by Lana Sky
The feel of the ashtray in my hand. His voice in my ear. “Strike them hard… Draw it out.” The stench of blood in the air. I never could seem to scrub it from my fingers no matter how hard I tried. Maybe I never really tried at all.
“You remember it. How good it was between us.”
I remember…
I remember the beatings. The rapes. The awful things he made me do. I didn’t want to do them.
Lies.
I remember the feel of his weight on top of me. The hungry way he used to kiss me. Touch me. Possessively. Demandingly. How his scent would fill my lungs more than oxygen would. Wolf Blood.
“You remember the fun we used to have.”
Nostalgia taints his voice in a way I’ve never heard it. It almost sounds like he’s humming.
The fun. Him goading me on while I…
“Stop!” I’m shouting. I’m begging. Him. Myself. The gun flails—it finds a new target. My wrist aches as I twist it so that the barrel is against my stomach. “Stop.”
“Ksei.” His voice regains that commanding edge. For once, he seems afraid. “You think killing yourself will keep you from me?” He throws his head back for a sharp bark of laughter that pierces me deeper than any bullet ever could. “You are mine, Ksei. You came to me. But our reunion might be too much for you to bear at once. I can understand that.” He gives me another smile. Another lethal blow. “I will give you a few days to remember our love. How about seven?”
I’m panting. I’m breathless. He seems so unconcerned. The only time he so much as flinches is when I raise the gun to my heart rather than my stomach.
“Seven days,” he tells me. “In the meantime, you may have the run of the city. Go back to that hovel you’ve found yourself in, though I would prefer the apartment. I will not contact you.”
“You’ve been watching me.” My voice breaks as the truth spells itself out before I even see him nod.
Every move I’ve made. Every pathetic attempt to convince myself that I had the nerve to really do it—kill him. He’s been watching. He’s been waiting.
He’s been amused.
“I could keep my distance,” he admits. “But I couldn’t go another moment without seeing you dance again.”
His words are the equivalent of someone revealing that my entire life has been played out on stage. All of those private, secretive moments that I thought were my own merely served as someone else’s entertainment.
“You were there…”
“I have my ways, Ksei.”
I swallow hard. For some reason, it’s easier to thumb the trigger with it pointed at my soul. Maybe the blow of a bullet could scrub him from it. Drive him out.
“Why?”
“It’s already too late, Ksei.” His eyes drift over my throat and then up to observe my face like it’s one of the many pieces of property he owns. “You already came back to me.”
“Get away!”
He takes a step, and I train the gun on him again, holding it unsteadily while I inch toward the doorway.
He lets me go, his eyes darker than midnight, his jaw clenched. “When you need me, I’ll be here. You will come back. In the meantime, remember me. All of it. We have much to discuss when I see you again.”
I turn on my heel and run. The suite becomes a maze. I wander it for what feels like an eternity before I finally stagger out into the main lobby of the hotel. Once I hit the street, I pick a direction and keep going. My bare feet slam against the pavement, driving me forward. I never stop to put the gun away. It’s my only protection from the memories. It’s my only shield from the eyes watching me with every step I take.
Moya lyubov. Moya lyubov.
I hear him. I smell him. I taste him.
I’m dying again. I’m drowning. He’s bashed my brains in, and there is no one here to scoop them back up and tuck them neatly into my skull. Just silence. Just my own pulsing heartbeat.
Just him.
Chapter 24
Espi
“Bang.” Two ice-cold fingers graze the back of my neck. “You’re dead.”
Giggling, Domi steps around me. Her eyes glow neon blue in the dim light of the bar. Her teeth are bared, a partial smile, partial snarl. She’s feral tonight. The way she used to look when Vlad made her turn so many tricks that she could barely walk before he threw her out onto the street.
Something has her worried, but I’m too tired to ask. No. Fuck that. I’m too drunk. I snatch a shot from the counter and down it without so much as a sniff test to tell what it is. The shit burns going down, but it doesn’t come back up. Yet. Two more shots don’t chase my sanity away though. It’s still here, lurking like poison, as Domi returns to her post behind the counter and starts wiping it down with a wet rag.
