Caged like a dog

Kaël’s eyes drift between the cold, rust-flecked bars, their rigid structure cutting the shadows like jagged fangs. He tries—desperately—to focus his mind on anything, anything else but the putrid corpse rotting just feet away from him. His thoughts are like moths circling a flame, and no matter how many times he swats them away, they always return to that bloated, maggot-ridden husk sprawled unnaturally on the bloodstained floor. The stench is unrelenting—sickening. It's not just rot. It's not just decay. It’s a violation of the senses, a rancid punch of sour meat, bile, and festering death. The smell burrows into his sinuses, etching itself behind his eyes like a wound that won’t close.

Kaël has smelled death before. He’s dealt with blood, gore, torn flesh. But this… this is different. This is personal. This is intimate in the worst way. The scent wraps around him like a suffocating shroud. Even rotting raw meat left out in the sun for days doesn’t come close to the chemical warzone of gases oozing from the fly-swarmed carcass. The body isn’t just decomposing—it’s melting, pooling into the cracks in the tiles with wet, slow certainty. And yet, somehow, what gnaws at Kaël even more than the corpse, more than the rancid perfume of death, is the slow, creeping realization that he hasn’t bathed in three days.

Three days.

Not long, not really—not by survivalist standards. But Kaël is used to a certain… sharpness. Precision. He’s not vain, but he’s clean. Efficient. His routines are sacred. Now, that sacred order is crumbling. His once-sharp hazel hair is tangled, matted with sweat and dried blood. His clothes cling to his skin in damp, chafing patches, soaked through with sweat and grime and the coppery sting of coagulated blood. His skin crawls with invisible itches, the kind that feel like insect legs skating just beneath the surface. He swears he can feel a rash blooming beneath his shirt, angry and hot where salt and friction have married.

He shifts uncomfortably, trying to adjust the stiff collar of his shirt, but the movement sends a new wave of that foul smell rising from the corpse. His stomach clenches. Not from disgust—not entirely—but from hunger. Real, bone-deep, gnawing hunger. Three days without food turns a man into something else, something more primal. His muscles ache, but not from strain—no, they burn with the hollowness of starvation. The kind of hunger that makes your mind start wandering down strange, unthinkable roads.

His gaze returns to the corpse. Dully, bitterly. The peeling meat has parted even further, revealing an obscene tangle of maggots gorging themselves on muscle and fat. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds—white, thick-bodied things that look disturbingly like overcooked grains of rice, except they writhe and pulse with life. They slither out from beneath the skin in wet, mucous-drenched waves, and as they fall to the tiles below, they hit the ground with a squelch Kaël can feel in the back of his throat.

His stomach lurches again. Not in horror—but in want.

No. He tightens his jaw. No, no, no. This isn’t him. He’s not some feral animal. But his body doesn’t care about pride. His ribs are beginning to show, the way they rise and fall like broken staircases beneath his shirt. His throat is dry—painfully so—and his tongue feels swollen, coated in film. Every buzz of a fly’s wing sounds louder. Sharper. Hungrier.

They’re not just crawling over the body anymore. Some of them have turned their attention to him.

He notices them now, inching across the tile in chaotic little zigzags. A bundle of larvae, moist and twitching, crawling toward him with eager momentum. He stares. Disbelieving. They’re coming for me. His lips curl into a snarl, but it’s weak, trembling. The implication settles in like poison: they aren’t done feasting.

They want him too.

They will want him—when he’s still, when he stops breathing, when he’s no longer capable of swatting them away. His mind spits out the term like a curse: myiasis. The infestation of living tissue. That’s what they want. That’s what’s next. To burrow into him. To eat him alive from the inside out.

A sound escapes him—a broken breath, a laugh, or maybe a sob—but he clenches his teeth and forces himself to push back against the bars behind him. The steel is bitterly cold against his bare skin, like ice dragged across fevered flesh. His head tips back until his skull connects with the metal with a dull thunk, and he closes his eyes. Tight. Squeezing out the sight. Trying to block it all. A soft, bitter prayer escapes his cracked lips—not for mercy, not for salvation, but a petty, cynical plea to the universe: Can these little bastards not be attracted to the stink of their own?

