The Bolo-Hat ghost doesn’t bleed.He doesn’t mouth accusations.He just tips his brim, and the cold thins to a tolerable hush.When Wyatt crowds me, Bolo-Hat slides into my periphery and the lights steady.Wait.Trust him.
The first two nights here were excruciatingly lonely.I cried until there wasn’t an ounce of moisture left in my body, but once I got all that out, I longed for him to come back.I wanted so badly for him to pull me into his arms every time he came in with food.I prayed he’d open the door at night and slide into bed next to me.
Instead, Wyatt’s chill kept pressing me toward a phone and a badge and a story that will end us.Bolo-Hat’s quiet kept telling me to keep my mouth shut and my feet where they are.The words find me anyway, no matter how I fight them.In the rattle of the vent:missing girls.In the click of the lamp:ask about London.In the way the window fog sketches an outline of a hand at a throat.I pull the duvet straight and breathe on threes and fives.
If I betray Cassius, I become the woman who hands over the only person who chose me—and did it in blood.He may be unhinged, obsessed, built wrong in ways that would terrify a saner girl, but nothing in him hums through me with the eerie voltage the dead that follow him carry.I can live with this.I think I can.
But if I choose him, what does that make me?A wife who swallows secrets until they calcify?A woman who learns to breathe around knives and sleep beside a man who calls himself aMachineand brings home new ghosts God knows how often?
I don’t know how to reconcile this cluster of feelings.I never once imagined I’d ever be in a position to have to decide whether I can accept someone taking another person’s life, but it seems my brain is accepting Wyatt’s fate just fine.
Shock is the wrong word.Thinking back to Cassius palming Wyatt’s forehead, the knife flash, and then skin, thinner than you’d think, parting with an obscene unzip.The cut isn’t a line.It’s a mouth.Arterial spray, hot and rhythmic, paints my lashes, dots my lips.Blood smells like pennies left on the Vegas sidewalk in the heat of summer and salt.It slicks down my throat, beads along my clavicle and gathers in the hollow like a garnet.
Wyatt tries to breathe through a pipe that no longer works.The sound is a wet kettle trying to whistle.His hands scrabble at air that won’t stick.He slides, smears, knocks his shoulder on the door with a dull thud I’ll hear in my nightmares.My shoes slip.The world tunnels down to the flutter of his pulse bulging, then emptying, then nothing.
I don’t scream.I don’t faint.A drip hangs from the tip of my hair.A streak on the window is crooked and I have the insane urge to wipe it straight.I press my lips together instead and swallow the copper.
And in that crimson hush something inside me molts.Melinda, the girl with even edges and careful rules, peels back.The part of me Cassius callsLindysteps forward, bare and reckless and brutally clear.The thing that plagues me is the rape would’ve been worse.Wyatt forcing me in a parking garage…even thinking about it now brings a vile taste to my mouth.I’d rather live with his death on my conscience than wake up every day his victim.If that makes me an awful person, I can be okay with that.The tax for my breath is Wyatt’s blood on my skin.I can live with that.Ihaveto live with that.
I should feel ruined.Instead I feel chosen.Claimed by a violence that bent itself around me instead of into me.I’m going to have to learn what that means.I’m going to have to decide what I’ll accept, what I’ll overlook, and what I’ll insist on.But standing in that parking garage that smells like iron and oil and the end of a life, I understand two things: monsters are real, and the one I chose is the reason I’m still standing.At the edge of my vision, a brim dips once and the cold thins.And the dead are watching, waiting to see what kind of woman I become.
We eat dinner with his brothers following our quick ceremony.They’re all so put together and serious, it’s intimidating.I sit to Cassius’ left, his hand on my thigh.I have no idea what to say, so I stay quiet unless I am asked a direct question, which isn’t often.I line my fork parallel to my knife.I count my sips of water in my head, four, then have to take a fifth so it won’t start itching under my skin.
Afterward I ask Cassius if it’d be alright if I came back upstairs to rest, really I just want to take off my fake wedding dress and wash off my makeup.He leans into me and kisses my temple before whispering in my ear, “You never have to ask me for permission Lindy girl,” before sitting back in his chair.
After my dress has been removed, along with my makeup, there’s a knock on the master door.
“Come in,” I say, feeling weird because it’s his room.
Cassius walks in, undoing his cufflinks and removing his suit jacket.He places it on the back of the same chair I draped my wedding gown over.I so carefully aligned it so the hem falls straight.I dig my nails into my palms to fight fixing his jacket to match.He sits on the bed beside me and unbuttons his shirt.His ring catches on a button, a light metallic scrape, a bright flash.He said he’ll never take it off.I look at my own band and wait for panic.There’s no itch to twist it, no impulse to slide it free.
“You looked gorgeous today, darling.”Cassius smirks and I swear the sun lives in his eyes.He’s such a contradiction.Ruthless killer.Relentless flirt.
“You cleaned up pretty nice yourself.”I take the shirt once he’s shrugged himself out of it and add it to our growing chair pile, taking a few extra seconds to line the seams, and then sit back down.He’s magnificent.I try to fight the urge to touch him, but my hand disobeys me and traces the slope of his shoulder, the hard line of his bicep.His knuckles are wrecked ridges, silvered scars, a fresh crack blooming under his wedding band.I thread our fingers anyway, my thumb skimming gently over the ragged skin.
Before I can shut myself up, I ask, “Why didn’t you kiss me today?Did you not want to?”
He looks down at our hands before turning to face me and cups my jaw.“Kissing you is all I want to do,” he says, and slams his lips to mine.The force of it makes me think he’s trying to prove something to me, or maybe to himself, that he can have this and not ruin it.I know falling in love with him will be dangerous, but this feels worse, like he believes falling in love with me would be dangerous and he already knows the end of this story.
It’s desperate.It’s careful.It pours every unspoken word, every restrained emotion.His hand, warm against my jaw, anchors me to the moment, to him, and I melt into the kiss, letting go of every doubt, every fear.When he finally breaks away he rests his forehead to mine and our breaths find each other, in-out, same rhythm.The world seems to stand still, suspended in the aftermath of our connection.His forehead rests against mine, and for a heartbeat, we're two souls caught in the gravity of each other, the rest of the world fading into insignificance.
“I've wanted to do that since the second I saw you,” Cassius murmurs, his voice a low rumble that sends shivers down my spine.“After putting my mouth on you atMirage, it’s killed me not to touch and taste every inch of you.I didn’t kiss you today because I wasn’t sure you wanted it.I gave you space after Wyatt because I thought you needed it.Touching you is the only thing I think about.Every ounce of my self-control is spentnottouching you.”
The realization that he's been holding back, is both overwhelming and exhilarating.We sit there, entwined and exposed, the world outside his room, with all its dangers and uncertainties, fades away.In its place is a fragile bubble of intimacy, a space where Cassius and I can be vulnerable, where the contradictions that define us somehow blend into something beautifully complicated.
“I was afraid,” he finally admits.“You make me weak and that’s not an emotion I know how to navigate.”
“Weak?”The word comes out as a whisper.There’s no way the man sitting next to me has ever felt true weakness.
“You underestimate my fondness for you.”
“People feel fondness for puppies,” I say.Cassius doesn’t even bother hiding his laugh.
“Is my Lindy girl suddenly feeling brave?”
“I wish, but I don’t know how to be this person,” I whisper.“The woman who came here wanted to be brave.I thought maybe I could find something in Vegas that would change me.”
Cassius’s mouth actually smiles this time, all the way to his eyes.“You found me, darling.”
