her back. She fought down a shiver at that sensation. I am so going to kill you, you asshole, she thought fiercely. She ignored the quiet little voice in the back of her head that whispered, How?

Tadano rolled the platform she’d been strapped to in front of her, and lowered her back down to it, face-down this time. She tugged and strained against the cables holding her as she was laid down, hoping that the change in position would allow her some extra freedom of movement, allow her to reach something, anything, that could help her escape. But there was nothing. In fairly short order, she was strapped to the table again, face-down this time, her head turned to one side.

Then, to her amazement, Tadano began to wash her. Cleaning the whip-marks and rinsing the blood from her back. What the fuck? Admittedly, he was using an astringent that stung, which added to the pain, but she could smell it was a disinfectant of some sort.

He applied a gel and bandages to a few of the welts on her back, the ones that had bled, she guessed. “There. Don’t want you getting an infection, now, do we?” He asked in a cheery tone of voice. It occurred to Yamai that this was probably his bedside voice, the one he used when taking care of patients, chipper and upbeat. It felt utterly bizarre, and incongruous with the whipping he’d just administered to her.

“And as long as we’re at it…” he added, then proceeded to sponge clean her armpits and crotch. “No need for you to smell rank while getting tortured, is there?”

He ended on the side of the platform that her face was turned towards, and she rolled her eyes to peer up at him. He was smiling down at her.

That smile, coming so soon after he’d just whipped her, was terrifying. He really is mad, she realized. My pain makes him happy…but he treats my wounds and washes me too? Why?

She didn’t know if she’d actually said that last word out loud, or if he just read it on her face, but he replied, “I don’t want your wounds getting infected. It would be horrible if you were to die of an infection before I was done playing with you.” His smile dropped, and he patted her cheek gently. “I’ll be back in a bit. I’ve got something I need to show you,” he said seriously. Then he turned and left, again turning off the lights as he went.

A whole-body shudder ran through her at the phrase playing with you. She wondered, Am I just a toy to him? She was afraid that she really was.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tadano sat at his kitchen counter for a long time, staring at his laptop computer. It was closed up, ready for him to take it downstairs to Yamai, but he was having difficulty getting himself to move.

He knew what he wanted to do with—to—Yamai next, but it was going to be difficult. Out of all the torments he had planned for her—and they were so very very many—this was one that promised to hurt him as much as it would hurt her, if not more.

But I need to share this pain with her. She needs to know why I’m doing what I’m doing. What she’s done to deserve this. He wasn’t so far gone as to believe she would agree with him that she deserved what he had planned for her, but still, he wanted her to know. He wanted her to be hurt psychologically in much the same way that he was hurting. Before he resumed hurting her physically.

I’m doing this for you, Shouko, he thought. He picked up the laptop and headed back into the basement.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yamai lay in the dark, the back side of her body pulsating from the whipping she’d received. She didn’t know how long she lay there in darkness, her attention focused on the red throbbing pain, but she was pretty sure it was at least a couple of hours before the lights snapped back on, and Tadano entered the basement again. Her head was turned away from the doorway, so she couldn’t see him at first, which made her tense. When he walked around to the side she was facing, she was surprised to see he was carrying a laptop computer and he looked somber. None of the manic smiling face he’d shown so far while tormenting her.

“I’ve something to show you,” he said quietly. He pulled a small side-table over to beside Yamai’s head, and set the laptop down on top of it. He opened it up, screen facing away from her, and spent a moment clicking away at something before turning it so that the screen faced her.

On the screen was a full-screen image. It was a wedding photo, a family shot, of Komi with Tadano and her parents and brother. They were all smiling broadly, even her normally reserved brother, looking joyous and pleased.

“I want you to know what you did,” Tadano said. “Who you stole from the world—not just from me, but from her parents, her brother, and all her friends. And there were many many friends. More than the mere one hundred she aspired to in high school. We all loved her. And you took her away.”

I didn’t take her from you! she wanted to protest, it was an accident! But she suspected that he would not take kindly to that, would never agree, so she kept her silence.

Tadano stared at the screen for a long, silent moment, and Yamai was surprised to see tears forming in his eyes. But he gritted his teeth, harshly wiped his face dry, and rested a finger on the arrow button on the keyboard. “And this is what you did to her.” He clicked the button.

The image changed to a scene that was so horrific that it took her a moment to understand what it was. It was a train track, covered in blood. And meat. Body parts. None of them were recognizable as Komi-sama, but there was a huge mass of incongruously beautiful long black hair trailing away from a pile of bloody meat and bones—her crushed skull—that was undoubtedly hers.

Yamai moaned and closed her eyes, her physical pain momentarily forgotten. She’d sometimes wondered what had happened to Komi-sama after her fall onto the train tracks, but she’d always avoided thinking about it in too much detail. The thought was too terrifying, nauseating, and depressing.

She felt Tadano’s presence near her, and he whispered into her ear, “You will look at these photos. You will keep your eyes open and look, or so help me I will slice off your eyelids and pin your eyes forward so that you have no choice but to look.”

Bile rose in Yamai’s throat at the thought of looking at that picture again, but she wasn’t willing to risk that he was bluffing. She reluctantly opened her eyes and looked at the screen.

“This is from almost immediately after she died,” Tadano said. “A crime scene photo. One of them, anyway.” He clicked on the arrow button again, and another photo came up. This one showed a different stretch of tracks, where a single pale white leg lay beside the track, looking surprisingly intact and clean, except for at the upper thigh, where it was a mass of mangled meat and bone. “They found parts of her scattered for several meters from where you shoved her onto the tracks.”

Click. Another photo, showing a jumble of clothing and blood and intestines, a torso with one arm still attached, blood spilling out more from this body part. Yamai felt bile rising in her throat, she wanted to look away, but fear of Tadano and horrified fascination kept her looking. She wasn’t even aware she was crying until the screen began to blur.

Click. This photo was in a morgue, where it looked like someone had tried to reassemble Komi-sama on a slab like a bloody jigsaw puzzle. The blood had been washed away, but with her clothes removed, the shredded and grated flesh of her various body parts was more evident. Both legs had been cut off, as had one arm and her head. Her beautiful face was entirely gone, indistinguishable in the pulped mass of bone and skin and brains, only her long hair remaining as an indicator of who this had once been.

“Nooo…” Yamai moaned.

Click. A close-up of her head. Bones and brains and crushed eyeballs, her tongue and a few teeth visible above the surprisingly intact lower lip and chin.

Yamai couldn’t help it, her stomach rebelled, and she threw up. She hadn’t eaten in days, had only drunk a bladderful of piss, but the remnants of that piss and bile burned her throat as she sobbed and puked. Tadano didn’t flinch as she spewed onto the floor and all over his feet. He just stared at her, waited for her to stop heaving.

“No more, please,” she whispered once her stomach had given up on emptying itself. She felt ashamed, begging her rapist and torturer, asking him please, but she couldn’t help it. “Please. Stop. Please.” She closed her eyes as she cried.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why should I spare you from the sight of what you did? You didn’t spare me this sight.”

Yamai couldn’t come up with an answer that she thought he would be willing to hear.

“Open your eyes. There are more.”

Yamai couldn’t open her eyes. She shook her head, tears still pouring down her face.

“Open them. Or I’ll open them for you.”

A cold metal point pressed gently against her eyelid. Fear spiked through her sorrow, and she found she wasn’t willing to test his resolve, was afraid that he actually would slice off her eyelids. She pried her eyes open, to once again see the shattered remains of Komi-sama’s face and head. She sobbed and stared at the screen, and that cold metal point withdrew.

Tadano showed her close-ups of all of Komi’s body parts, in pitiless detail. Yamai felt herself dissociating, felt like she was floating above her body as she looked at this obscene slideshow of death. It was all meat and bones and scraps of skin. Internal organs that were now external, where they had never been meant to be. Komi had obviously been dragged a fair distance under the train, her body tumbling and losing limbs and skin as it went.

Finally, finally, the display of death was over, and the slideshow returned to the wedding photo. The happy smiles were now horrifying, for knowing what would happen mere hours after that photo had been taken.

Tadano closed the laptop. “I wanted you to know,” he said softly. “When you sob and plead and wonder why I’m doing to you what I’m doing to you, remember this. This is why.” He picked up the laptop and walked away, out of her line of sight, and was still and quiet for almost ten minutes. Only the fact that she didn’t hear the door open or close convinced her that he hadn’t left her.

Finally, he walked back over to her, his face still impassive. “Let’s clean up this mess.” He brought over the hose again and sprayed the floor below her head, washing her watery vomit down the drain in the floor. When that was done, he lifted the hose, as if to spray her face. She hoped for a moment that she might even be able to get a bit of clean water in her mouth, but then he shook his head and turned away, crushing her hope of a drink. Her dry mouth tasted of bile and piss.

After he put away the hose, he returned to her side and stood staring at her, his arms crossed across his chest, a small frown on his face. His solemn gaze unnerved her, and against her better judgement, she said, “What?”

Tadano took a deep breath. “I’d been planning to start small. Bamboo slivers under your toenails, pull a few of them off, break a toe or two, etcetera. But looking at those photos, seeing what happened to Shouko, makes me want to start a little larger.”

Larger? The thought of bamboo slivers under her toenails was terrifying enough, but what did he mean by larger? She struggled to keep her breathing even, not panicked gasping. And she was mostly successful, until she saw him move over to the table full of tools and lift a larger object from behind the tale.

An axe.

“No…” she whimpered, then clamped her mouth shut. He’s bluffing. He just wants to scare me. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t, really use that…

Tadano hefted the axe and held it cross-body, staring down at her. Then he moved to the other end of the platform she was restrained to, to her feet. “Damn, wait, I can’t…” he muttered softly, and he set down the axe. The relief Yamai felt was intense. I knew it was just a bluff. He’s just trying to scare me.

Tadano stepped back to the silver table and picked up a long strap with an odd bar sewn across it. He slid it under her lower leg, then he tied it tightly around her ankle, then twisted the bar to make it even tighter. Yamai’s blood ran cold as she realized, it’s a tourniquet…

Tadano picked up the axe again, and gave her a small somber nod. “This is just the beginning,” he said, making it sound like a promissory note. Then he raised it as high as he could in the confines of the basement and swung it down hard.

The physical jolt of the axe cutting through her ankle made the table shudder, and for a moment Yamai felt nothing, making her desperately hope for a split second that this really was just a bluff. Psychological torture, not physical. Then the pain hit, a blinding jolt of lightning running up her leg, the most excruciating thing she’d ever felt in her life. The whipping she’d just endured was nothing by comparison. She didn’t even try to hold back her screams as she had for the whipping, she just wailed, unable to hold anything back. Did he really do that? Did he cut off my foot? Or did he just hit it with the dull side of the axe? It was amazing how hard she could rationalize, even while in agony, to avoid thinking the unthinkable.

