Chapter Twenty
Some people struggled.Some people froze.
Keeley attempted a different approach.Her unwavering gaze didn’t leave Romeo, and her lips curved into a confident smile when he took hold of her.
She wanted to be brave in the face of death, and she was.Up until she wasn’t.
Instinct took over, her arrogant composure died, and she pulled away, hands coming up and clawing at Romeo’s wrists.She jerked, trying to escape, trying to get away.Her feet slipped from her heels in her attempt.One of her hands swung for Romeo’s face but he leaned away, and she resumed scratching at his wrists.
He didn’t feel her nails cutting into his skin, not when he could feel everything else.
The monstrous part of him wasn’t caged or chained.It wouldn’t be again.It wasn’t a violent takeover of his body, it drip-fed through his veins, filled his muscles, expanded in his skin.They weren’t separate, never had been, it just had been easier to think of it that way when he’d been a child so eager to be normal, and man desperate to make his parents proud, always knowing he couldn’t.
His parents thought he was a good person when they died.
How wrong they were.
The two most selfless people on the planet had made a monster.
It wasn’t fair on them, they deserved a good son, but Romeo had respected them enough to wait until they were gone before allowing himself to be who he was always supposed to be.
A killer without conscience.
Romeo strangled Keeley with both hands, crushing the muscle in her neck into all it was designed to protect.Her arteries, her veins, her windpipe, the cartilage that protected her thyroid.It dug into Romeo’s palm until he adjusted his grip, pushing his thumb against the hard ridge, and applying pressure until it collapsed in on itself with a satisfying crunch.
Keeley made a choked sound as her knees gave out.Her eyes were wide, still unblinking, but they no longer stared at him in challenge, they were watering, and darting, trying to find something in his eyes, some doubt to exploit.
All his victims had used the same look on him.Romeo thought it must’ve been instinctual, something in the biology of humans that had been passed down through time.
Don’t kill me.
When people were too weak to fight, the eyes were the last resort.
They were supposedly windows to the soul.
That’s why Romeo never looked away at the end.
He wanted his victims to see he didn’t have one.
He had what he referred to as the monster instead and it was elated watching them slip away.
Romeo relaxed his grip, and the same instinct that made Keeley look forhumanin his eyes, made her take a painful jagged breath.He trapped the air inside her again, and she spluttered blood onto her lips.
Something had burst, or split, of torn in her throat, and blood gurgled at the back of mouth.
He wasn’t going to let this death be quick.
