by Cole McCade
It had always comforted her, how long that line had curved across his palm, unbroken and promising that he would always be there.
No matter how he suffered, he would always be there for her.
As long as she could find her way back to him.
* * *
SHE WOKE TO THE SOUND of a body striking the floor.
It was a strange sound, at once wet and dry: the shuffle of cloth and the smack of sweating flesh on concrete, a sound she’d heard only once before but that had been bored into her like a bullet hole to the heart. She jerked awake, her breaths coming up out of her in a rush like spitting up, leaving her chest constricted and empty and straining. For all of two seconds nothing made sense, until the door ground closed with a grating roar, almost drowning out the sound of a muffled whimper.
Heart racing, she blinked the sleep from her eyes and stared hard at the darkness beyond the faint pools of dusty daylight spilling from above, as if she could will the shadows to clear. A terrible, heavy sound scraped across the floor, drawing closer and closer, until Priest emerged from the darkness like a leviathan rising from the dark, from the deep.
He dragged a body behind him, and for a moment she thought it was a corpse until the man squirmed, whimpering against the duct tape over his mouth. Priest had him by the collar, and he dangled like a worm on a hook, fighting only to gag and fall short, his square face reddening when the high, stiff collar of his dress shirt dug into his throat. Priest threw him down, and he tumbled into a heap inches from Willow’s feet. She recoiled; Priest caught the edges of the duct tape and ripped, freeing the man’s scream to bounce off the walls in reverberating echoes.
The man had the strangest mouth, Willow thought with a numbness that tried so hard to pretend this wasn’t happening. Upper lip thick and full as a strawberry, lower a pencil thin line. Or maybe it was drawn thin because he was screaming, sobbing with sheer unadulterated terror that vibrated off him like an aura in terrible colors. He stared up at Willow, his eyes clear as glass and bottomless as infinite mirrors, reflecting her horror back at her over and over again.
“Save me,” he whispered, reaching for her.
No. No, not again, not again…
Grim, silent, dispassionate, Priest snared his fingers in the man’s hair and jerked him back before he could touch Willow. The man screamed. So did Willow, jerking against the chair, straining toward him as if she could break free and do something, anything, to save him.
“Don’t!” she cried.
Priest lifted his gaze to hers. Those fox-gold eyes were so dead, so withdrawn, an emptiness there that chilled her. She didn’t know if she was seeing a mask over the man who had fed her and called her firefly, or if the thin veneer of civility was the true mask—but that cold, cavernous blankness was terrifying, and cut down to the root of her soul to primeval memories that remembered huddling in the night and fearing the shadows that skulked in the dark.
That flash of silver again. The keen edge of a blade, slipping into his hand.
“No!” Willow shook her head, jerking her shoulders until the ropes burned her flesh, fighting with everything in her, tearing skin that didn’t hurt nearly as much as the rips opening in her heart. “Don’t—don’t don’t don’t no no no oh God—”
“Please,” the man babbled. “Please, I h-have money, I’ll—I’ll—”
He never had the chance to finish. Never breaking eye contact with Willow, eyes flat behind the shield of his eyeglasses, Priest drew the blade across the man’s throat. It was strangely soft and silent, that motion, strangely smooth, as if drawing a finger through cream—but no cream could bloom that bright, terrible red, opening on the horror of the inner workings of a body that would never breathe again, a body that was already going limp with nothing but a gurgle, not even a scream. But Willow screamed for him, closing her eyes against the blood, against those empty glass marbles of eyes, against that fox-gold stare that held her as if to say:
This was for you. So you can see. So you can know.
One day you, too, will be nothing but lifeless flesh that was once made of stars, and your eyes will be nothing but empty green glass.
Sobbing, choking on it, she hunched into herself and tried not to hear it. The sounds of the body moving, whatever Priest was doing with it. But she couldn’t escape the smell, bright copper awful and thick and hot, crawling into her nostrils, and then something warm and sticky kissed her toes; she opened her eyes, and oh God the blood the blood the BLOOD was running in rivulets over the floor, pooling around her feet, channeling toward a drain she hadn’t noticed before, set into the concrete near the ring bolting her to the floor. She cringed back, lifting her feet off the floor.
“Priest,” she whimpered, shaking her head, trembling. “Priest…”
He looked up, wiping his knife on the dead man’s coat, and watched her impassively. The knife disappeared, and he straightened and strode closer. She shrank back from him—monster killer horror demon sick sick SICK—but God she needed him for this moment when he was the only shield between her and this awfulness he’d created. With a soft, clucking sound of his tongue, he caught the chair and lifted it, picking her up and moving her out of the path of the runoff. He’d dressed some time after leaving, but now he peeled out of his t-shirt and knelt before her; he caught her feet and propped them on his thigh, and began gently wiping the blood away like Mary Magdalene washing the feet of Jesus.
And Willow wanted to pull away, hated his touch—but she hated the stickiness of blood even more, red and staining her skin.
“Why?” she sobbed. “Why would you do that?”
He only looked up at her, watching her; his jaw set briefly, before he returned his attention to cleaning her feet. He handled her with a gentleness that she knew now wasn’t gentleness, but control. Concern couldn’t matter to someone like him. It couldn’t. This was about having control—over that man’s life, over her.