In all the chaos of the week, I’ve barely checked on her. Really checked. Francisco’s taken good care of her, protecting her from the shitheads at the bar; I can tell that much. Whatever’s gotten her antsy lives inside her head. She never stops fiddling with her hair. Tugging at it. Pulling. It’s like she’s trying to yank something out, but damn. Don’t I know better than anyone? Dark thoughts can only be buried beneath liquor and nicotine.
Or confessed to someone so tormented by their own shit that they just might hear you.
Another shot chases the thought. Not far enough away though.
With a sigh, I settle my focus on Domi. “What’s up?”
She stands beneath a puddle of bluish light, and I’ve never realized just how young she is before. I know her age, but she’s young. A tiny little girl with no clue of what to do.
“It’s nothing,” she says, shaking her head. “Someone just asked me something. That’s all.”
In an instant, I’m sitting straighter as anger washes through my stomach, neutralizing the alcohol. “Arno?”
Domi shrugs but doesn’t deny it. Tonight, she’s wearing another outfit of Darcy’s. Something so fucking skimpy that I can’t even dissect it in pieces. I just stare at her eyes. The bruise around the one is healing up, but they look even more haunted than before. Blue and Yellow. Piotr’s hell sure did churn out an unusual pair.
“They just asked me about a girl is all,” she says, her accent thickening the way it does whenever she talks about the past.
I wasn’t stupid enough to pry about her family or her life before America. In a way, I never really had to. Domi always was an open book—a fucked-up graphic novel with the scenes depicted in violent, glaring colors.
“She was blond, they said. Green eyes. American. Five foot two…”
I grit a sigh back and shove away the bottle of whatever I was drinking. That definitely sounds like Arno. “You don’t have to—”
“I said no,” Domi says, staring down at the counter. Her fingers twitch against the rag as if she’s fighting to cling to the present. Her eyes reveal the truth though. She’s already back there, living and breathing in the stench of the club. “But that’s not the truth…”
I wait without saying a damn thing. Hope. It’s a bitter fucking taste that burns worse than nicotine. I can still see Parish slumped over the end of the bar, too doped up to carry on a conversation. I would never say it to Arno, but it’s better if she’s dead. Honestly, she already was.
“You saw her?” I ask while Domi just stands there, her palms braced against the countertop.
“I don’t know.” She’s barely loud enough above the shouts of the last stragglers to stagger out of the bar. “I don’t remember. I never saw their faces, the other girls. I can’t tell you what the girls who shared my room looked like. You go through that life blind. You focus on you. Only you. I don’t know if I… I don’t know.”
With a sigh, I stand and circle around the counter to where she’s standing. She doesn’t resist when my arms go around her. She just coughs, her nose wrinkling at the stench of cigarette smoke. I’m no good at the nitty-gritty of comforting people. I just wait until she stops shaking.
Until she stops muttering nonsense
into the front of my shirt—I don’t know. I don’t know.
She sways on her feet when I finally let her go and send her upstairs to get some rest. But then the real fun begins. Because, after calming her, I don’t even know how to comfort myself. Arno’s way isn’t working tonight. I’m all out of cigarettes. I’m out of fucks left to give. In the end, I just leave the bar, pick a direction, and start walking.
It feels like hours before I find myself somewhere familiar. Even this goddamn early, there’s a man still on the corner, his hands tucked into his pockets. I shove a fifty beneath his nose, and he hands me a vial, full and unbroken.
I’m doing a mental count of just how many extra syringes I have by the time I start home. The moment I reach the front stoop, I lose count.
Someone broke into my house again, but I don’t go for the knife this time. I shoulder the front door open instead and find the culprit in plain sight, slumped against the wall. I blink as my eyes adjust, making out a slender frame. Pale. A woman.
