The Blade that Freezes. Excerpt

From the hallway, Anna listened to the old sorority catechisms echoing through the cracked door. “This is the first rule,” Kristin spat, even as her hands shook on the edge of the mattress. “Men are prey. Women are the hunters.” Margret picked up the chant without missing a beat, her voice thick and shaky but growing stronger: “Men are weak, men are soft—” “—and they exist only to be tamed or destroyed.” Even as terror fizzed in their guts, the repetition gave them strength, the rhythm of call-and-response a shield against the animal in front of them.

But the animal did not die quietly. Gunnar writhed, blinking tears and coffee from his eyes, and for a long, dreamlike interval seemed more wounded bear than human. He lashed out, catching Margret’s wrist in a meat-grinder grip, and with a single flex of his forearm slammed her to the headboard. Her skull made a sound like a knuckle cracking. The surprise in her face was almost comical—her own body betraying her, refusing to rise to the violence it had always feared. Anna, at the doorway, whispered, “Get up,” as if the force of her will could animate Margret’s limp arm, the fingers that curled and uncurled weakly at her side.

Kristin did not hesitate. She planted her feet on the carpet, braced her knees against the edge of the bed, and swung at Gunnar’s face with the mug’s broken handle. He caught it mid-arc, twisting her wrist until the bone creaked, and yanked her forward so hard her teeth clicked shut on her own tongue. She tasted blood, swallowed it, and with the other hand—her left, always the weaker—drove her thumb straight into his eye. He roared, not in pain but in outrage, the sound echoing through the house like a barnyard animal at the slaughter. He thrashed, tearing her hand away, and in the same motion pitched her across the mattress. She landed hard, shoulder-first, but rolled to her feet at the far side.

For half a minute it was chaos. Margret, dazed but breathing, crawled away from the headboard, her vision tunneling in and out with every heartbeat. Gunnar was already on his knees, one hand pressed to his bleeding face, the other searching the air for something—anything—to grab. When he found Margret’s ankle, he yanked her back toward him, pinning her to the sheet by sheer body weight. His thighs were like tree trunks. “You little fucking bitches,” he hissed. The phrase was so ordinary, so trivial, it almost made Margret laugh. She tried to say something, some final curse, but the air left her lungs as he hammered a fist into her stomach. She doubled over, vomit stringing from her nose and mouth.

Kristin, moving on pure animal instinct, circled the perimeter of the bed, searching for a weapon. She found none. She looked at Anna, who stood in the doorway, frozen and white-knuckled, and understood for the first time that this was not Anna’s fight—she had built the plan, but she would not soil it with violence. Kristin’s fury doubled, then tripled; she was alone, and this fact was both terrifying and purifying. She screamed, not words but a raw, primal sound, and launched herself at Gunnar from behind. She wrapped both arms around his neck and squeezed, her forearms digging into the stubble and loose skin. He thrashed, but she hung on, legs locked around his hips, grinding her heels into his groin as she wrenched backward with everything she had.

He rose from the bed like some obscene resurrection, Kristin clinging to his back, and staggered three steps before slamming both of them into the cracked plaster of the opposite wall. The impact bounced her teeth together. She lost her grip and tumbled to the floor, where she curled into a ball, splinters of pain shooting through her lower back. Gunnar, panting now, looked down at her with a kind of dull surprise, as if unsure how his daughters had grown to be so feral, so unkillable.

Margret was crawling again, one arm useless, the other clutching a pillow like a shield. Gunnar reached for her, but she twisted and kicked him in the face with both feet. The blow was clumsy, awkward, but it caught him just below the nose, splitting his upper lip and sending a fountain of blood across the mattress. “Yes!” Anna shouted, fists clenched at her sides. It was the only encouragement she would offer. Kristin, still on the floor, rolled onto her stomach and scanned under the bed for something—anything—to even the odds. Her fingers closed on a length of duct tape, sticky with years of dust, and she ripped off a strip as Gunnar, distracted by Margret’s flailing, momentarily forgot about her.

She launched herself at his feet, wrapped the tape around his right ankle, and pulled. He staggered, nearly fell, and for the split second he was off balance, Margret kneed him point-blank in the groin. He bellowed, the sound wet and shrill, and collapsed backward, his legs splaying outward as he hit the floor. His thin cotton briefs twisted in the fall, one leg riding up to expose the vulnerable mass of his genitals—the heavy, egg-shaped testicles flopping against his inner thigh, the shaft curled limply beside them like some pale, wounded creature. His hands clutched uselessly at himself, and that was the opening Kristin needed. She pounced on his back, tape in hand, and looped it around his throat, yanking with such force his windpipe nearly collapsed. His face went crimson, then a mottled purple, as veins bulged at his temples and his eyes bulged.