Then Tadano stepped back up next to her head. The axe dangled casually from one hand, and in the other hand was a foot. Her foot. It was awash with blood, bones and muscles visible at the top, the pale pink toenail polish she’d put on last week visible on the toes. The physical pain redoubled, for this psychological horror, of knowing that she had been mutilated. Being raped and whipped were terrible, but this was permanent. There was no recovery from this. Her screams of pain merged with sobs of sorrow and despair.

Shock began to set in, slowly making it easier to hold back her sobs. She was panting like she’d just run a thousand meter dash, the pain and shock making adrenaline flood her body. She shivered, despite also feeling like she was burning up.

And finally Tadano smiled. “That’s just the beginning,” he repeated softly, and Yamai finally understood what he had planned for her. He was going to take her apart, rend her into pieces like her beloved Komi-sama had been torn apart by the train. Memories of those horrifying photos flashed, unwilled, through her mind. But unlike Komi-sama’s quick and sudden fate, he was going to vivisect her slowly, methodically, piece-by-piece, making her feel every bit of it.

Tadano pulled back the side-table he’d rested his laptop on before and placed her severed foot on it, right in her line of sight. She stared at it in horrified fascination, the shock contributing to the sense of unreality. That can’t really be my foot, can it?

He then moved back to the end of her leg and began sewing closed the wound at her ankle. The pain of him sewing her up was nothing compared to the terror and fear she felt for what must be coming next. She stared at her foot, at the slightly chipped toenail polish on her bloodied toes, and finally, overwhelmed by everything physical and psychological that had happened to her, she passed out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some indeterminate time later, a sharp acrid smell snapped Yamai awake, and she coughed and tried to shake her head, to get away from it. Her nose stung from the acrid ammonia smell. She opened her eyes to see Tadano standing beside, holding an ampoule of smelling salts.

While she was unconscious he had turned her over and restrained her on once again on her back, but this time she was sitting up, legs outstretched in front of her. Her back and ankle throbbed, and she couldn’t help but stare at the end of her right leg, where bandages marked where her foot should have been.

“Welcome back,” Tadano said.

She glared at him. “I’m going to kill you,” she hissed.

Tadano smirked. “Good luck with that. Fortunately for you, I have absolutely no intention of killing you.”

Indeed, he could have done so at any time in the past couple of days. She dreaded knowing that he wanted her alive—why he wanted her alive.

“And on that note, here’s your supper.” He held up a large glass full of what looked like a gray, unappetizing milkshake. There was an oversized silicone straw in it, like the ones used for boba teas.

“What is that?” she asked, suspicious.

“It’s nothing strange, it’s the same thing I had for dinner. Just all puréed into a form you can eat with a straw.” At her revolted look, he laughed. “You didn’t really think I was going to untie one of your hands and give you chopsticks and a knife, did you?”

That was in fact what she had been hoping for—she’d envisioned slamming a chopstick into his eyeball quite vividly—but he had anticipated her. “What’s in it?”

“Like I said, dinner. Salmon, salad, some broccoli, miso soup, rice, and a bit of star fruit. Same things I had. Oh, and I added some CalorieMate jelly for trace minerals and vitamins.”

“All together?” The combination sounded revolting.

“I’m not here to provide you with a gourmet dining experience,” he said drily. “Do you want it or not?”

She grimaced and nodded.

“And what do you say before a meal?” he asked in a mocking, sing-songy voice.

She bared her teeth at him. “Itadakimasu,” she spat out.

He smiled, and held up the cup, placing the straw between her lips. She took a tentative sip. It tasted…not good, but not as revolting as it had sounded. It was definitely food, she could taste elements of all the ingredients he had mentioned to her. And there was no flavor of piss, at least.

She was hungry enough that she overcame her reticence and sucked down the “meal,” her stomach growling in satisfaction at the first thing she’d had to eat aside from cum and piss in almost two days. Tadano held the cup patiently for her, his face neutral, letting her eat at her own pace.

When she’d drained the last of the sludge, he put down the cup and picked up a large cup of water. “And, as promised, no urine.” He again held the straw to her lips and let her drink. The tepid water was delicious, and she only wished there was more.

As if reading her mind, he said, “Your body needs about one and a half liters of water a day to survive. I’ll give you more in the morning. Don’t want you dying of thirst. Gotta keep up your strength so we can continue to play together.”

That made her wonder briefly if she could go on a hunger strike to keep him from “playing” with her, but she was more concerned with keeping up her strength so that she could escape when the opportunity presented itself. He has to slip up eventually. She didn’t want to think about how she’d escape with only one foot, but she saw a few objects around the cluttered basement that she might be able to use as an improvised crutch.

Tadano put down the empty water cup and did something that caused the platform she was strapped to to lay flat again, back in her original spread-eagle position. She hissed as the weight of her body settled onto the lash marks across her back.

Tadano seemed to take note of that. “Right, pressure ulcers,” he muttered. He walked away and came back holding what looked like a long board covered with foam. He moved her arms down to her sides, still restrained, then somehow attached the board to the side of the platform. There was a loud metallic clack and a vibration went through the platform, and suddenly she was being rotated to the side, so she was laying on her side on the padded board and not her back. “That should help,” he said.

Yamai suspected that the arm she was laying on would eventually fall asleep, but he was right, the pressure on her back was drastically decreased. She supposed it was an improvement, but just barely.

Her legs were still spread wide, strapped to their own supports, now with the right leg up in the air and the left down towards the floor. She doubted that it would be much more comfortable than being flat on her back, but at least elevating her amputated ankle reduced some of the throbbing pain she felt from it.

Tadano poked at her cunt, spreading her lips. Yamai tried not to show how much it bothered her. Even though it paled next to the horrific violation of having her foot cut off, she hated how casually he manhandled her sex. “Swelling’s gone down some already, that’s good,” he noted.

Why the fuck do you care? she wondered, but didn’t ask.

“I’ll see you in the morning for more fun and games.” He left the basement, and again darkness returned, hiding away the sight of the stump at the end of her leg. Not that the pain decreased any. The pulsating red-hot ache kept her awake for hours, wondering what he would do next. Before he’d cut her foot off, she’d thought—had hoped—that there were limits to what Tadano might do to her. Rape, yes, flogging, yes, but surely nothing permanent? Surely he wouldn’t go so far as to kill her?

That fantasy had been destroyed. She now knew he was willing to mutilate and maim here. Her worries about what he might do to her next suddenly expanded in magnitude, because now there were no limits. No boundaries on the evils that he might perform upon her flesh. She tried to reign in her imagination, for the sake of her sanity, but she kept thinking of worse and worse things he could do to her. And she knew that, with his medical background, he had undoubtedly thought of many many other things she’d never contemplated. It was those unknown and unknowable things that disturbed her the most.

It was many hours before she finally managed to drift off to sleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yamai snapped awake with the lights coming back on. She had been right, the arm she was laying on was definitely asleep—completely insensate, she couldn’t even feel it except as a lump beneath her side.

Tadano rotated the platform so she was laying back on her back, then sat her upright again. The change in orientation meant that blood began to flow back to her arm, and it tingled and burned as feeling returned. He wordlessly set a bedpan beneath her, and waited for her to use it. She was surprised she could pee at all, she’d been so dehydrated before last night’s drink.

After cleaning her up, he held up another glass of water with a straw for her to drink and she sucked it down. The cup was large, had to hold at least half a liter, but she drank it all down. She felt a little queasy after she was done, but she didn’t regret it.

He peeled away the bandages around her ankle, and cleaned it, dabbing a bit of antibiotic onto it in a couple of places before reapplying fresh bandages.

Then he lay her back on her back, and he slid two padded blocks onto either side of her head, clamping them down tight, holding her head stationary. Her hearing was muffled by the blocks over her ears, but her eyes swiveled around to follow him as he gathered some unseen objects from the silver table and sat down at her head.

Tadano smiled down at her as he rubbed a very medicinal smelling substance onto her scalp. “I would dearly love to have scalped you,” he said casually, “peeling your entire scalp away in one go. But scalp wounds bleed horribly, and the chances of you getting an infection and dying are too great. Which is why I cut off all your hair instead.” He held up a scalpel above her, and Yamai went almost cross-eyed as she focused on it, her attention riveted by the sharp glittery blade. “So I‘ll just take a few little strips of skin. I’d originally thought to carve the kanji for ‘murderer’ on your skull, but that’s too long to easily fit.”

Yamai felt herself hyperventilating at the thought of him peeling strips of skin off of her body. Despite the evidence of him hacking off her foot, she found it hard to believe that he could actually do something so horrible to her. “No…” she whispered, unable to keep herself from begging, despite not wanting to give him the pleasure.

Tadano’s smile acquired a crazed edge. “Oh, yes,” he replied, and drew the scalpel gently across her scalp.

She couldn’t help it; she screamed. And he laughed.

The only good thing about him slicing tiny ribbons of flesh from her scalp was that it distracted her from the throbbing heat in her ankle. The fresher pain was more potent, she discovered. He sliced tiny strips of skin from her scalp, each with a short bit of fuzzy hair attached to it, approximately two or three millimeters wide and ten to fifteen centimeters long. He draped each strip delicately across her forehead, where they dripped blood onto her face and into her eyes. She clamped her eyes shut against the blood, also hiding from the sight of Tadano’s cheerful face as he cut her apart.

He moved slowly, carefully, and stitched each slice back together after he was done. That stopped the bleeding, but without anesthesia, the needle pricks and tug of the sutures stretching her skin to fill the newly created gaps just added to her pain.

She lost track of time, in pain and despair, but eventually he stopped cutting and stitched up his final incision. He wiped the blood from her scalp and face, allowing her to open her eyes again. She wondered where the strips of flesh that had adorned her forehead had gone, but she couldn’t care enough to ask.

Tadano left, but the lights remained on, making Yamai suspect that he would be back. She lay there, panting against the pain that throbbed throughout her body. She was discovering that fresh pain was only distracting from old pain while it was occurring; now that he was no longer actively tormenting her, the pain in her back from the flogging and her ankle returned to divide her attention. She hurt in so many places, in ways she’d never hurt before.

He returned a half an hour later, a large onigiri in hand. He munched on it as he tidied his workbench, and Yamai realized that not all of his planned tortures were physical. She hated that her stomach was capable of growling in hunger, despite her discomfort, which made Tadano smirk.

He finished his lunch, washed his hands, then returned to face Yamai, a smile on his face. “So, that was a productive morning! Let’s return to your feet—oh, I’m sorry, your foot—for the afternoon.” He pulled up a stool below her foot, and Yamai lifted her head as far as she could to peer down the length of her body at him. The view across her bare breasts just reminded her that she was naked in front of this mad-man, which added to her despair.

“Originally I’d planned to do this with both of your feet, but, well, I got a little ahead of myself yesterday. Sorry about that.” He actually sounded regretful. He picked up something slim and brown—a bamboo sliver, she realized. “Shall we begin?”