He feels movement. One of the worms has reached his shoe. His sneaker—once white—is now a murky gray, stained with layers of filth and blood and dust. The maggot—bold little fucker—has slithered up to the very tip. It’s alone, for now, a vanguard ahead of the rest. He watches it. Doesn’t crush it. Instead, he reaches down with two fingers and picks it up. It squirms wetly, a revolting softness between his fingertips, like a water balloon filled with slime. Every instinct screams to pinch, to obliterate it—but he doesn’t. He flicks it instead, sending it sailing between the bars and into the dark void outside the cage.

“Fuck me…” he mutters under his breath, voice hoarse and worn to raw edges. He slams the back of his head once more against the steel bars with a grimace. His hands rake up through his tangled hair, fingers clawing at the roots, gripping tight enough to hurt. He wants to rip the hazel strands out—wants to do something—but he stops short. Not yet. Not yet.

And then he hears it.

A sound.

A low, amused chuckle—smooth as honey, dark as pitch. His eyes snap open, bloodshot and furious, tracking to the corner of the room near the corpse. And there, standing like he’s been there all along, is a man.

Not just a man—a presence.

Tall. Broad-shouldered. The kind of figure you overlook once, but never twice. Jet-black hair hangs in uneven locks just above his brow, messy but deliberate, like it was styled by chaos itself. He looks like he walked out of a marble statue—the chiseled angles of his jaw, the sharp cut of his cheekbones, the masculine fullness of his lips. The bottom one juts out slightly more than the top, lending him a softness that betrays the predatory air he carries.

Kaël’s breath catches in his throat.

His first, utterly inappropriate thought: I want to bite it.

The man’s eyes—gray, stormy, unreadable—glide over Kaël’s form with something like amusement. His voice cuts through the stale air, thick with a Scottish lilt that makes Kaël’s stomach turn in ways both terrifying and pleasant.

“So, you beat me to him.”

The words are casual. Almost conversational. The stranger takes a step forward, completely unconcerned by the slowly advancing tide of maggots that squirm at his feet.

Kaël instinctively pulls his knees tighter against his chest. A makeshift fortress, laughably inadequate. He’s still mostly clean of the infestation—mostly—save for the one he flicked away. His eyes narrow, burning with defiance. The look he gives is venomous, feral. That of a predator wounded and caged, no longer dangerous but still lashing with teeth and fury.

He doesn’t speak. Just watches. Waits.

The stranger crouches near the cell, peering through the bars with an unabashed smirk.

“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”

Kaël sneers, forcing bitterness into his voice. “Calling me ugly? How rude of you.”

The man seems caught off guard for a heartbeat—then chuckles again, deep and rich.

“That accent,” he says, tilting his head. “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?”

Kaël’s lips curl into something between a grin and a grimace. “What gave you that idea?” he deadpans, cocking his head in mock confusion.

Another grin. This one sharper. Predatory.

“Maybe the fact that you’re in there, and not out here with me,” the man replies, nodding toward the corpse, “and John here’s taking a nap.”

Kaël wants to play this game—normally, he would. But now? Now his stomach is turning on him, and his limbs feel heavy, and he’s so damn tired of the smell of death.

“W-who are you?” he asks, letting a faint stutter slip in—just enough to sound vulnerable.

The man’s gaze doesn’t waver. “I have many names. One in particular… The Stitcher. Ever heard of it?”

Kaël shakes his head. Slow. Careful.

The man raises an eyebrow. “No? What about The Butcher? Sawblade? The one who stitches his victims back together after removing the parts they used to sin?”

Kaël feigns ignorance. “Nope. But maybe your new name could be… ‘the guy who lets me out of this fucking cage’?”

That earns a laugh.

But it dies quickly.

Because this isn’t a game to The Stitcher.

And Kaël is running out of time.

Understood. I’ll rewrite what you send in the same tense, tone, style, and level of detail as the original piece you shared—present tense, dark psychological horror, richly descriptive, emotionally intense.

The man shakes his head slowly, his steps lazy as he drifts back toward the corpse. One hand sways through the air—not at the flies, Kaël realizes, but at him. A dismissive flick, like brushing off a gnat.

“Now why would I do that?” the man muses, voice laced with venomous amusement. “I don’t know you. You don’t know me. And isn’t there a saying about not talking to strangers?”