“You’re a monster,” she gulped out around painful breaths. “A fucking monster.”
“As I said, and you would not believe me. So was he.” One pale eyebrow twitched. “Your point?”
“You don’t get to—don’t get to—t-to—”
He sighed, set one of her feet on the floor, started on the other. “You have a strange and skewed view of the world, little one,” he murmured. “Anyone can do anything. You seem to think should and cannot are the same.”
“Do you even know the difference?” she spat.
He held his silence until he’d finished with her other foot, set it on the floor, then bundled up his blood-stained shirt and draped it from his knee. “You grieve for him.” He looked up at her, tilting his head like a hunting hawk. “Why?”
“Because I’m human. Because he was human!” She stared at him through the haze of tears. How could he not understand this? How could he be so calm? He started to part his lips, but she shook her head. “Don’t. Don’t tell me whatever story of whatever he did or whomever paid you, like it’s going to change anything. Just don’t. You killed him.”
“As I have killed many others. Denial does not change fact.” His gaze flicked past her, and she didn’t have to ask to know what he was looking at. The corpse on the floor. That fucking dead body that she could pretend wasn’t there as long as her back was to it, as long as she wasn’t staring into those dead bottomless eyes. “I cannot and will not try to change you from what you are,” he said. “From the morals you have steeped yourself in. From the sense of right and wrong that you possess. Without people like you, there would be no reason for people like me.”
She shook her head again so hard her neck twinged. When she could move no other part of her body, it was the only way she could defy him. “You aren’t doing this for me.”
“Perhaps not,” he said thoughtfully. “But you cannot change me from what I am, either. And this is what I do. I already had to clean up one kill site. I could not risk another for the sake of sheltering you.”
“I…I do
n’t understand. Kill site…?”
“I would not have killed that man in that alley if the distraction you provided had not necessitated it. I prefer to do it here.”
“Why? So you can torture them longer without being seen?”
He sighed: patient, weary, as if her accusations tired him. “So I can control the scene and leave no evidence. No blood spatter patterns, no ballistics, no fingerprints, no trace evidence.”
“No forensics,” she whispered, as it dawned on her.
He knew what he was doing with an expertise born of practice, training. Which meant she would disappear, leaving behind nothing but family who would look for her for a few months until her body turned up somewhere, mangled and cold and virtually unidentifiable.
“Si,” he answered. “Exactly.”
“Is that what’s going to happen to me?” she demanded. “Where are you going to dump my body? The quarry? Maybe weights around my ankles? That’s a fucking classic. Heave-ho overboard and I’m sinking away and taking your guilt with me, so you don’t have to see or think about it or me again. Is that it?”
He regarded her for several labored beats of her heart, and she wondered if she would even see it coming. If he would look her in the eye when he did it, and if his eyes would be just as dead.
Then he stood, and hooked his fingers in the ropes under her shoulders. “You’re tired.”
She flinched, hissing at him. “Don’t touch me.”
But it didn’t stop him. It never stopped him. He loosened the ropes, working his fingers deftly under the knots and teasing them into more and more slack; she held her breath and stared up at him, and wondered if she should fear or hope. If he was cutting her loose to add her blood to the trickle spiraling across the floor in hateful red…or giving her that moment, that breath, that second she needed to escape.
Loops of nylon fell down over her breasts and pooled at her waist. Then the hot, rough pressure against her folds eased, and she closed her eyes with a twisting burst of shame burning in her cheeks so she wouldn’t have to see the rope peeling away, glistening wet and trailing dripping threads between her skin and the accusingly red nylon cord. The ropes went loose, rasping faintly as they fell to the floor, leaving only the knots binding her wrists and ankles, then—
“You’re wet,” Priest growled, the edges of his voice so very sharp.
Willow clenched her jaw. She wanted to crawl into a hole and die, but even if she couldn’t stop her blush, she could at least refuse to show her mortification. “Physical response to manual stimulation,” she bit off coldly, “is often unavoidable.”
“Is that so?” he lilted. Soft, mocking, until in the darkness behind her eyelids his voice was a physical presence, wrapping around her like a hot, stroking wind. “Do you think if you say it so clinically, you can detach yourself from it? From your own body?” A purring growl, a chuckle, a sensory hothouse of sound. “Why are you a virgin, firefly? Are you so very afraid of yourself?”
Her eyes snapped open. She glared at him. “No!”
“I think you are.” He sank down, gripping the edges of the chair, leaning in at eye level—in her space, in her breathing room, invading her with his intensity. “I think you fear your own body. You fear the power of a woman’s flesh.”
His gaze lowered. She could feel his eyes on her, on her nakedness, long before his fingertips grazed her knee. With slow deliberation he walked his fingers up her thigh, marking a path as if staking a trail, staking a claim, and she fought not to shiver and failed, her breaths a soft and hitching thing fetching up against the tightness in her throat.
“What if I showed you?” he whispered. “What if I showed you you have nothing to fear?”
“It…it would be a lie. I have everything to fear from you.”
His touch stilled. His gaze cut into hers once more. “You would be right to.”