Yamai quickly discovered that there was a reason that bamboo splinters under the fingernails was such a clichéd form of torture—because it was very effective. How such small slivers of wood could produce so much pain was beyond her, but she screamed and sobbed as Tadano slowly, methodically shoved the bamboo slivers under each nail, one by one. She kept curling her toes, trying to get away, but of course she couldn’t actually flee from him.

She tried to not watch him—she told herself it wouldn’t matter if she knew what he was going to do next; he’d do it regardless. But she couldn’t help but watch, desperate to know where the next burst of pain would come from. The worst thing about watching him was seeing how fucking happy he looked. He had a small, gentle smile on his face as he tortured her, and she thought she heard him humming under his breath at one point, when her screaming paused for a few moments of gasping breath.

The pain wasn’t as intense as having her foot cut off, but in a way that was worse—that pain had been so horrible that she had passed out. Here, although she wished she could pass out and escape for a while, she couldn’t.

He wiggled the splinters under he toenails, moving them from side to side, detaching the nail completely from her toe. Then he picked up a pair of pliers and plucked the nails completely off. By that point, there was so little connection between the nails and her toes, it hardly added to her pain, except for psychologically.

After the fifth toenail came off, she was left panting, tears dripping down her face, a vague sense of relief that at least it was over. There were no more nails to pull. She lay there, eyes closed, trying to choke back her sobs and get her breathing under control. So she didn’t see when he picked up a simple salt shaker, but she surely felt it when he poured salt on her raw and exposed toes. Her screaming renewed, harsher and louder this time, as the tops of all five toes exploded at the same time with redoubled agony.

She didn’t pass out. She wished she could.

After an incalculable time—one minute? Ten? It was impossible to say when experiencing such pain—Tadano rinsed the salt off of her toes. “Hmm. That seems to have staunched the bleeding, in any event,” he observed. “I’ll just give you a quick wipe-down with an antiseptic and then bandage them up.”

The antiseptic, she soon learned, was not one that had an anesthetic mixed in. The cleaning was almost as painful as the salt, but it was quick, his touch gentle and sure, as he cleaned and bandaged her toes.

“There! That should do it for today.” And he turned and left, leaving the lights on. Yamai lay there and tried to think, tried to figure out how she could escape this madman. Her urgency, which had been very high to begin with, was higher, now that she knew what she was dealing with. A madman. Driven by pain and sorrow, determined to inflict at least as much pain and sorrow upon her.

Maybe I’ll go mad too…

An hour or so later, Tadano returned, a cup of sludge in hand. He set it on the table, then picked up the empty water cup and filled it at the sink. He once again propped her up at an angle to make drinking easier, and held her “dinner” up to her lips for her to drink through a straw. She grimaced at the taste—chicken and cabbage, tonight?—but doggedly drank it, determined to keep up her strength, so she could escape when the opportunity presented itself.

When she’d finished, he flipped her over to her front and lay her back down on her stomach, to relieve the pressure sores on her back. “Good night, sweet dreams,” he said, as he exited the room.

As darkness once again took over the room, Yamai shivered. Sweet dreams, my ass, she thought bitterly. The only sweet dream I’ll have is one of bashing in your head.

Somehow…

Once again, it took her many pain-filled hours to drift off to sleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The pain made for a very restless night of sleep. When Tadano came downstairs the next morning, he was holding a handful of odd wire shapes in one hand. Before Yamai could figure out what they were, he set them down on the silver table and set about emptying her bedpan, cleaning her off without comment. He checked her wounds, replaced a few bandages, adding more antibiotic salve here and there.

Then he flipped her back over and angled the platform so she was lifted a few degrees and wordlessly placed a cup and straw to her lips. She drank greedily, her parched body grateful for the relief.

Tadano turned to the table and put away the cup and picked up one of the odd metal wire shapes he’d brought with him. He smiled at Yamai. “I’ve been working on these for several days now, and they’re finally ready for use.”

Yamai just glared at him, not willing talk. He would torture her either way; she had no desire to engage with him.

Tadano didn’t seem put off by her silence, but he held the wire up in front of her face so she could see it better. It looked like a long piece of coat hanger, where he’d bent the end of it into a complex shape that defied her understanding. “Do you recognize this?”

Warily, she shook her head.

“Well, it might be difficult to read backwards, but it’s the kanji for “meat.”

Yamai stared at the twisted metal, and could just barely see what he meant. So? she wondered.

He turned back to the table and picked up a large blue metal cylinder with what looked like a brass straw at one end. He twisted a knob on the side of the brass fitting and pressed a button. With a click, a jet of flame appeared at the end of the straw. It was a blowtorch, Yamai realized. Her stomach churned with fear, as she imagined what Tadano could do with that intense source of flame.

“So, all these little kanji forms I created are brands.”

Brands? Yamai began hyperventilating. The kanji form wasn’t huge, each just two or three centimeters on a side, but she had no desire to be branded.

Tadano stood the torch on the table with the flame pointing up, and held the end of the meat brand in the flame for a half minute, until the metal at the end began to glow red.Yamai couldn’t help it, she whimpered at the sight, a small “No…” escaping her lips, despite her desire to never give him the satisfaction of voicing her fear or pain.

“Now, where should we put this first one?” asked Tadano musingly. He looked Yamai up and down, and then pressed the glowing metal firmly into her thigh.

She screamed. She couldn’t help it. And a moment later, the pain was accompanied by the revolting smell of her burning flesh.

Tadano lifted the brand, and looked at the mark burned into her flesh. He frowned. “That last stroke could have been neater. But I’m working with coat hangers and needle-nosed pliers; I guess I can’t be too picky. Now, what should we do next? I’ve got quite a selection—‘cunt,’ ‘dog,’ ‘useless,’ ‘murderer,’ ‘slut,’ ‘sow,’ ‘odious,’ ‘worthless.’ Oh, I know, let’s do a two-fer.”

He picked up two brands and heated them up in the torch’s flame. Yamai panted, fighting back a whine of pain as she watched the metal begin to glow. Not again, not again, please not again, she begged silently, but she knew it was a futile wish.

Tadano examined the brands, spun one around so it was oriented the right way, and pressed the two of them into the meat of her mons, just centimeters above her clit. She didn’t even try to fight back the screams this time, her whole body twitching and convulsing against the restraints as he burned foul words into her flesh.

He lifted the brands, and admired his work. “‘Useless Cunt,’” he read, sounding pleased. “An appropriate placement for that one, don’t you think?”

“Fuck you,” Yamai rasped, panting against the pain. All three brands throbbed, a touch less painful than at first, but not by much.

Tadano just smiled at her curse. “I’ve got a half-dozen more words to describe you. And I can use each one more than once! Let’s see what kind of patterns I can make on your skin.”

In all, he added over two dozen brands to her body, including placing another ‘meat’ brand in the center of her forehead. “I think I’ll just call you ‘Meat’ from now on,” he said. “That’s all you are to me. Meat to play with. You’re not a person, you’re a thing. Fleshy, pain-filled meat for me to torment. I like that.”

Then he doctored all of the brands, gently tracing each strokes of the kanji with a swab dipped in antibiotic. The touch was gentle, but it made each one throb anew, increasing the pain even more.

“There. Don’t want you getting an infection, now, do we? I want to keep you alive and well for a long, long time.” He smirked. “For a very limited definition of the word ‘well,’ I guess.”

Yamai shuddered. How long? she wondered bleakly.

Tadano set aside his first-aid supplies and unzipped his pants. “I think I’ll try raping some meat again.”

He seemed to enjoy keeping a hand on the meat brand on her thigh as he raped her, squeezing it tight and making it throb and bleed again. At least the pain distracted her from the still-horrible sensation of his cock thrusting in and out of her. After he came, he again cleaned and dressed that brand, patting (an unscarred section of) her thigh gently when he was done.

Once again, he took a lunch break, leaving Yamai alone with her pain for an hour. When he came back, he was beaming. “I just had a wonderful idea, while cooking lunch!”

Yamai just glowered at him.

“It occurred to me that I could use that blowtorch more directly than just heating up brands. Skip the middle man, as it were.”

Yamai felt rising terror and nausea, as his words sank it. Where is he going to…?

Tadano picked up the torch and lit it, then stood silent for a moment, smiling, regarding her. Her terror ratcheted up higher and higher the longer he looked at her. What will he attack next? My legs? My belly? My face?

He waved the torch back and forth over her legs, the flame just barely missing her skin, doing no more than warming her and burning off the fine hairs on her skin. She was so frightened that the smell of burning hair barely registered with her. As the brilliant blue flame approached her crotch, she felt herself hyperventilating. The thought of flame in such a sensitive area was utterly horrifying.

But it passed briefly over her pussy, burning off a few short pubic hairs, before he moved the flame back down her other leg. He got to her foot and paused for a long moment, just staring into her eyes. His expression never wavered, with its gentle, calm smile, that she remembered from their high school days. The fact that he looked so serene was more terrifying than if he’d howled in manic glee.

Yamai couldn’t help it. She began to cry. “Don’t,” she begged. “Please, please don’t. Whatever you have planned…you’ve done enough to me already.” She searched his face for some signs of humanity, of mercy. “Komi-sama wouldn’t want you to do this.”

She knew mentioning Komi was a mistake as soon as she said it. His smile disappeared in a flash, and a scowl took over his face. “You have no idea what Shouko would have wanted,” he hissed.

“She wouldn’t want you to become a monster,” Yamai begged.

His lips curled in disgust. “If I’m a monster, it’s you that made me that way.”

“This won’t bring her back.”

He gave a harsh, barking laugh, that sounded like it was coming from the depths of a grave. “Nothing will,” he snarled. “But at least I can console myself with this.”

And he aimed the flame of the blowtorch directly at the sole of her foot.

Feet are remarkably sensitive, for all the abuse they endure, carrying around a full body’s weight. Many major nerves terminated at the feet. Yamai’s howl of pain ripped through her throat, making her gag with the intensity of her scream and the pain. Her whole body flexed and flailed against the bindings holding her down as she thrashed more violently than she ever had, even while trying to find a way to escape. She shuddered and screamed and pissed herself, her whole body convulsing at the intensity of the pain.

Tadano kept the torch aimed at her foot, slowly moving it up and down the sole, hitting new nerves with every pass. The smell of burning flesh filled the air, and Yamai felt like her whole world was focused on her sole. Nothing else mattered, the pain so great that it erased all rational thought; she had no words with which to beg or plead. Instead, she screamed and screamed and screamed.

The last thing she noticed before passing out from the pain was that Tadano’s gentle smile was back.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The pain was so intense that when she woke back up, she almost passed out again immediately. But, unfortunately, unconsciousness eluded her, and she lay awake, aware of nothing but the pulsating pain in the bottom of her foot. Even the amputation hadn’t felt this awful. That ankle throbbed, and she was barely aware of the pains of the brands and her scalp.