The words are sharp, cutting—like a knife slipped between Kaël’s ribs.

“Besides,” the man continues, circling around the rotting husk of the corpse, “I know you’re not just some poor, innocent victim. That knife in John’s throat? Recently sharpened. And the way you drove it in? Right where it needed to go. Surgical. Efficient. That kind of precision comes with experience.”

Kaël sways where he sits, the dread rising inside him like a pot left on the boil—bubbling, hissing, threatening to spill. His eyes snap to the man’s back as he moves toward the heavy metal door—the only exit, the only lifeline out of this waking nightmare.

“But it’s fine,” the man says over his shoulder. “I’ve got business to attend to. And you, well… you’ve got guests.” He gestures to the twitching carpet of maggots inching steadily closer. “Unless, of course, you’d like to tell me who you really are. Full name’s fine. But I’d prefer the title given to you by people like us.”

A silence falls. Thick. Drowning. It stretches long and slow, like fog creeping over a graveyard—smothering. The man doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Just waits.

Seconds crawl by. Minutes, maybe. Only the sound of buzzing wings and the wet gargle of decomposition breaks the hush—flesh liquefying, bones sinking deeper into the blood-glossed floor.

Then, finally—movement. The man turns to go. One boot crosses the threshold.

“Wait!” Kaël’s voice is raw. Cracked. A whimper wrapped in desperation. “I… I’m Bloodhound…”

The man freezes mid-step. The name hangs in the air like smoke—thin, but suffocating. Recognition flickers in the man's eyes, cold and calculating. Kaël’s kills are whispered about, not screamed. But certain details linger. A name. A chain around a crushed throat. Bodies ripped by hounds. The calling card of a predator, hidden behind silence and teeth.

The reaction comes fast. Hard.

“And why the hell should I let you out?” The voice lashes like a whip, no longer teasing but snarling, soaked in contempt. “You’re a killer. I should open you up—split your belly and let them feast on what spills out.”

He storms forward, steps loud, cruel. Kaël’s body shrinks instinctively, curling tighter against the cold steel bars. It isn’t the threat that makes him flinch—it’s the tone. Loud. Sharp. Piercing. It rattles his skull, his bones. He’s used to silence. To whispers. This—this is too much.

He doesn’t speak. He can’t. His body jolts violently as the man kicks the bars, the crash of metal ringing out like gunfire in a chapel. It echoes. It pierces.

“Answer me!”

Kaël folds inward, palms clamped over his ears, teeth gritted to hold in the scream that fights to be born. A sob escapes anyway—thin, strangled. He didn’t even notice the tears until they’re streaming freely, wetting his cheeks, his sleeves. No comfort in their warmth—just more salt on skin already rubbed raw.

“Aww… is the puppy crying?” The man’s voice is poison now. Not mocking. Cruel. He watches Kaël scratch at his arms, nails digging through grime to reach the burning skin beneath.

No comfort comes.

“Fine. Here’s a choice. Shut the fuck up,” he growls, voice flattening, dead and cold, “or I toss a few of your little friends in here. Let them keep you company. Disgusting, yeah, but you’re already halfway to their level.”

He turns back to the corpse. Squats beside it. Begins rummaging through the pockets, fingers deft but indifferent. Comes up empty. Looks back—eyes narrow, demanding.

Kaël’s voice is barely there. Just air and fear.

“D-drawer… in the workshop table…”

A whimper follows. Barely audible. Like a beaten dog afraid to speak.

The man rises. Crosses the room with measured calm, boots crunching over god-knows-what. The workbench is a warped, peeling ruin—paint cracked, wood scarred by time and cruelty. He opens the first drawer. Bingo.

Phones. Wallets. Bits of jewelry. Trophies, Kaël thinks. Evidence. Lives reduced to pocket lint. Nestled among them—a rust-stained key.

The lock clicks.

The cage door creaks open.

But Kaël doesn’t move.

He doesn’t bolt. Doesn’t crawl. He just stays, pressed against the far wall like the open door is another trick, another trap. His sleeves—soaked and filthy—are clamped over his eyes, like cloth can shield him from being seen. From being chosen.

“Easy, pup,” the man says, voice low now. Not kind—never kind—but less edged. A calm before something. “Get up. You’re coming with me. I have somone who wants to meet you".

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