I’m on my knees beside her before I even realize I’m crouching. She flinches when I touch her, cringing against the wall. She’s shivering—so cold that the chill bites through my fingertips. I try to withdraw my hand, but she grabs my wrist before I can, her nails digging in. Scraping. I let her hold me as I wrestle the door shut with one hand. I don’t say a fucking thing.
I’m just here. She pulls me closer when she’s ready. Her head finds my shoulder, her breath hot on my skin. There’s something in her hand, I realize, held to her chest. It’s metal. It’s oddly shaped. Her finger is on the trigger.
Stitches won’t cure this newer pain. No. I have to reach into another box of tricks this time.
“Which one shall it be, huh?” I wonder out loud as I lean back against the wall and stretch my legs out in front of me. “Little Red? Sleeping Beauty?”
She tilts her head just enough for me to make her eyes out through the shadows—wide, empty, yellow. They drift down my chest, and I sigh, reaching up to follow the line of her gaze with my fingers.
“All right. Listener’s choice it is.” I eye the ceiling as the sound of her breathing counts the seconds. I grit my teeth at the realization that she’s crying, gasping at the air.
I have a feeling that the tears aren’t because of sadness. In my experience, the real waterworks start flowing once you lose every fucking shred of control. When your emotions turn against you and all you can do is just feel your body fall apart.
It looks like I’ll have to dig deep for story time. Maybe play a game of Show You Mine because she already showed me a bloodied bit of hers.
“Do you know the difference between a murderer and a killer?” I ask to no response. “Animals kill. Hunters kill. Diseases kill. It just happens. Sometimes there’s a reason behind it. Sometimes not. Murder is different…”
She doesn’t react when I reach for the gun and pry it from her grip. It’s the one I gave her. I sniff and catch the telltale scent of residue drifting from her fingers. She used it.
“You have to want to murder,” I say, continuing my story as I tuck the weapon against my side. “You do it on purpose. There’s no reason behind it. Just rage. You want the fucker to suffer. You need them to die. I…I’ve never killed anyone in my life.”
She swallows noisily. I know the question she wants to ask. Maybe she’s too tired to. Maybe she already knows the answer. Either way, she says nothing, and I let her lie here beside me. I let her heat sink into my skin. But a promise is a promise, after all. I owe her a story.
“My brother is a killer,” I say to kick off my little fairy tale. “He does what he has to, when he has to—no questions asked. He doesn’t think about it. I think about everything.”
It’s a sloppy way for the story to start. I take a deep breath and try again.
“My dad…if you want to call him that. He was a doctor. Had a nice house. Nice car. I barely even knew the guy, even though I got sent to live with him when I was eight. My mother died in a car accident not long after I was born. I had an older brother, though, who stayed with my dad while my grandparents raised me. I never really saw him growing up. He was always in a ‘special home’ or out on the streets. By the time he was eighteen, he’d moved out of that place, and our dad always said he was on drugs. A runaway. But he came back. I never knew why until I got older though.”
I’ve never been a good storyteller. The fact must run in the family. All the words run together. It’s hard to keep it all straight. My captive audience doesn’t seem to mind though. Her eyes never leave me once.
“As it turns out, my dad wasn’t as squeaky clean as he seemed. He did stuff to Dante…” I have to suck in air as the words stick in my throat. I grit my teeth and force them out—that bastard doesn’t deserve any sugarcoating. “He used to sneak into his room when he was a kid. Touch him. Hurt him. He was a fucking pedophile.” I flick the word out the same way I flick the dead ash from a smoke. This flame continues to burn me up though. I smolder.
She doesn’t react to the minutes-long pause that comes after. She listens, and it takes me a while to hunt down the thread of the story again. I’m fishing in my pockets before I even register craving a cigarette. I’m all out though. I have to inhale the air and use the rage in my blood as fuel rather than nicotine.
“I didn’t know. All those years in that house and I didn’t know. Dante came back to keep me away from him. Every waking moment. It killed him, being near that sick fuck. It killed him. He did it for me. When I finally found out, I was sixteen. He…my dad, was drinking in the kitchen. He looked at me, the bottle in his hands. He really looked at me.”