After a few moments of focusing on her foot, she realized that it didn’t hurt all over—just around the perimeter of her foot. Most of the sole felt weirdly cold, not pained.

“Oh, good, you woke up in time for dinner,” said Tadano.

Yamai opened her eyes and looked up at her torturer. She had thought she hated him before, for kidnapping her, raping her, mutilating her, but the intensity of her hatred reached new depths as she scowled at him, her breathing ragged and gasping from the pain. I will find a way to kill you. “Fuck you,” she muttered.

Tadano rolled his eyes. “How original.” He cranked the platform up and held up a glass of water. She gritted her teeth for a moment, but her throat was sore from screaming and parched, and she drank greedily. As he held up her puréed dinner, he said conversationally, “I may have made a miscalculation with burning your foot. I think I may have burned it so deeply that it killed all the nerves in the bottom of your foot, which makes it hard to inflict any pain.” He sighed regretfully. “I’ll have to come up with something else, I guess.”

Yamai found it difficult to sympathize with his dilemma.

He lay her back down, placed the bedpan beneath her, and bade her goodnight again. Leaving her alone in the darkness, where the lack of visual stimulation made the pains of her body just that much more noticeable. Hours passed before she dozed off, her sleep uneasy and never very deep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The lights snapped on, startling her out of her fitful sleep. Tadano came down the stairs, and Yamai was unnerved to see that he looked unhappy. Whatever was bothering him, she suspected he was sure to take it out on her. He ignored her, and walked over to the table full of torture implements, his back to her. When he turned around a minute later, he was holding a syringe instead of her glass of water.

“Well, this is annoying. My parents are worried about me, and they’re coming to visit today to see how I’m holding up.” He grimaced. “This room is soundproof enough that people outside of the house can’t hear you, but I can’t be sure of anyone who’s inside. So I’ll have to keep you quiet for a while.” He approached her with the hypodermic, and jabbed it into her bicep. It stung and burned as he injected whatever it was into her body. “This should keep you quiet for about six hours. If you’re lucky, I got the dosage wrong and it will kill you.” She shuddered at the notion that dying was lucky. At this point, she was sure it probably was true. But even so, she really didn’t want to die.

He suddenly smiled. “And if you don’t die, there will be a lovely surprise waiting for you when you wake up! That should give you something to look forward to.”

Yamai felt the world waver around her, and only had a moment to worry about what “wonderful surprise” he had in mind before everything went black.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As Yamai slowly swam up from the depths of her anesthetized slumber, her first thought was, Well, I guess he got the dosage right. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. The pains of her existence slowly returned, her aching shoulders, the burns and cuts all over her body, her scalp, her aching hips—

She wondered about that. Her hips hadn’t hurt before. Her left foot had certainly hurt, burned as it was, and the other ankle where her right foot had been had ached, but now she couldn’t feel those pains. She peeled her eyes open, and was confronted with the sight of a couple of long slender objects dangling over her belly. They looked like mannequin legs, swaying gently from side to side.

She blinked, then saw a brand, Meat, on one of the legs. One of the legs had a foot missing, and the other foot’s sole was blackened. Suddenly she was fully awake, her heart pounding. Those weren’t mannequin legs hanging from hooks over her, those were her own legs. She looked down, and saw that her body now ended at her crotch in a mass of bandages. Despite all her previous resolutions to never give Tadano the satisfaction of her screams, she screamed.

“Oh, hello, Meat! You’re awake.” Tadano sounded pleased. “Do you like your surprise?” He walked into her line of sight, wearing a bloody surgical gown and wiping a saw dry.

“You—you—monster! My legs!” she wailed.

Tadano tapped her legs, sending them swinging. “Now, now, you should be grateful. If I’d taken them off while you were awake, the shock and pain probably would have killed you. But I can’t have you escaping me that easily.”

His smile disappeared, and he glared at her with those flat, soulless eyes that were even more terrifying than his chipper smile. He hissed at her, “You got to have your legs cut off while you were anesthetized. Shouko was wide awake and terrified when the train rolled over her and cut her to pieces. You’re getting off easy.”

Yamai shuddered, swallowing bile. She remembered the photos he’d forced her to look at, of what had happened to the body of her beloved Komi-sama. In a way, he was right—she was getting off easy. It nauseated her even more to be agreeing with him, when he’d violated her body so horribly. Getting raped was terrible, being flogged and burned and sliced up was painful, but even getting her foot cut off hadn’t felt like this large a violation. It was a whole other order of magnitude. She felt herself going numb, withdrawing from the world, unable to cope with the sight of her legs, hypnotically swinging back and forth over her. She closed her eyes and wept for her lost legs, knowing she’d never walk or dance or run again. She didn’t have to look at Tadano to know that he was smiling gently at her, enjoying her tears.

“And look! Now I don’t have to raise or spread your legs to rape you anymore! Isn’t that convenient?” he asked. He shrugged off the bloody surgical gown and unzipped his pants and suited actions to words. His hips slamming into the bandaged wounds where her legs had been kept her screaming the whole time he raped her, which seemed to please him. The whole time he was raping her, her legs swayed gently back and forth above her.

When he was done, when he’d once again filled her with his vile cum, he lowered her legs from the ceiling and carried them across the room, where he tossed them casually into the freezer chest. Then he raised her up to a sitting position. The straps across her torso kept her from resting any weight upon the fresh wounds at her hips.

Tadano headed back upstairs, though he left the lights on. She slowly stopped sobbing, the screaming pain in her legs—or rather, what used to be her legs—faded to a “merely” agonizing throbbing.

Tadano returned with her dinner. As always, it was a vile tasting sludge of puréed food, for her to suck up through an oversized straw. He waited patiently for her to finish her “meal,” then silently offered her water. She hated accepting food and drink from him like this, hated being dependent upon him for sustenance, but she knew she couldn’t afford to not eat. She needed to keep up her strength. Even if I can’t walk out of here, I might yet find a way to escape, to crawl out of here. Or find a phone or some other way to contact help. So she grimly accepted her unappetizing but purportedly nutritious meal.

Tadano lowered her back down, so she was laying flat again. “Parental visit aside, this has been a remarkably productive day. I’ll see you in the morning.”

And once again, the pain of her latest torment kept her awake for hours after he left, before utter exhaustion finally dragged her down to a fitful slumber.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The morning began the usual way, in what felt like how her mornings had begun forever, even though she was fairly certain it had been barely a week. Tadano let her use the bedpan, then hosed her clean. He gave her a glass of water to drink. He took off the now-wet bandages on her leg stumps, being surprisingly gentle as he tended the wounds. Yamai couldn’t help but look, grimly curious, at the stitched-up skin concealing the ends of her barely centimeters-long leg stumps. He bandaged her back up, and Yamai fought down a moment of tension, fearing that he might take the opportunity to rape her again, but he ignored her cunt altogether.

Instead, Tadano moved to her left side and began strapping her fingers down to the arm board. Oh, fuck. He’s going to move on to pulling out my fingernails, she thought, despair creeping over her. But after her hand was restrained, he did something he’d never done before—he pulled out his phone and began to play some music, startling her. She hadn’t even noticed that there was a wireless speaker in the room.

The music was classical, and it only took her a moment to recognize the piece—it was Schubert’s String Quartet Number 14, "Death and the Maiden.” She recognized it because it was a recording she and the quartet she had once performed in had made. Back in the real world, before she’d been committed. Hearing it brought tears to her eyes.

“So, tell me, Meat. Did you ever wonder why I started with pulling out your toenails instead of your fingernails?” Tadano asked. “I mean, fingernails are sort of more traditional.”

Yamai gave him an incredulous look. Why would I wonder about that?

“It was because I wanted to have a chance to talk with some of your former colleagues about your work first.”

Yamai didn’t really want to engage with Tadano, but she couldn’t keep a small confused frown off her face. Why would he do that?

“You see, I have no desire to deprive the world of any great art. If it turned out that you were, in fact, a musical genius, bringing beauty into the world, despite all the beauty you’ve removed from it—well, then I might have been moved to spare your fingers, so you could play the violin again someday.”

Yamai began to shake.

“But, as it turns out, you’re just…fine. Good enough to be in a professional ensemble, make a few recordings, sure, but you’re certainly no genius. One of your former colleagues said you were ‘Solidly workmanlike.’”

Yamai’s face burned with humiliation at that tepid appraisal.

“So! It’s on to the fingers we go!”

Yamai closed her eyes and turned away. She didn’t want to see him pull out the pliers, or knives, or bamboo slivers, or whatever cruel instrument of torture he was going to use next. It wasn’t as if knowing what was coming would make it hurt any less.

Thunk! A solid blow slammed into the arm rest, shaking her body, and an electric bolt of pain so great it was like grasping a live wire ran through her. Her eyes snapped involuntarily open. She looked over at her left hand to see the axe embedded in the arm rest at the end of her palm. Where her fingers used to be.

She screamed. Not just at the pain, but at the terminal mutilation. Pulled fingernails she could have lived with. She could have still played the violin. But this…there was no going back from this. Her life as a musician was suddenly and violently over.

Tadano smiled and pulled the axe out of the arm rest, and Yamai saw her fingers restrained to the board. Then they were hidden in a wash of red blood, flowing from her hand. “Well, better get this bleeding stopped,” Tadano said. He unstrapped her fingers and flicked them to the side, discarding them to the floor like trash. That casual disregard for her fingers, with which she had made music, had earned her living, was almost more revolting than the loss of the fingers themselves.

Tadano lifted her palm and wrapped the end of her hand where her fingers used to be in a slick gauze-like material. “This is hemostatic gauze, there’s a protein coagulant in it, it should stop the bleeding before you bleed out,” he said conversationally. “Once that’s under control, maybe I’ll stitch up the end of your stumps here. Or maybe I’ll just cut off the whole hand and sew up the wrist—that’ll be less work, overall, I think.” He looked thoughtful as he worked. Yamai felt like she was watching him from the end of a long tunnel, as shock set in, the pain at the end of her arm throbbing rapidly in time with her racing pulse. She shuddered involuntarily, teeth chattering. As if from a distance, she heard “Death and the Maiden” continue to play.

Then she passed out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Unfortunately, Tadano wasn’t so quick with her other hand. There, he took his time, over the course of several days, shoving bamboo slivers under each fingernail before pulling them out one-by-one, lingering over her pain, enjoying it like a connoisseur of her agony. After removing the first nail, he once again sprinkled salt on the wound, compounding the pain—“A classic, don’t you think?” he asked cheerily. The next finger he dipped in vinegar—“Is that better or worse than salt?” She didn’t deign to answer, but it was worse. The next raw fingertip, he rubbed with wasabi, the one after that, ghost pepper chili sauce, which was the worst. To add insult to injury, he then poured some of that hot sauce into her mouth, and while it wasn’t as painful as it was on her raw fingertips, it was still not fun.

