Interior Design for Demons: A Demon Romance by Rebecca F. Kenney

Author:Rebecca F. Kenney [Kenney, Rebecca F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

My tryst with Apollyon carries me through the next hour or so of torture. When the door finally opens again, I’m in very real pain, just as itchy and headachy as before—but my spirit is still strong, and I have to pretend to be cowed and broken. Rath cradles me against his chest and carries me to my suite. He even takes away some of the headache, though he doesn’t draw the itchy burning of my skin into himself. When he offers to bathe me, I decline, but I request something to soothe the itching and while he goes to fetch it, I shower. I don’t even bother turning off the lights or concealing myself from the hidden cameras. Everyone’s going to see me naked and tormented in Episode 3. What’s the point of modesty now?

The contestants are given twenty-four hours to recover. Rather than ordering food to my room, I spend some time hanging out in the dining mall, watching some of the TV feeds from the Earthly plane and waiting for my fellow competitors to show up. A few of them do, looking haggard and haunted, and we swap whispered torture stories over our trays of food. Amanda doesn’t show up, and neither do Aghilas or Linnea. Hisae tells me a little of what she experienced—a lot more physical damage than I went through, apparently. Every one of her toes was dislocated during her session, and even though she says they were all healed afterwards, her feet keep twitching, as if from phantom pain. And one of the other male competitors was chewed up by dogs. Despite his healing session, he now has faint scars along both arms and legs.

A couple of the contestants won’t talk about what they endured at all. They sit quiet and vacant, poking at their food, startling if anyone speaks to them.

At the end of our recovery period, we’re each hustled off to our assigned torture chambers, where we have forty-eight hours to create “the perfect environment for agony,” according to the assignment. We don’t have to invent all the tortures, but we’re supposed to have elements of pain and discomfort in place, and we’re told to provide storage for specific tools and implements of torture. After what Apollyon did for me, my goal is to create a room that gives the victim moments of relief or wonder, hopefully subtly enough that the judges won’t realize what I’m doing.

I paint the walls in the darkest red Rusala can find for me, and I set yellow track lighting along the center of the walls, around the entire room. It’s like a chair rail, except it’s a narrow tubelike light fixture. And it’s monochromatic light, which saps the color from everything in the room. I saw it in a documentary series on Netflix, in one episode about Olafur Eliasson’s art installations. When I first turn it on, Slate gasps and Rusala stands open-mouthed, staring at his hands, his body.

“Where did the color go?” Slate asks.

Smiling,

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