Sweet Romance13 min read
The Packages, the Hands, and the Black Cat
ButterPicks11 views
"I can't keep giving him money," I said, the words small and flat in the kitchen where silence had grown heavy like dust.
"He swore he'd stop," my father replied, looking at me as if speaking to a child who had broken a curious ornament. "He promised in front of everyone."
"He promised he'd cut off his hand if he gambled again," I said.
My voice trembled and the memory came back cold and sharp: Gavin Moller on his knees at my parents' house, a kitchen knife glinting. He pressed the blade to his finger and shouted, "If I ever gamble again, I'll cut my hand off. I'll sell blood and kidney. I swear it." He made a video; he posted it to friends and family. Everyone watched and nodded and said, "For the child, give him one more chance." They all told me that, including his mother, Luz Bush, with tears in her eyes. "For Adelyn," she kept saying.
"Give it time," my mother said then. "He'll learn."
He didn't learn. He hid debt behind debt. He sold my wedding gold. He lied to my parents that he was injured to get money—my father wired him funds for supposed hospital bills—and Gavin spent it in a single night. He sold the electric scooter he used for work. He took my phone, my money, my savings.
One night I woke up and found my accounts empty. "Where's the money?" I asked.
Gavin slapped me. "You don't let me live," he spat. "You humiliated me in front of everyone."
"You're the one who humiliated yourself," I whispered, backing away.
He hit me again. Our daughter, Adelyn Moreira, screamed. He kicked her. I wrapped Adelyn in my arms and we hid in the bathroom. I called the police.
"Leave," the officer told him that night. "If she wants divorce papers, file them." He left eventually, only to return at all hours, shouting at my workplace, threatening my family, threatening to take Adelyn.
"She won't come back," he told my aunt. "If she doesn't, I'll make her family pay."
He once stood outside our door with a bucket of gasoline. "If I can't have them, no one will," he said, the words slurred and insane. My parents sold the house and took Adelyn back to the countryside for safety. I moved far away, changed my apartment, and tried to erase him.
"I thought I would be safe," I said to Clark Brantley the first time he met me at the police station. "I thought he'd never find me."
"We're doing everything we can," Clark said, in a voice that made a place of safety feel possible. "But he knows people. He disappears and comes back. He has harmed many."
Three months later, a foam box arrived at the rented apartment. A courier left it by the lobby. I grabbed it without thinking, because my parents sometimes sent vegetables. The box had my name in big marker, but no sender's address. I took it upstairs, peeled off the ice packs, and froze.
Inside was a vacuum-sealed human hand.
I sat on the floor and the world narrowed to the sight of that wrist, the pale skin pulled tight by the plastic. The little knuckle had a familiar scar. My brain snarled. He had said he'd cut his own fingers off. The scar matched the story. I called the police.
"Who would do this?" I asked, but Clark was already on the line.
"We will trace this," Clark promised. "Stay where you are."
"You believe it's him?" I asked.
"Not yet," Clark said. "We will check DNA. But call us if anything else arrives."
The next morning a small box showed up at the office. I opened it without thinking and the box ruptured a little. There was a tiny smear of blood on the blade of the box cutter when I used it. The office smelled like soap and paper and then—then like blood.
I closed the lid and sank. The box contained another vacuumed hand, this one packed inverted. It had been forced in; the fingers curled. I felt the paper slip and saw red water seeping from the plastic.
I carried the box outside and called Clark. "They keep sending things," I said. "Please come."
"Stay put," Clark's voice said. "We are on our way."
I held the box at my knees in a strip of grass outside the office building. "Please don't be him," I whispered to the sky.
When Clark and a female officer—Jasmine Makarov—arrived, they were calm and practical. "We will take it," Jasmine said.
"Do you think it's Gavin?" I asked, heart in my throat.
"DNA will tell us," Clark said. "But if it is him, we'll open a cross-province case."
"Please," I said. "Just take this away."
I went home but didn't go inside. I slept in a motel that night. Then, on the street outside the police station, someone lobbed a wrapped object at me. It hit my shoulder, warm and heavy. When it fell open, I saw dark, clotted organ and a smell like copper. A kidney.
"Who would do this?" I said again. "Who wants me to look at this?"
"We'll treat it as evidence," Clark said, taking the kidney away in gloves. "We are comparing everything now."
At the station that night, the world narrowed and expanded at once. The officers were good and steady. They took my statements. They told me Gavin's parents' address. They asked me to come back with them to his hometown because the DNA samples were matching—on the hands and the kidney—and yet men who had not been found alive were still appearing alive in surveillance footage.
Clark looked at me. "You need to come."
"Do you think he's dead?" I asked.
"We're not sure," Clark answered. "But there is something strange here."
