She didn’t win.
She just taught me how much pain it takes to finally snap.
I throw the photo into the ashtray and crush it with the butt of my cigarette.
Juliet was wildfire. She made me believe in chaos and called it love. She licked the blood from my knuckles and told me I was beautiful when I was most violent. And then she left—left me bleeding, shaking, craving more.
But Raven?
Raven is a different addiction.
“She thinks she’s surviving me,” I whisper, dragging my knife across the edge of the desk, gouging another line into the wood. “She thinks I’m chasing her because I’m unhinged.”
I grin. “But I’m not chasing her, Vex. I’m preparing her.”
I flick the switch behind the desk, and the monitor lights up. Hidden camera feeds flicker to life—her flat, her fire escape, the alley she smokes in every Thursday night at 1:42 a.m.
My sweet little ghost.
She hasn’t noticed the new camera yet. The one I mounted in the corner of her bedroom ceiling. The one that caught her curling into her sheets, whispering my name in her sleep.
“You heard it too, didn’t you?” I ask the spider. She doesn’t blink. “She said my name like a prayer. Like a curse she didn’t want lifted.”
I lean back, watching Raven on the screen—sitting cross-legged on her bed, headphones on, completely unaware she’s being studied like a fragile specimen.
“She’s better than Juliet,” I whisper. “Smarter. Softer in the right places. But harder too. She won’t break the same way. She’ll need… special attention.”
I glance at the wall across from me. The one with the photos. The strings. The sketches. The map of her daily life.
I’ve mapped her like a city I plan to invade.
And I will.
“She’ll thank me eventually,” I say, eyes still on the screen. “After the fear fades. After the walls crack. She’ll see that no one will ever love her the way I do.”
I lean in closer, watching her smile faintly at something on her screen.
“I just have to peel her apart slowly,” I whisper. “Like silk. Like skin. And when she’s raw and real and ruined?—”
I smile.
“That’s when she’ll finally belong to me.”
Vex shifts again, resting at the very edge of the glass like she’s waiting for the next story.
And I have plenty more to tell her.
The monitors flicker. Raven moves across the screen—pacing now. She has that look again, like she’s trying to crawl out of her own skin.
I know that feeling.
I live it.
I pull the drawer open again, the one no one’s allowed to touch, and slide out the velvet-lined case. I crack it open slowly. The syringe gleams under the low warehouse lights, crystal glass and steel, filled with nothing but air.
Not heroin. Not poison.
Just a memory.