Then, once all the fingernails had been removed, he moved on to removing her fingers. One by painful one.

Her little finger he simply chopped off with a shears. “Well, that was over too quickly,” he groused.

The ring finger he pounded with a hammer until it was reduced to a sodden paste of bone and flesh and blood.

The middle finger he fried with the blowtorch, burning it to a crisp as she screamed. The too-familiar smell of burning flesh stuck cloyingly in her nose long after it was done.

The index finger her dipped into liquid nitrogen, waited until it was frozen solid, then shattered it like a piece of glass using a hammer.

And her thumb he dissected slowly, peeling back her skin, then her muscles and tendons, one by one, detaching the bones one at a time. It took him over two hours to disassemble it, and it made her long for the liquid nitrogen. At least that had gone numb quickly, only burning at the edge of her hand where the flesh didn’t fully freeze.

And the whole time he worked on destroying her hand he continued to play music. All recordings that she had been part of, as if to emphasize what he was taking away from her.

When he’d finished stitching up and bandaging her destroyed hand he again lifted her partway up, so that she could drink her revolting puréed dinner and glass of water. The dinner was thicker, meatier than usual, tasting of pork, and she wondered what, exactly, was in it, but she wasn’t willing to ask.

Should I bother to keep on eating? Is there any point left to keeping up my strength? How can I escape now? Maybe starving myself to death would be faster… But still, hunger won out, and she finished her meal, then washed it down with a glass of water.

She made use of the bedpan before sleep, vaguely hoping that Tadano found wiping her ass to be as revolting a task as she did, but she suspected he was inured to it, being a nurse.

Once he’d left her for the night, she spent hours cataloging all of her aches and pains—throbbing palms where fingers once had been, slightly more healed and less painful leg stumps, brands and whip marks and cuts all over her body, each a small voice of pain adding to the total symphony that was beginning to drive her mad. There was no escaping the pain—it lessened, with time, as she healed, but Tadano always provided more, new, sources of pain, so that it was omnipresent. Only in sleep could she escape it for a while, but the pain made it difficult to fall asleep in the first place.

She remembered the first day, when Tadano had slapped her, and said, “That’s best you’ll ever feel for the rest of your life. Every day will be worse.” He’d proven true to his word, alas.

Eventually she drifted off. Hoping she might wake up somewhere else, that this had all been a bad dream, but she knew she wouldn’t. This was all too real.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yamai was losing track of time. Had Tadano cut off her fingers yesterday? The day before? Last week? Everything was beginning to blur together. Days of sharp scalpels, burning hot soldering irons, pounding hammers—they all blurred together. Despite all the different horrors he visited upon her, there was a monotonous sameness to her days in this dark basement, where she couldn’t see the sun. Wake up, drink, piss, get hosed off, occasionally get raped, then some other part of her body was cut or crushed or burned or mutilated. Drink her horrid sludgy dinner, then try to fall asleep.

And repeat.

So she was surprised when one morning Tadano didn’t show up. She knew her time sense was off, maybe it was just that she thought it was morning when it wasn’t, but as the hours passed, she grew more and more concerned. It wasn’t just that she was thirsty—though she was—but waiting in darkness, with nothing to occupy her, allowed her fears to swell and multiply. Maybe he’s done with me, and he’s going to leave me here to starve and rot. Maybe he got into an accident, and won’t be back. Maybe he’s working on something even more horrific than anything that he’s done so far. That one kept her worrying the most, wondering what he could be making. So far all of his torments had been fairly straight-forward, medical in nature. But she’d seen medieval torture devices in history books. What if he was busy replicating an iron maiden, a rack, or something even more horrible to torment her with?

But even those fears couldn’t keep her awake. Though her wounds throbbed and her remaining muscles were screaming from being held stationary for so long, she eventually drifted back off to sleep, waking again and again to darkness, hunger, and thirst. She cried, alone in the dark, fear and pain and terror her only companions. It occurred to her at one point that perhaps this was just another torment—maybe he was watching her through infrared cameras as she mentally broke down. Surely it had been just a day or two. Or three? She had no way to tell.

She was glad that he had routinely left the bedpan beneath her overnight, but after a while the smell was vile. And not being able to wipe her ass was its own kind of torment, both physical and psychological. She would have thought that the pains of her various amputations and tortures would override such simple discomforts, but they seemed to heterodyne.

I may be missing various body parts, but can’t I at least have a clean ass? She knew if Tadano knew how she felt, he’d never clean her again.

Or maybe he would. He seemed to have a nurse’s fastidiousness about bodily fluids—he regularly washed her crotch and pits, and other than that first horrific day when he’d given her an enema, he’d never again raped her ass.

The worst part was, it itched. So many things itched. And she couldn’t do a thing about it.

The lights, when they finally came back on, startled a small yelp from her. She squeezed her eyes shut, the light stabbing into her skull like the photons had been sharpened. By the time she could open her watering eyes and see again, Tadano was already standing by her side, holding a cup of water.

“Sorry about that. Something came up,” he said blandly. He lifted her up towards vertical, the change in position providing a little relief to her back and ass, which had been compressed for however long she’d been alone in the dark. He held up the cup of water and let her drink. It tasted heavenly, and she felt like her mouth and throat just absorbed the first few sips before it even hit her stomach. “Slowly,” he cautioned. “Or it’ll just all come back up again.”

She knew he was right, but she couldn’t hold back, and Tadano pulled the straw out of her mouth after just a moment. “Slowly,” he repeated, waiting for her to swallow. She glared at him, but had no choice but to wait. He returned the straw to her lips, only leaving it for ten or fifteen seconds at a time, enforcing her slow consumption. She’d only finished half of the cup when he set it aside. She whimpered, her eyes glued to the cup.

“I’ll give you the rest in a minute. Let’s get you cleaned up first,” he said, removing the bedpan from beneath her. After emptying it, he hosed her off. He even donned a pair of latex gloves and pried her buttocks apart to clean the crusted shit off her ass. She was surprised when he slathered some sort of thick white cream along the crack of her ass, soothing the pain there. Some sort of diaper rash ointment? Why on earth did he have that ready to hand? Why did he care enough about her comfort to provide it, instead of letting it add to her torment?

After discarding his gloves, he again let her sip at her water. “On the bright side of things, a couple of days without playtime should have allowed you to heal up a bit,” he said.

“Aside from my bedsores,” she growled. Her back was still aching from being immobilized for so long.

“True,” he conceded. “Let’s take a look at that.”

She finished the cup of water—it felt like nowhere near enough, but she also felt vaguely nauseous. She knew that, annoyingly, he was right, if she had more just then she’d probably throw it up.

He flipped her body over on the platform, and Yamai almost cried in relief, feeling blood flowing back to the back half of her body. With the returning blood flow came pain, especially under her shoulders and buttocks, and Tadano even hissed under his breath. “Not good. Some of those are approaching stage three. We’ll need to clean those up.”

He set about cleaning and bandaging her sores, which puzzled the hell out of her. Why is he taking such care with these, when he cuts off other parts of me with abandon? Admittedly, he wasn’t giving her any painkillers to deal with them, but he was being careful with the cleaning and bandaging.

“I think we’ll leave you on your stomach or side for the next day or three,” Tadano told her when he was done. He pulled a stool over next to her head, and perched there, staring down at her. His face was unusually somber. She wondered why he had disappeared for two days. She couldn’t quite believe it had only been two days, not three or four, but she supposed she would have been even more dehydrated if it had been.

Eventually, Tadano spoke, quietly. “Tell me, Meat, did you ever wonder why Shouko and I got married so suddenly, after all those years of living together?”

Yamai shook her head, even though she had wondered, once upon a time. Before Komi-sama had died.

Tadano leaned in closer, his mouth next to her ear, and whispered, “Because she was pregnant.” When he pulled back, his eyes were dead and flat, none of the usual smile he so often had while torturing her. Yamai felt bile rise in her stomach.

“You killed two people that day. My wife, and my child.”

Staring into Tadano’s flat soulless eyes, Yamai for the first time truly believed in her heart that she had no hope for any sort of mercy or respite from Tadano. None at all. The rage and madness that burned so quietly within him seemed boundless, and she knew he was going to write it all out on her body, in one way or another.

She was already mentally fragile from the days of isolation. She broke down sobbing, despair overwhelming her, all hope finally truly abandoned. She didn’t notice the smile slowly returning to his face as he watched her tears and despair.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tadano let himself quietly into the apartment, so as not to wake up Shouko. It had been a long day, with several hours of overtime, and he felt a deep-seated weariness. He was glad he had been able to shower at work at the end of his shift, so he could just slip out of his clothes and slide into bed.

But when he got to the bedroom, Shouko was awake, sitting up and reading something on her tablet. She smiled at him as he entered the room and set the tablet aside.

“Why are you still awake?” he asked.

Her smile broadened. “Because I wanted to see you.”

He glanced at the clock—it was well after midnight, approaching one. “I’m happy to see you, but you’ve got to get up for work in six hours.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’ve got news for you.”

Tadano frowned. What news could keep her awake this late that she couldn’t have told him earlier in a text or phone call? “Yes?”

Shouko patted the bed beside her, and he sat down. She took his hands in hers, breathed deep, and said, “I’m pregnant.”

Tadano blinked, his exhausted brain not quite processing the words. “What?”

“I’m pregnant.” Her smile faded a little, and she looked at him worriedly.

“You’re pregnant,” he repeated dumbly.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

She giggled. “Yes, really.”

Tadano’s mouth opened and closed a few times, but no words came out. A smile slowly crept across his face, and he started to laugh quietly. He placed a hand on Shouko’s belly. “We’re going to have a baby.”

“Yes.”

He suddenly wrapped his arms around her, and they both toppled over sideways on the bed, with Shouko making an adorable little squeak as they did so. He pulled her on top of him and hugged her tight, and she returned the hug. “Wow. A baby. Us, parents. That’s…that’s amazing.”

“Yes. Yes it is.” Her smile was radiant, and Tadano felt like his heart would burst with happiness and love.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yamai wished she could just sleep. Sleep and sleep and sleep forever, never awaken to the horror that was her life now. But there were only so many hours in a day that she could sleep, even when Tadano wasn’t present, and the ever-present pain made her sleep restless and fitful in any event, never quite satisfying her need for sleep.

She had totally lost track of how long she’d been in this basement, how long she’d been tortured and played with. Sometimes it felt like it had been mere days; other times, it seemed like forever. This was the only life she’d ever known, and her memories of life before this basement dungeon was a dream, a fantasy she’d told herself to have something other than the pain and horror to think about.

I used to have a whole body, once. I had arms, and hands, and feet and legs. My body once felt something other than pain, I’m sure.

Pretty sure.

Maybe.

She shuddered, and fought back the tears that came at random, even when she was alone, not being actively tortured.