I went with them. The train ride home pulled at my chest. Old memories blurred the tracks: a park where Adelyn took her first steps, a market where we argued about cheap rice, the day he first promised to stop.
Gavin's parents lived in a tiny, damp room under a roll-up door, full of the items they'd collected to sell. They were old, faces carved deep, eyes milky with worry. "Is that you, Jillian?" Luz asked slowly. She held a woven bag to me. "Clothes for the child. For Adelyn."
"Take them," I said, not trusting my voice.
"Where is Gavin?" I asked.
"He's...gone," Hassan Rizzo said, in a voice that trembled between guilt and relief. "He came home last night. He left. I don't know."
They let me see the photos Clark had taken from surveillance. In one, a thin figure in a black hoodie looked gaunt, eyes very large. He was always in shadows. But the DNA match said something else entirely: the hands and the organ belonged to Gavin Moller.
"That can't be," I whispered.
"All we can do is search," Clark said. "He ran from us before but he can't run forever."
We found him near the block where he used to gamble—skinny, hair damp with something, eyes wide and unblinking. He didn't seem to notice us until I walked past and we almost collided.
"Gavin," I screamed.
He didn't shake me off. He simply stared, and the eyes were wrong—like dull fish eyes, unfocused and held open. He lifted his jacket and there was a clean line where his hands should have been gone.
"What did you do to him?" I asked. "Who—"
"I'll cut off my hands if I gamble," Gavin said to me, voice flat. "I promised."
"You're alive," I whispered, trying to make sense of the living and the dead. "You are alive and yet—"
He showed me the stump where someone had cut his wrists. The skin was pale and free of fresh blood as if frozen and preserved. Blood wasn't flowing.
I backed away. "How—"
Hassan Rizzo walked forward slowly, bucket in hand. "I did what I had to," he said softly.
"You killed him," I said.
"No," Hassan said. "We made sure he couldn't hurt you. We kept a promise." He smiled like someone explaining a trifle. "We kept our boy from gambling again. We kept his hands safe."
"Hands safe?" I repeated.
"You swore you'd divorce him," Luz muttered, "so we did this to keep our promise."
My mouth opened in a soundless protest. I looked at Gavin's hollow eyes and could not say what he felt. He moved in jerks and spoke as if a tape were playing inside him. "If I gamble again, cut the hand. I said that, Jillian," he said. "I told them."
I wanted to scream, to push through the crowd of officers and neighbors, but Hassan only stood there, calm as a butcher.
That night in the motel, I could not sleep. I thought of the foam box, of the hands I had seen. When I finally thought I could breathe I got a call from Clark. "We have more," he said.
"Who did this?" I asked.
"We're not sure. There were traces. We found a page in Hassan's handwriting listing names. There's talk of...old rural practices. People are frightened. And there is money." Clark's tone changed. "Your father took a box of cash and kept it in a foam box in the backyard?"
I felt the ground slip. "Yes."
"Keep it closed," Clark said. "Don't touch it. We'll need to get to the bottom of this."
Two nights later, something else happened. I returned to my childhood house. My father led me to the shed and opened a large foam box. Inside were bundles of cash, vacuum sealed and wrapped. "Your grandfather's sale," he said weakly. "We couldn't trust banks. We didn't want Gavin to take it."
"Where did this come from?" I asked.
He said, "The money came in a box, Jillian. It arrived for Adelyn. We never saw the sender."
I touched the plastic. It was cold like surprise. I thought of Hassan's claim that the money was "for the child."
Later, Clark brought me to the police station to watch. He had arranged a press meeting to call witnesses. People had to know. We had to expose whatever pact had formed. The town hall filled with neighbors, reporters, and a row of cameras. Clark stood at the podium.
"Gavin Moller was found alive," Clark began. "He is vulnerable and injured. We have recovered human tissue—hands and an organ—sent to different addresses. DNA identifies the tissue as belonging to Gavin. We are investigating who is responsible."
"You're saying his parents were involved?" someone cried from the back.
"We ask you to allow the investigation to proceed," Clark said.
Hassan stepped up, hand trembling. "I did it," he said. "I did what needed doing. I cut him and I offered the hands to her by mail. I gave the kidney. I promised to keep him from gambling."
A murmur grew into a roar. "What?" people shouted. "Why would you—"
"Because he was killing us," Hassan said, voice thin. "Because we were helpless. Because he promised he would die if he gambled and he could not stop."
I could feel my knees weaken. "What message were you trying to send?" I said, my voice small yet slicing across the town hall like a blade.
Hassan's face shifted. "I wanted them to be safe."
"You sent body parts," a neighbor cried. "You tortured your son!"
"He's a danger to himself and others," Hassan said. He did not look ashamed. He looked exhausted, like someone who had spent his last breaths and offered them to justify what he had done. "I thought I'd be praised for stopping him."