“If you think I’ll fuck you to save my life—”
“Fucking you, as you so crudely put it, has nothing to do with whether you live or die.” His hand fell to rest against her thigh, broad palm branding her, his thumb sweeping along the inside of her leg, grazing close, so close. Her folds drew up tight in unwanted anticipation, like a morning glory curling back from the heat of the sun. His lips curved slowly, knowing, dark. “This simply tells me more about who you are.”
“So you can prove I’m bad, and kill me too?” she hissed. “Is that it? Sluts deserve to die? You fuck me, get me dirty, and then your conscience is clean because I had it coming?”
He arched both brows. “Why would having sex make you a slut? Why would being a slut warrant death?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know!” She bit her trembling lower lip, holding in a whimper. “I don’t…I don’t understand what you’re doing.”
“I, firefly, am merely trying to understand you.”
“Trying to prove I deserve to die, you mean.” She hated how brittle she sounded, how fragile. “That’s what this is all about. You’ll keep poking and prodding until you find the one bad thing I did in my life that means I’m horrible inside.” Dirty thing, dirty thing. Everyone’s ugly to someone. “I am horrible inside. I’m petty and selfish and scared. I’m weak and broken and I’m a failure of everything I ever wanted to be, because life got in the way of what I wanted to do and instead of fighting for it, I gave up and went with the flow, and hated myself and everyone around me more and more for what I had to do to keep my head above water and stay alive without really living.” Her voice broke; she swallowed roughly, glaring at him. “But that’s everyone. No one is morally pure. We all fight our ugliness every day. All of us. We try to fight past it, because when we give in we see all the things we hate about ourselves in other people, and we stop being able to love and care and need.” She didn’t know who she was trying to convince—him, or herself. But she leaned toward him, searching, hoping maybe some spark of warmth inside him could hear her. “You don’t have to give in, Priest. You don’t have to give in to whatever broke you. You have a choice.”
“So do you,” he said, and dipped his head between her thighs.
She barely grasped what he meant to do before she knew what it meant to have fire in her flesh and lava in her veins; his tongue was a molten barb darting between her folds, tracing slick and knowing her in ways she’d never even known herself. Her breaths rushed from her. There was a snake inside her, a snake of venomous pleasure coiling itself around her deepest inner self, and in its poison bite was everything she’d ever feared: the loss of control, the power her hypersensitive, overextended nerves gave someone else until her body was not her own and he took complete ownership. Her toes curled and her thighs jerked, and she let her head fall back against the chair as every twist of his tongue rolled through her like she’d spiked heroin and fallen headlong into the rush.
That voice couldn’t belong to her. That voice crying hot and wicked things, that voice gasping in breathy, sinful, dirty ways that rose to the beams of the ceiling and echoed there, gathering like whispers, like demons summoned to watch her fall. His tongue-tip circled her clit and the serpent’s poison burned deeper until her bones were liquid and pain twisted pleasure like steel wire coiling in the pit of her stomach—and oh God, he was the serpent, offering her the Devil’s own knowledge if only she would give in.
And she was ready. For one shameful, awful moment she was ready, wanting it, wanting that tight heady burst inside her, wanting to know if it would be better when his tongue was so much better than her fingers, than the ropes, than the brush of her panties…but before she could let herself give in, he stopped.
Stopped, and pressed his lips to her lower belly, before murmuring, “Do you understand the choice you have, firefly?”
“OhGod.” She slumped against the chair, trembling. What had she almost done? The answer was in the pulse and tremor of her flesh; in the cold caress of air licking at the wetness on her skin. She took a shaky breath. “You…you must be insane to think I’d ever want you.”
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His only answer was the pad of his thumb: gliding along the crease of her folds, gathering her slickness as if pooling it to smooth into her flesh as he found her clit and rolled it, teased it, that pressure just right to make her lift her hips and spread her thighs; her body had a mind of its own, and a hunger that kindled like a furnace in her gut, that howling emptiness, that wanting that stole her will once more. She gasped a cry, choked a whimper, strangled a scream as pleasure radiated out from that scintillating point like ripples from a stone tossed into a deep, endless pool. And then nothing again: nothing but an absence of touch as intense as its presence, when that unanswered need simmered in every micron of her skin.
He watched her, his silence pointed. She struggled to calm her breaths, curling forward, fixing him with a glare.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” she panted. “You…you can’t control physical response to stimulation. Rape is still rape.”
He inclined his head. “What happened when you said no, firefly?”
She looked away. Answering him honestly would make this less than what it was; would make him seem rational, when this was in no way rational—and playing at consent was part of his fucking sick game, and nothing to do with treating her with any kind of respect. But after a grudging moment, she muttered, “…you stopped.”
“That is all you have to do.” He bent to work at the ropes around her ankles. “Say no.”
“I…I don’t know what I’m doing.” She watched him, the powerful roll of his shoulders, the easy confidence in his movements, and wondered how far she’d get if she ran. How far she’d run before he caught her, pinned her beneath him, and did everything those penetrating looks and that devious tongue had promised. She quaked inside, and hated herself for it. “I can’t want this. I can’t want you.”