One morning, Tadano brought a long cylindrical object with him to the basement. She eyed it wearily, wondering what it was, how he was going to use it to torment her. She didn’t have to wonder long. After their morning routine, he picked up the object. It was grayish white, rounded at one end, and the other end was oddly knobby. It reminded Yamai of the bone in a chicken leg, only much larger. Tadano held it up with a smile. “I’ve got a present for you, Meat!”

She stared back flatly, knowing any “present” from him was loaded with pain and torment.

“I carved a dildo for you. A fun little arts-and-crafts project.”

Yamai blinked, and realized that the rounded end of the cylinder looked vaguely like a cock. Tadano’s carving skills obviously weren’t his strong suit. Then she frowned, looking at the other end. What is that carved from?

Tadano apparently read the confusion in her face, because his smile grew darker. He smirked, and said, “I carved it out of your femur. And I’m going to use it to fuck your ass.”

Yamai’s stomach roiled, revolted by the notion. He was going to use pieces of her own body to violate her. She closed her eyes, not wanting to watch.

“And since I don’t really want to have to deal with patching up your ripped anus, I’ll even put some lube on it first. Isn’t that kind of me?”

Yamai opened her eyes again, to glare at Tadano, which just amused him. She watched dully as he suited actions to words, spreading a generous coating of lubricant on the obscene bone dildo. At least it’s smaller than his dick. It looked like it was only two or three centimeters in diameter.

Tadano nestled the glistening obscenity between her buttocks, then angled it up and shoved it in. It slid in easily, more easily than his cock had when he’d raped her ass. It was still unpleasant, but compared to the pain he’d inflicted on her since then, it was nothing.

“There. Now you’re fucking yourself,” Tadano said with a smirk. He thrust the dildo in and out several times, working it in deeper and deeper. Yamai’s stomach roiled at the obscenity of being fucked by her own leg bone.

Inevitably, Tadano unzipped his pants, and shoved his cock into her cunt. She could feel the pressure against the bone in her ass, making her tighter than usual. A fact that Tadano apparently appreciated, as he moaned slightly as he raped her. “Shoulda’ done this long ago, it tightens you up nicely,” he panted. “But I had to clean the meat off the bone first.”

That caught her attention. Meat, he called it. Her leg. What had he done with the muscles he’d removed from her femur?

He came inside her, disgustingly as always, then pulled out and tidied himself back up. Annoyingly, he left her femur in her ass, an intrusive reminder.

“What…” She didn’t want to interact with her torturer. She tried to avoid talking to him at all if she could But a nauseating curiosity forced her to speak. “What did you do with the rest of my leg?”

Tadano’s smile sharpened. “Waste not, want not,” he said in a sing-song voice.

She glared at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”

He laughed. “I mean, you’re Meat. That’s all you are. So I’ve been feeding you your legs for the past week or so.”

She stared at him, aghast, bile rising in her stomach. “You what?”

“I ground up your leg muscles and used it for your meals. A good source of fats and proteins. It seemed better than just letting them go to waste.”

She didn’t know why that horrified her more than the rape, or torture, or amputations, but it did. She clenched her teeth against throwing up, she couldn’t afford to lose the water, but she felt tears start to drip from her eyes. “You…you’re obscene,” she hissed, unable to come up with anything worse to call him.

He smiled down at her. “Now, now, Meat, don’t worry, I’ve also added all the usual fruits and vegetables and rice. I’m watching out for your nutritional intake.” He cocked his head. “Would you like me to try any special seasonings or flavors? Just for variety’s sake.”

That notion broke through her self-control, and she vomited back up the water she’d just had. Tadano sighed and shook his head. “Oh, honestly, Meat. It’s not like you were using your legs for anything else.” He pumped the femur dildo in and out of her ass a few times, a horrific reminder that he was fucking her with herself, and smirked. “Well, I mean, aside from this.”

After another pain-filled afternoon (spent peeling millimeter-wide strips of skin off of her belly, before rubbing salt in the wounds), Tadano again offered her her evening water and meal. She was anxious for the water, having lost most of her morning’s ration when she threw up, but she eyed the glass of sludge with revulsion and clamped her mouth shut.

Tadano sighed. “Oh, come on. It’s not like you haven’t been eating this for the past week anyway. You need to keep up your strength.”

Yamai considered that. Did she need to keep up her strength? To what end? That had been her rationale for eating up until now, but she had no hands, no legs, just arms that she was certain would be removed soon enough. She’d found no way to escape before he removed her hands, and now…now it seemed utterly hopeless. Why not starve herself to death, get this over with? She kept her mouth shut and shook her head.

Tadano stared flatly at her. “I’m not going to let you starve yourself. You don’t get to escape that easily. You can either drink this voluntarily, or I’ll pry your jaw open and put a feeding tube down your throat and pump your meals directly into your stomach. Your choice.”

Yamai gritted her teeth as she considered that choice. Her grandfather had died of esophageal cancer, and in his last months had been fed by a feeding tube. It had not looked pleasant, even though he’d tried to pretend otherwise. With a small growl, she unclenched her teeth and opened her mouth, waiting for Tadano to place the straw between her lips.

“What do you say when someone prepares a meal for you?” he asked in a sing-songy voice.

“Fuck-you-dakimasu,” she spat out.

Tadano barked a startled laugh at that, for the first time looking genuinely amused at something other than her pain. “Not quite what I meant, but I’ll take it,” he laughed as he placed the straw between her lips.

It took Yamai a half a minute before she could bring herself to suck in the “food”—the meal made up of her own flesh. But she eventually sucked, grimacing as she did so. The taste was no better or worse than it had been yesterday, but knowing that the gamy pork flavor she was tasting was her own flesh made it so much worse. Her stomach churned in disgust as she drank.

Somehow, she managed to finish it all. “Good girl,” cooed Tadano when she was done, which just pissed her off all the more. She wondered if she could projectile vomit her meal into his face; she felt nauseous enough to throw up if she gave in to it just a little.

But he turned away from her, removing the temptation.

Tadano flipped her over and lay her on her stomach, then patted her ass. “Good night, Meat!”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Blinding light. Drink. Get hosed clean. Her mornings at least were consistent.

Tadano flipped her back over to lay on her back, then sat down on a stool next to her shoulder. “So! Today, let’s get rid of those pesky arms, shall we?”

Yamai had been certain that this moment was coming, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant.

“Of course, there’s the same issue of you dying from the pain and shock as when I took off your legs, but I’ve come up with a solution for that.” He picked up a hypodermic needle from his worktable and held it up with a flourish. “A nerve block! A nerve block would render your arm totally numb, insensate. I don’t want to spare you that much, so you’ll be getting a half-dose. Just enough to keep the pain from killing you.”

Despair sat like a hot, wet blanket upon her, smothering all other emotions. She found it hard to care anymore.

“Now, I’ve observed dozens of nerve blocks, but this will be my first time actually doing one. Maybe I should have gone for an MD instead of a nursing degree, eh? Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure I know what I’m doing.” Yamai knew that that should frighten her, but being Tadano’s practice dummy was no worse than everything else he’d done to her. She was fairly sure he’d also never performed an amputation at work, but he’d amputated a dozen or so of her body parts so far.

She watched as he slid a long needle at an angle into her chest just above her clavicle. “Brachial plexus should be right…about…there,” he muttered. He squeezed the syringe, and what felt like hot metal flooded her chest. But the burning sensation dissipated quickly, leaving behind just a dull throb.

“Let’s give that a minute,” he said, turning away. Yamai closed her eyes, and mentally said farewell to what remained of her arms.

When she opened them again, Tadano was in a surgical gown, with a mask and glasses on. She blinked, startled. “Don’t want to risk getting you infected,” he said cheerfully. He proceeded to scrub her upper arm with a pungent orange liquid, an antiseptic, she assumed. Then he situated a tourniquet around her arm just below the armpit.

He pulled out a scalpel, and without warning slid it across the back of her right forearm. A long gash appeared, blood sluggishly welling up in it. She twitched, just barely feeling it. Tadano frowned. “Did I get the dosage too high?” He reached underneath his work table and picked up a hand-held sledge hammer. He raised it high, and brought it down on her forearm with incredible force. Yamai gasped, feeling pain, but nowhere near what she should have. She felt vaguely grateful for that, as it looked like her forearm had been snapped clean in two. Tadano whacked her forearm a few more times, pulping it, and looked annoyed when she didn’t scream. “Nuts.” He grimaced, and put down the hammer. “Well, I’m not willing to wait twenty-four hours for the nerve block to wear off, so I guess we’ll make do with this.”

What followed was painful, but at a remove, nowhere near as agonizing as it should have been. The relative lack of pain contributed to the air of unreality about the situation, making her feel like she was floating above herself, watching Tadano operate on her. He drew a circle around the middle of her bicep with a scalpel, then peeled the skin back, exposing the muscles underneath. He sliced through the muscles and bone with a saw, pausing now and then to sew off arteries as they were cut. When her arm was fully detached, there was still about ten centimeters of bicep left, which puzzled her—why didn’t he cut closer to her body?

That was answered when he pulled out a shiny stainless steel eyebolt, and proceeded to screw it into the stump of her humerus. He then pulled down the loose flap of skin he’d peeled back earlier and sutured it around the bolt, leaving it sticking out. He smiled at her. “Soon I’ll have a way to hang you up without using those pesky cuffs!”

Then the whole process was repeated on her left arm. But this time, he lowered the dosage for the nerve block even lower, and she felt it. A lot. Tadano seemed happier this time, working while listening to her screams. She barely noticed when he finished, and threaded the cables that had previously been attached to the cuffs around her wrists to the eyebolts. But a jolt of even stronger pain ran through her as he activated the motor that lifted her off the platform, leaving her dangling from her truncated arms.

Tadano stepped back and admired his handiwork as he stripped off his gown and gloves. “Perfect. No more strapping you down, no more pressure ulcers. You can just hang there and wait to be hurt.” He smiled. “You know, Meat, nobody is looking for you. They’ve happily forgotten all about you. The embarrassing daughter who murdered my child and wife, and went to a mental institution. You don’t exist anymore, except to be hurt by me.”

Yamai didn’t believe that. Not really. Surely her parents were still searching for her. But… Why hasn’t anyone rescued me, yet? Is he that good at hiding what he is, where we are? She had no more tears to shed for herself, but still, despair washed through her as he vocalized all her worst fears.

I can just hang here and wait to die…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was difficult to sleep while being suspended in the middle of the air, but eventually Yamai passed out, the pain of the day having exhausted her. She didn’t even wake up when Tadano turned on the lights, only startling awake with a scream when he whipped her back

He didn’t do more than a couple of stripes—apparently it was just a wake-up call. Yamai groaned as she struggled to raise her head, her neck stiff from hanging down as she slept.