"Where did you get the money?" a reporter asked.
Hassan's jaw tightened. "That is not important."
The crowd pressed closer. Phones were out, cameras rolling. A woman who had known Gavin's family for years said, "You think this will help him stop? You butchered your child and put him at the mercy of some...some ritual. This is monstrous!"
He stood and faced the room. "I kept my word," he said. "I kept my word and I obeyed the oath my son made. If that makes me a monster, then so be it."
People around me reacted in ways I couldn't forget. Some shook their heads in disgust. A few whispered about the money. Some took videos. One older man spat on the floor near Hassan's shoes.
"You're a coward," I said then, though my voice trembled. "And a murderer."
At that moment Hassan broke. The exhaustion drained from his face and something animal slid in. He laughed—then he cried. "I had to do it," he said. "I had to keep them safe. I had to make him pay." His shoulders shook. "They all begged me. They said it would end it. They said it would keep her safe."
"Who begged you?" a policewoman asked.
Hassan looked around with a wild eye. "The men who paid me. They wanted a living puppet who would do their favors. I couldn't face it. We were in debt. I thought if I gave them a piece, they'd go away."
That confession—partial and jagged—cracked through the room. "What men?" Clark demanded.
Hassan's glare darted to his son's hollow eyes, who sat on the back row with a blanket draped over his lap, hands bound. Gavin's holes for hands made the blanket fold strangely. "They called it service," Hassan groaned. "They paid and we did what they wanted."
Someone in the crowd shoved a microphone forward. "You sold your son."
"I kept my family," Hassan said, and for a moment his rage sharpened. "You have to understand. He was killing himself and us. I cut him, I stopped him, I sent the parts to scare them—"
"You sent the organs to intimidate," Clark said. "You knowingly committed a violent crime, and then you tried to stage a ritualistic explanation. You sent body parts to terrorize a woman and a child. That is attempted murder and other charges."
He didn't care. "I was afraid," he whispered, and then louder, "I am still afraid!"
The crowd closed in. Phones recorded it all. "Arrest him," people shouted. "Arrest him now!"
Clark signaled. Officers moved in. "Hassan Rizzo, you are under arrest for mutilation, intimidation, and conspiracy," Clark said.
Hassan's expression flipped. He went from defiant to terrified, eyes surreal with disbelief. "No," he gasped. "No, please. I only wanted to stop him. I only wanted to protect them."
"Protect them," a woman mocked. "You killed your son to protect us."
Hassan's face crumpled. "It was for the family," he wailed. "Do you know how hungry we were? Do you know the threats? I was told it would be only this. I was told no one would be hurt if I did this."
The crowd's reaction hardened into revulsion. A man near the front spat on Hassan's shoes. A group of neighbors began to chant, "Shame! Shame! Shame!" Children were pulled away by their parents.
"You're a monster," someone said, and others repeated it like a chorus. "Shame. Shame."
Hassan fell to his knees in public. Cameras kept rolling. He tried to cry and then to justify. He promised repentance. He offered to work every hour of his life to repay what he'd done. He begged for forgiveness. He shouted that he had acted out of love and duty. He pleaded to be spared.
"Does anyone forgive him?" Clark asked, and the only answer was silence, then murmurs, then the slow clinking of coins from pockets—not for charity, but a symbolic turning away.
Inside the sea of cameras and faces, I watched Hassan change. He moved through stages I recognized: denial, defiance, bargaining, collapse, brokenness. He first said, "I didn't do anything wrong," then, a minute later, "But I had no choice," and later, "Punish me, but help him." People filmed his trembling, the way his hands—still intact—shook.
When the officers led him away, a crowd surrounded the car. Someone shouted that he should be led naked through the town. Another wanted him tarred and feathered. A few tried to reason: "The law will take care of this." The mixture of fury and hunger for spectacle hung like a thick cloth over the square.
That public shaming—an exposure, a seizure of the family's private shame into light—was necessary. It had to be done. The scene lasted long enough for cameras to fill their memory cards, and for Hassan to move from ruthless to broken to small.
But the punishment in that square was only the start. The legal process followed. In court, the evidence—boxes, blood swabs, DNA—mounted. People testified. The men who had paid Hassan for "services" were traced in part through bank records and arrested. The town watched men who met in smoky rooms, the same men Gavin had owed money to, being led away in handcuffs. Each of them had a different sort of collapse when exposed: some tried to bluff, others lied, and a few begged for leniency. None of them got it.
The public scenes varied. One man, a gambler ring leader, went pale and denied everything until a video of him with a frozen hand in the trunk of his car played on the courtroom screen. He then scrambled to plead insanity. "I didn't know," he cried. "I was drunk. I was stupid." He was carted off under a chorus of whispers and cameras.