I still see him. Eyes bloodshot. Lips slick with drool. Tears drying on his fucking face. Real goddamn tears—not a single one for Dante, only for himself.
“He begged me for forgiveness. Said he was sick. Said he was sorry.” I laugh.
The sound makes her stiffen, and something in my chest tightens up. Apparently, she’s disgusted by my show-and-tell. I wait for her to flinch away. Her fingers seek mine out instead, clenching me tighter, and my entire body thrums with the latest dose of her.
“Sorry. Can you believe that? Sorry. I wasn’t sorry. All I really remember is that I grabbed a hammer from the table. He’d been fixing something, but I don’t know what. I remember the first hit, right across his mouth to shut him the fuck up. It knocked him off his chair. It didn’t dislocate his jaw though. He was still blubbering.”
I couldn’t help it.
God, I tried…
I gotta tell him I didn’t mean to.
“I hit him again.” The story’s gone rogue. It pours out of me, broken and tactless. I can’t sprinkle in pretty words to decorate the gore. I tell her everything. “He got scared then. He begged me to stop. I hit him again. And again, but…I never blacked out. I never stopped to think about what I was doing. I didn’t have to do it.”
The admission paints the air black as coal. The only source of light is her eyes, like embers in the ashes. My ragged breathing makes them glow. Spark. Catch fire. It’s like she goads me to go on. Spit the truth out. Admit it all.
“I wanted to do it.”
So what the hell does that make me? I had the answer inked onto my chest. I wouldn’t hide behind a lie. I would never forget what I am.
My lone audience member silently digests the end of story time. She doesn’t offer up a glowing review. She doesn’t pat my head and try to comfort me with meaningless phrases like you didn’t really mean it. She listens.
And that silence is more numbing than anything I could inhale. Go fucking figure.
I instinctively know she’s not beside me when I wake up. I’m already lurching toward the door when I spot her watching me from a seat near the kitchen table, wearing only black underwear.
She got a cigarette from somewhere and managed to light it up. My throat goes dry as she drags deep and releases a plume of smoke.
I still have the gun, I see when I glance down. I test the w
eight of it. It’s loaded. She had quite the night, it seems. A puddle of silk is on the floor beside me. A dress. Fancy. Expensive. Black.
“I’m sorry.” She tosses the words at me between puffs. “I didn’t mean to—”
“You don’t have to apologize to me.” I haul myself upright, clutching the wall with my free hand for balance. I tuck the gun into the waistband of my jeans. Then I join her at the table.
It’s not set up for entertaining. My sketchbook is open in the center. Apparently, she’s been flipping through it. The sketch she’s on now stares up at me. One of Dante.
“You’re good.” She flicks the ash into the ashtray in front of her and turns the page.
“It’s nothing.” I reach over and flip the book shut.
There’s no judgment in her gaze. No pity. None of the shit I’m used to.
“Seems like you had a rough night,” I say to change the subject.
She drags on the cigarette, making the end glow red. Whether by accident or intentional, she exhales the cloud of smoke directly into my face, and I breathe her in like a fucking addict. Smoke. Fire. Yellow.
“I just… Tell me something,” she says.
It’s a plea, not a question.
“What?”
She thinks for a minute. Whatever drove her here kept her up at night. Shadows line her eyes. Her hands are shaking. In the end, she grits her teeth and sighs, settling on a single question. “Tell me… How would you define love?”
My mouth quirks, ready to deliver a laugh, but she doesn’t even attempt to return it. She wants a serious answer, it seems. It just so happens that I have one.
“It’s pain.” I eye my sketchbook, picturing the drawings I’ve scribbled inside it. Dante. Arno. Danny. “It’s getting addicted to someone’s own personal brand of the shit. It’s letting it fuck you up. It’s wanting to be fucked up. Love is poison.”
“And hate?” She sounds even more desperate now, like a student seeking the right answers for a test. She’s trying to make sure our papers match. For some reason, she thinks I’ve paid more attention in this damn class than she has.