From there, the day went the way the day had started every day for the past two weeks—or was it three weeks? Time was getting a little fuzzy. The repetitive sameness was wearing on her. Yamai sometimes wondered if she’d ever actually had a life outside of this cluttered basement torture chamber. Maybe all of her life before was just a hallucination, something she made up to console herself.

Then she’d shake herself, Don’t be ridiculous. It’s only been two weeks. That’s not enough time to lose it. Though it was enough time to lose her legs. And fingers, and hands, and arms… Still…It’s only been two weeks. Three, at most.

Hasn’t it?

As always, Tadano gave her a glass of water to drink, and cleaned up her bedpan. She watched with dull eyes as he pulled a strange wooden structure over to her. It made harsh scraping sounds as he dragged it across the floor. He positioned it in front of her, a wooden table positioned just below her tits as she hung from the overhead cables.

“So, I suppose you’ve been wondering when I would get around to your breasts,” he said cheerfully. “Well, wonder no more.”

Yamai closed her eyes, not at all surprised. She flinched and opened her eyes when she felt him unscrew the barbell piercing in her nipple to remove it, only to replace it with a large ring. It was a larger diameter than the barbell it replaced, and it stretched and ached a bit. Then he did the same to her other nipple.

She watched him as he stood on a step stool and threaded a cord through a couple of pulleys overhead. He looped one end of the cord through the ring on her left nipple and gave it a gentle tug. It wasn’t pleasant, but on the scale of torments she’d endured, it barely registered. Then he threaded a second cord through another couple of pulleys and attached it to a flat plastic plate. “Open up,” he said to her, holding it in front of her mouth.

Yamai considered resisting for a moment, but what was the point? She opened her mouth, and he placed the plate between her teeth. “Bite down on that. Don’t let it slip out of your mouth.”

He then picked up a paint can, and tied it to the other end of the cord going to the plate in her mouth, suspending it in the air. She had to bite down hard to keep it in place; the paint can was apparently full, and heavy. Then he tied the first cord that he’d attached to her nipple to the paint can. He stepped back and looked at the arrangement, and smiled in satisfaction. “If you let go of that plate in your mouth, the paint can will fall, and its full weight will yank the cord attached to your nipple. With probably dire consequences. So I’d keep your mouth closed, if I were you.”

Yamai could picture it with appalling clarity. There was no way her nipple could support that much weight, it would rip the ring right out of it. He’d found a way to keep her from speaking or screaming out loud while he tormented her.

Then it occurred to her, So what? He’s going to do that, and far worse, to my tits before the day is done. At least this way, it will be by my choice, not his. Before she could think about it too much and let the fear of the pain stop her, she opened her mouth, letting the can fall to the floor. As expected, the force of it jerked the ring in her nipple hard. For a split second it held, yanking her breast up, then it ripped through the tender flesh of her nipple, tearing it in half.

Tadano looked stunned, and her bellow of pain was laced with hysterical laughter. In some distant back part of her brain, she wondered if she’d finally lost it, but she couldn’t find it in herself to care. The pain was horrible, but less than many other torments she had endured. And Tadano’s surprise was wonderful.

After a moment, Tadano’s expression melted into a wry smile, and he shook his head. “Okay, that’s one for you. Well played.”

Then he picked up a hammer and nail, and nailed her tattered nipple to the board below her breasts. That drove her shrieks to a higher note, all laughter gone. He picked up another nail, but instead of driving it through her flesh, he threaded it through the remaining nipple ring and pulled it forward, stretching her breast out on the board. Then he nailed that nail in place, keeping her right breast stretched taut in place. He stepped back, and regarded her for a few contemplative moments. “Let’s see, what first—needles or nails? Well, we’ve already done one nail, so let’s give needles a shot.”

Turning back to his silver work table, he carefully picked up a handful of needles, some long like acupuncture needles, some short with little plastic thimbles on one end. He waited until Yamai’s screams of pain faded—which happened quickly; she was becoming far too used to pain, it was an old familiar friend by now. Then he pushed a long needle into her breast. And continued pushing, until it came out the other side.

It hurt, but on the scales of pain that she had endured to date, it was barely worth a whimper. Tadano frowned, clearly disappointed by this lack of reaction, then placed the next needle directly in her nipple. That more sensitive flesh garnered a stronger response, her gasping and biting her lip. “Ooh, I wonder…” Tadano said quietly. He then proceeded to puncture the entire perimeter of her areola with needles, just millimeters apart. Then he did another round of needles between those needles. There was barely any flesh between the needles when Tadano pulled out the nail holding the nipple ring in place. “Let’s see if we can tear on the dotted line,” he said with a smirk, and yanked the nipple ring away from Yamai.

Instead of ripping the ring through the flesh of her nipple, her entire nipple and areola detached from her breast, generating her loudest shriek of the day. Tadano laughed, and held up her nipple up before her eyes. “Such a pretty little nipple.”

Yamai wanted to spit in his face, but she had her teeth clenched against the pain. Tadano tossed her nipple aside, and bandaged up her breast. Then he moved on to the other, already split nipple. The one he’d nailed to the board. He picked up the hammer and nail, and drove another nail through her nipple. Then another. And another. Until eventually, that one, too, detached from her body, bloody and shredded, nowhere near as “pretty” as the first, intact nipple had been.

Yamai’s head hung low, gasping and sobbing from the pain. Tadano put a finger under her chin, and lifted her face to look at him. He was holding another needle in his hand. “What do you think, should we see how many needles your clitoris can take before it, too, explodes?”

Yamai’s eyes went wide, and against her will she found herself begging again. “Please. No. Not that.”

Tadano bent down and spread her pussy open, and slid the needle through her clit. She jerked and spasmed and screamed, terror of what was to come even more excruciating than the pain. “No, no, no, please, nooo,” she babbled.

Tadano stood back and watched her writhe and sob, a small smile on his face. Eventually, she became aware that he wasn’t doing anything, and her tears trailed off.

“Don’t worry, Meat. I don’t want to waste your clitoris on something that banal. It has far too many nerve endings to be simply obliterated like that.”

With that chilling observation, he turned and left, leaving the single needle in place, throbbing and reminding her of his threat.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tadano was surprised at how difficult it was to extract all of Yamai’s teeth. It wasn’t just that she resisted the process—he had expected that, and had made sure to have blocks and props to keep her mouth open and head stabilized against her will—but she had surprisingly healthy teeth. They were solidly attached to her jaw and skull, and it took two days of back-breaking work to get them all out. Apparently the pain was excruciating, because Yamai kept passing out, which annoyed him. He’d crack a vial of smelling salts under her nose whenever that happened. “What’s the point of torturing you if you’re just going to sleep through it all?” he groused.

After he finished with all her teeth, he let her mouth rest for a few days, healing.

He spent a couple of those days drawing obscene designs all over her back and ass with a soldering iron. The smell of burning flesh came to be a balm to him, soothing in its evidence of Yamai’s torment. As always, he gently cleaned and covered the wounds when he was done, striving to keep her healthy.

Yamai’s pubic hair had been growing back in over the course of the weeks that she’d been in Tadano’s tender care, so he spent one happy afternoon plucking out her pubic hairs one by one with a pair of tweezers. The pain was nowhere near as severe as some of the other things he’d done to her, but it was unrelenting, and in a very sensitive area of her body. As he worked he’d occasionally pinch her labia or clit with the pointy tweezers, just to make her scream and jump, which also made him laugh.

After several days he looked into her mouth and pronounced, “It’s healed enough for all practical purposes,” those purposes being raping her throat again. He no longer needed to hold a scalpel to her throat to ensure good behavior; he enjoyed not having to worry about her biting him.

Her nose he cut off slowly, slicing off a couple of millimeters at a time, gradually working his way down to the bone. When he finished, he held up a mirror for Yamai to see her new, disturbing visage, looking like a skull. “You’ll never have to worry about a runny nose ever again!”

Her ears, by contrast, he took off quickly. By now, Yamai was barely responding to pain, and he felt like there was no point in drawing it out.

Tadano debated with himself on taking out her tongue—it felt so good against his cock when he raped her throat—but in the end he decided it should go, too. He wanted to isolate her, trap her in her body as much as possible, unable to speak or sign or communicate with anyone else once he was done with her. “Any final words?” he asked cheerfully, before he grabbed her tongue with a forceps and pulled its full length out of her mouth.

“Fuck you,” she said wearily.

Tadano pursed his lips. “Not terribly original, but I suppose I could hardly expect more.” He sliced her tongue off with a quick stroke of a razor sharp knife. An enormous quantity of blood flooded her mouth as he pried her mouth open and stitched up the stump of her tongue, and Tadano had to keep sucking blood out of the way to see what he was doing.

“I’ll let that heal a few days before fucking your throat again,” he said magnanimously. She glowered wordlessly at him, her fury dulled by the sense of despair that had settled over her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By the end of the fourth week of Yamai’s captivity and torture, Tadano decided it was time to end things. He was running out of things to do to Yamai, and she was running out of body parts for him to excise. She had no limbs, no breasts, no ears or nose or teeth or tongue. She was just a mutilated head on a torso, and although it was nice to be able to throat-fuck her without having to worry about her biting him, the novelty of that was wearing off. One day while the full length of his cock was buried deep down her throat, cutting off all of her air, he was tempted to just stay there until her feeble struggles faded out. That would be an apt way for her to die, he thought, choking on his cock.

But, no. He didn’t want to kill her. He wanted her to live. To survive, hopefully for years, decades even, trapped in the horror that he’d created for her. That was why he’d been so careful to guard against infection while mutilating her, after all. That was why he’d not taken her eyes or deafened her—he wanted her to see and hear everyone’s reactions to her, their horror and pity and disgust, every day for the rest of her life.

He had faith that the Japanese medical system could keep her alive a good long time, as long as he returned her to her family in good health. “Good health” being a relative term, of course. Yamai’s family could afford the best possible medical care. She wasn’t going to be dying any time soon, if he could help it.

But Yamai was wearing out. Not just physically. She was numb, in shock, reacting less and less to the games he played upon her body. There was almost no skin left anywhere on her body that didn’t have scars or brands or marks of some sort.

But he did have a couple of last torments in store for her. Ones that he was certain would break through her apathy and growing indifference to pain. And so, on the final morning, he awoke and dressed carefully in the same tuxedo that he’d worn to his wedding. He picked up his dried boutonniere from the wedding and pinned it to his breast pocket. “There. That should do it.”

He tucked a phone and a photo into his tuxedo pockets, and headed downstairs for the last time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Good morning, Meat!” Tadano sang cheerily, and Yamai slowly opened her eyes. She still found it hard to believe she could sleep like this, suspended from the eyebolts embedded in what remained of her arms, but exhaustion always won out. She groaned as she lifted her head, her neck sore from her head hanging down while she slept. She blinked, wishing she could rub her eyes clear of sleep. Tadadno looked happy, which was never meant anything good for her. She suppressed a shudder. And for some reason he was wearing a tuxedo, complete with a dried floral boutonniere and shiny black shoes. She vaguely wondered why he was dressed up, but had neither the energy nor the tongue to ask him.