Another man, a creditor who had paid for parts, at first laughed and offered bribes, and then sat silent, the color drained from his cheeks. His wife left him in court. He was left to face the judgment of men and women who had been wronged. The difference in punishments was deliberate: some were publicly shamed with their faces shown; others were exposed privately as creditors whose own families left them in disgrace.
For Hassan, the fall was complete. The town had seen him at his worst and would never forget it. He was taken in front of a judge, then to a journalist's van, where a reporter asked, "Did you ever imagine this would happen?"
Hassan looked hollow. "No," he whispered. "I thought...I thought I'd fix it."
"Do you regret it?" the reporter asked.
A crowd gathered. Some shouted insults. Others stood silent, leaning on each other.
Hassan's pleas then sounded childish: "Help him," he begged. "Help my son. Don't let my grandson suffer. Forgive me."
The cameras caught the implosion. People lined up to record his apologies and then to cast them into the internet like pebbles into a pond. The damage ratings rose. Pity and contempt walked together. He tried to speak to a reporter and was met with a wall of cameras. He tried to weep and was told to spare it. He tried to explain and was interrupted with curses.
That public punishment will stay in my mind: a crowd of neighbors and strangers, the press' hot lenses, the coldness of justice and the cruelty of mob thirst. Hassan's face, once warm as a man who loved his son, became a map of regret and terror under streetlight and camera flash. When he was led away, someone shouted, "You should rot alone with what you've done!" The crowd answered with a roar.
Yet even as Hassan suffered, the strangest things kept happening. Gavin, the walking hush of flesh, was moved to a hospital. His body was odd—alive, yet exhibiting features of preservation. Doctors said they had never seen tissue like that; forensic experts called it anomalous. Clark kept working the threads, determined to find who had orchestrated the mailings and why the money that had arrived in my childhood yard was there.
"When this is over," Clark said one night, "we'll make sure Adelyn is safe and those who paid for this can't touch you. We will do everything."
"You say that," I told him, "but what if some things are deeper than police work? What if there's something else behind it?"
Clark did not answer. He looked tired and kind.
When the dust settled enough for me to breathe, I took the foam box of money from the shed and kept it closed for a week. I thought of what Hassan had said—that men had paid him to create a living puppet for their use. I thought of the black cat I had seen once in the hotel hallway, darting like a shadow. I had not told Clark about the cat then; it felt too strange.
"Do you believe in luck?" my mother asked one night, watching Adelyn sip milk.
"I believe in small mercies," I said. "And I believe some things are too strange for my head. But I know this: I will keep Adelyn safe."
"That's all that matters," my mother said.
When I finally opened the foam box at night, alone in a locked room, I found stacks of cash folded neat as prayers. No one had traced the source. No one had stepped forward to say where the money originated. But I took some and put away enough for Adelyn's school and kept a single note to remind me of the price paid: a small bloodstain at the corner, like a dark punctuation.
"Keep it hidden," Clark said when he learned. "We will keep investigating. Report any unusual delivery. If anything comes, don't touch it."
"Will Gavin get better?" I asked.
Clark hesitated. "Sometimes bodies do strange things. But we will get him justice, and you and Adelyn safety."
"I don't want to look back," I said.
"You don't have to," Clark answered. "You have every right to move on."
The black cat came one night as if to say more than words could. It sat by Adelyn's window and watched the moon. It was sleek and looked at me as if deciding whether I could be trusted. It left a small, dark, smooth pebble on the windowsill and then slipped away into the night.
I left the foam box closed that night and slept with Adelyn under my arm.
Later, when the men who had paid for the grotesque services were sentenced, the town watched as justice unfolded in legal terms and in a million small ways: a father who had acted out of desperation was judged harshly in the public square and by the law, a ring of cruel men were exposed and punished, and the children of the neighborhood had one less threat. But the memory of a hand in a foam box, of a kidney on a bus stop, and of a man with no hands walking and whispering his oath, stayed lodged in my mind like a stone under skin.
I keep the pebble the black cat left on the windowsill. It is smooth and black and cool in my palm. I cannot say whether it means protection or simply coincidence. But it is mine now.
"Do you think we'll ever understand why they did it?" Adelyn asked me one evening, small fingers curled around the pebble.
"I don't know," I said, folding her into my lap. "But I'll keep you safe. That's enough for now."
She smiled, eyes drowsy with sleep. "Promise?" she whispered.
I looked down at her and saw only trust. I put the pebble in a small box and closed it.
Outside, somewhere in the town, cameras had recorded a public collapse and a long terrible truth. Inside, I had a sleeping girl and a small black stone. I would not pretend everything was whole, but we were alive, and the box at the shed sat closed for now.
The End
— Thank you for reading —