Tadano gave her a drink of water, which she felt helpless to resist. The relief on her parched throat was the only physical pleasure she had, and she couldn’t help herself. She let loose with her bladder, by now indifferent to peeing in front of him. Tadano picked up the bedpan and moved around behind her, where she couldn’t see what he was up to, and puttered around for ten or fifteen minutes. Weeks ago, that would have driven her to distraction, wondering what he was doing back there, what torments he was planning behind her back. Now she was just numbly resigned.

“Well.” Tadano appeared in front of her, smiling and holding something small in his hand. It didn’t look sharp or metallic, so she ignored it. “I have some wonderful news for you. Several pieces of good news, actually! Do you want to know what they are?”

Yamai just stared back at him. What was good news to Tadano would undoubtedly be awful for her. The only certainty she had was that it meant more pain.

“Well, first off, this is your last day here!”

Was he finally going to kill her? She was a little surprised that the relief she felt was tempered by a tinge of regret. Even as ruined as she was, some small part of her still wanted to live. But, no, it would be better to die, to end this pain and misery, escape the hell her life had become.

“I’ll be calling your mother to come pick you up soon.”

Pick me up? Or my corpse? Damn her survival instincts, which made her hope that her mother would somehow come and rescue her from this hell. Make things better. Not that there was much that could be made better in her life right now.

“But before that, we’ve got two more little things to do. First off…despite all the bleeding you’ve done over the course of the last month, there’s one kind of bleeding you haven’t done.”

Yamai wondered dully what torture he thought he’d overlooked—what new form of blood-letting he would inflict upon her. Despite the all-pervading numbness that sat on her like a moldy wet blanket, she shuddered. Tadano noticed, and his smile grew sharper. “No, no, nothing like that, Meat. This is a bleeding you’re familiar with.”

Yamai blinked and frowned, not following his train of thought. Her thoughts were sluggish, she couldn’t understand what he was implying.

“A monthly bleeding. You haven’t menstruated.” Tadano held up a small rectangle of plastic. There was an indentation at one end, where two pink lines appeared. “Congratulations! You’re going to be a mommy!”

Yamai thought she had passed beyond fear, but those words proved her wrong. A rush of adrenaline penetrated the fog in her brain. She moaned wordlessly, her tongueless mouth agape in her horror at the thought of being pregnant. With his child. What new horrors would he inflict upon her now, and upon an innocent baby?

Tadano set the early pregnancy test aside and patted Yamai’s scarred belly reassuringly. She couldn’t help it, her skin flinched at his touch. “Don’t worry, Meat, I won’t hurt the baby. You took Shouko’s and my baby from me. Even I’m not enough of a monster to take your baby from you. Instead, I’m going to turn you over to your mother’s tender care.”

Redoubled fear drove away the last of the fog that had shrouded her brain for days now. Oh, gods, her mother. Her mother, who contributed to lobbyists who worked to get abortion outlawed. Her mother, who would never allow her to abort this monster’s spawn. Her mother would force her to carry it to term. Tears welled in her eyes at this new horror, this psychological torment.

Tadano laughed at her tears. “Oh, it was worth keeping you around long enough to see this through. Now you’re nothing but a vessel for my seed. A mute, powerless womb, forced to give birth. And even then, you’ll never hug your child. You’ll never sing her a lullaby. You’ll never run through a field with her, or swim with her in the ocean, or walk through a mall and buy her an ice cream. Just like Shouko or I will never do any of those things with our child.

“The rest of your life will be spent totally dependent upon others for everything, from eating to changing the channel on TV to wiping your ass. Not even your child will ever look at you as an object of love and affection, only of horror and revulsion. Pity, at best.” He sighed happily. “There’s just one final gift I have left for you before I call mommy dearest.”

He went over to the table full of his tools of torment, but the only thing he picked up was a zip locked bag and a pair of rubber gloves. He brought them back over to Yamai and held the bag up. It contained a palm-sized green leaf of of a kind she didn’t recognize. “Have you ever heard of a gympie-gympie bush?”

Yamai shook her head, her eyes locked on the innocent looking leaf. If it made Tadano happy, it was anything but innocent.

“It’s an Australian plant. Sometimes called a ‘stinging bush.’ But ’stinging’ is really an understatement. It’s the most excruciatingly painful stinging nettle plant on the planet. One person described it as ‘like being burnt with hot acid and electrocuted at the same time.’ But what makes it even better is, the pain never stops. It can last for weeks, or even months. For some victims the pain keeps recurring at random for years. If they don’t kill themselves first.” Tadano sighed happily. “It sounds like the perfect way to make sure you never forget me, don’t you think?”

As if she could ever forget the monster who had tortured her, stolen so much of her body. And left her saddled with his spawn. Still, the description of the pain made her begin to tremble. She was tired of pain. She wanted it all to be over. She wished he would just kill her. But he was crueler than that. He’d made sure that she had absolutely no means take her own life. She could never end her suffering on her own.

“Now, originally, I wanted to get enough gympie-gympie to make a huge leaf pile and just toss you into it. Let you thrash around in it, covering more and more of your body as you flailed. But that would have probably killed you, and besides, it’s difficult to get outside of Australia. All I was able to get was this one leaf. So I’ll need to be selective about how it’s applied.” His unnerving smile never wavered. “Remember when I said I didn’t want to cut off your clitoris, because it had too many nerve endings to be wasted?”

Yamai began to moan in renewed fear, the guttural, tongueless sound abhorrent to herself, but she couldn’t hold it in.

“Something like ten thousand nerve endings, according to recent research. Just imagine how this will feel. Or, well, you won’t have to imagine for very long.”

Tadano pulled on the pair of rubber gloves, and opened the bag. Yamai began thrashing her head back and forth, moaning “O, o, o,” no, no, no, wordlessly begging for mercy. She flexed and twisted her torso in vain as she tried to keep her genitals away from him.

Tadano held up the leaf, and smiled into her fear-filled eyes. “This is goodbye, Meat. I’ll call your mother after this, but I suspect you’ll be in no condition to notice much of anything for a while.” His smile disappeared and he leaned closer to her and whispered, “None of this would have happened if you had left Shouko and our child alone. This is all your own fault. All your doing. Remember that, for as long as you live. Do you think I liked becoming a monster?”

Yamai stared into his soulless, empty eyes, whimpering and wordlessly pleading for nonexistent mercy. Then he stepped back and slapped the gympie-gympie leaf onto her crotch, rubbing it hard against her clit. He rubbed it all up and down the length of her cunt, working it into all the folds of her labia.

Yamai had thought she’d learned all there was to know about pain over the course of the last month. She’d been raped, mutilated, branded, burned, and dismembered. She’d had bones crushed, skin flayed from her body, all of her limbs and ears and nose cut off. She’d lived in a constant state of pain ever since she’d woken up in this hell hole. But none of that prepared her for the pain of this one little leaf on clit and pussy. It felt like a thousand angry hornets were stinging her all at once, a thousand points of burning, excruciating pain focused on the most sensitive part of her anatomy.

She screamed like she’d never screamed before, a long drawn-out wail that shredded her vocal cords. She could barely stop screaming long enough to draw breath, and what breath she did draw just went into screaming more. The pain was as bad as having the sole of her foot burnt off, but, unlike that pain, the nerves never burned away and died, the pain never abated, it just built and built and built. Her whole body convulsed, and she vomited water and bile, her empty stomach retching. She pissed and shat herself, her body swinging wildly from the cables that held her aloft. She threw her head from side to side, trying desperately to break her own neck, the only way she could think of to kill herself, but it was to no avail.

And still the pain grew stronger.

“They say it takes twenty to thirty minutes for the pain to reach its peak,” said Tadano cheerfully. “So, it’s only going to keep getting worse.”

But by that point Yamai was beyond hearing or understanding him, all thought erased in the mounting pain. Tadano stood back and watched her, pleased with the results. He tucked the leaf back into the plastic bag. He picked up a marker and wrote on the bag “Gympie-gympie leaf—DO NOT TOUCH—TOXIC!” “There. That should take care of that,” he murmured. He didn’t want to accidentally hurt any of the EMTs who came to pick her up.

He put the bag down, stripped off his gloves, and pulled Yamai’s cell phone out of his pocket. He pressed the button to power it up. Once it had restarted and established a connection, he called Yamai’s mother.

“Mrs. Yamai? No, this isn’t Ren, this is Tadano Hitohito. How are you? I’m calling from Ren’s phone to ask you to come pick her up. Yes, yes, I know you’ve been looking for her, that’s why her phone has been off all month. But you can come get her now. She’s ready for you. What? Oh, I don’t think she wants to talk just now. Let me ask.” He held the phone up to Yamai’s face, but she didn’t even notice, her eyes rolled back in her head, her raw ragged gasping screams just continuing on and on, getting hoarser with every breath.

“So, yeah, she’s not feeling very conversational at the moment. But I’ll text you the address to pick her up. You might want to bring an ambulance. Why? Oh, let me text you some photos.” He took a close-up picture of her face, covered with scars and the vivid red meat brand in the center of her bald forehead, no ears or nose or tongue or teeth. The latter two were obvious because her mouth was wide open in a rictus of screaming. Then he backed up to take a photo of her whole body, what was left of it. He sent both photos, then waited until he heard the horrified yelling start at the other end of the phone to continue.

Tadano raised his voice to be heard over their yells. “And by the way, congratulations! You’re going to be a grandmother! I hope you take good care of my child. Goodbye.”

He hung up, sent a short text with his address, and set the phone aside. He tidied the steel table-top where all his tools rested, lining up the bag with the leaf, the phone, and the early pregnancy test all in a neat row. “Let’s see, that should about do it,” he mused. “Front door’s unlocked, they shouldn’t have any problems finding you down here, they’ll just have to follow the screams.”

He stared at Yamai, still convulsing with pain suspended from the cables, beyond any form of rational thought, undoubtedly wishing for the release of death. “The pain is still building, it should be peaking soon,” he murmured. “You’re only getting what you deserve. Meat.”

Tadano turned his back on her and put her out of his mind. He pulled a small photo out of his tuxedo’s inner pocket and stared at it for a long moment. It showed him in the same tuxedo, holding Shouko in his arms in the classic bridal carry, her dressed in her western-style white bridal gown, both of them laughing. He kissed the photo gently, reverently, then set it on the table. He touched the dried boutonniere on his chest for a moment, a flicker of sadness crossing his face, then he took it off and also gently lay it on the table next to the photo. He bent over and carefully unlaced his shiny black dress shoes, then stepped out of them and lined them up next to the table.

He picked up a scalpel and eyed the glinting, silvery blade. “My work here is done, Shouko. I think it’s time I joined you.”

Then he slit his throat.

~Fin~