“Then do it,” I growl, my hands sliding from her waist to her hair, fisting the damp curls and tilting her head back so she has to look at the blood she’s drawing. “Spill it, Wendy. Paint the floor with me. If you don’t love me, if I’m just a monster to you, then fucking kill me! End the loneliness. Put the blade through my throat and be done with it!”
“I will!” she sobs, her knuckles turning white on the silver handle. “I’ll fucking do it!”
“Then why is your hand shaking?” I taunt, my thumb tracing the line of her trembling jaw. “Why aren’t I dead yet, Wendy? Is it because you know that the moment I stop breathing, you’ll be alone in the dark again? Is it because the monster is the only one who ever truly saw you?”
“Shut up!” She’s hyperventilating now, the knife stuttering against my skin, carving a jagged, messy line of red. “Shut the fuck up! I’ll kill you! I swear to God, Peter, I’ll?—”
I grab her wrist, not to pull the knife away, but to steady it. I guide the point right over my jugular, the pressure making my vision swim with a dark, euphoric heat.
“Do it,” I whisper, my lips brushing hers, tasting thesalt of her tears and the iron of my own blood. “Give us both what we deserve. Spill my fucking blood, Wendy. Show me how much you love me.”
She lets out a sound that isn’t a word—a high, shattered wail of total defeat. The knife doesn’t go in. It slips from her fingers, clattering onto the hardwood floor with a sharp, final ring. She collapses against me, her forehead hitting my bloody chest, her hands fisting in my shirt as she sobs with a violence that shakes us both.
I wrap my arms around her, crushing her into the scent of gunpowder and the mess of my own life. I’ve won. I’ve seen the truth.
“See?” I murmur, kissing the top of her head as I look at the shrine of her on my wall. “I told you, Darling. You’re exactly where you belong.”
I pull her closer, my hands sliding up from her waist to cradle her face. I don’t care about the blood ruining my shirt or the fact that my throat is stinging with every breath I take. I use my thumbs to wipe the tears from her cheeks, but they’re replaced instantly by a fresh deluge. My heart—that cold, necrotic organ I thought had stopped beating years ago—is thumping with a terrifying, heavy ache.
“I’m not going to kill you, Wendy,” I whisper, my voice losing its jagged edge, turning into something soft, something dangerously close to a plea. “I couldn’t. You’re the only thing that makes the silence in this house bearable. You’re the only thing that’s real.”
She recoils as if I’ve burned her, her eyes wide and bloodshot, her breath coming in ragged, wet hitches.
“Don’t,” she sobs, shaking her head so violently her hair whips across her face. “Don’t you dare saythat. You don’t mean that. That’s not fucking true! You’re a fucking psychopath, Peter! You’re a monster who plays with his food before he eats it!”
“Wendy—”
“No!” she shrieks, her hands coming up to push at my chest, smearing my blood across her own palms. “You’re obsessed! You’re not in love! You’ve curated me like a fucking painting, and the second I get a crack in the frame, the second I get boring or I don’t scream the way you want, you’ll reach for that scalpel. You’ll kill me just like you kill everyone else! You’ll hang me up to dry and find someone else to haunt!”
Her words are like glass shards in my throat, sharper than the blade she just held there. I try to speak, to tell her she’s wrong, but the wit is gone. The sharp-tongued King of Chicago is a stuttering ghost.
“I wouldn’t,” I rasp, my voice breaking. “I would burn this city to the ground before I let a single hair on your head be harmed. You’re my soul, Wendy. Even if it’s a black, rotting one, it’s yours.”
“You don’t have a soul!” she screams, her voice cracking with a devastating, final honesty. “You have a collection! You have a shrine! You have rules! But you don’t have a soul, and you don’t have me. You just have a prisoner who’s too afraid to leave because you’ve made the outside world look like a graveyard.”
She looks at the blood on her hands—my blood—and lets out a low, animalistic wail of pure grief.
“I hate that I care if you bleed,” she whispers, her eyes dropping to the floor. “I hate that I’m standing here instead of running. But don’t you ever lie to me and say thisis love. It’s just… it’s just your way of not being alone when you finally go to hell.”
I stand there, paralysed. I’ve survived hits from the North End, I’ve survived betrayals from my own blood, but watching her fall apart because she thinks I’m just waiting for the right moment to kill her… it destroys me. It hollows me out until I’m nothing but a suit filled with ash.
“I will never get bored of you,” I say, and for the first time in my life, there is no mockery in my tone. There is only a raw, bleeding truth. “I will never kill you. I would sooner kill myself than see you stop breathing.”
“Then do it,” she gasps, her eyes meeting mine with a terrifying, hollow light. “If you love me so much, Peter… then kill the monster. Kill yourself and let me go.”
The silence that follows is a tomb. I look at her—broken, bloody, and beautiful—and I realise that the girl I trapped in this house has finally found a way to win. She’s found the one part of me that isn’t made of stone, and she’s twisting the knife.
I don’t answer her with words. I can’t. My throat is too tight, the skin still weeping red onto my collar, the air in the room suddenly too thin to support the weight of her demand.
I step forward, and this time, she doesn’t flinch. She’s too exhausted, too shattered by the force of her own honesty. I reach out and slide my hands beneath the heavy silk of her robe, my palms finding the bare, trembling skin of her waist. I pull her into me, not with the predatory force of the bath, but with a slow, devastating reverence that feels like a confession.
I sink to my knees before her.
The King of the North End, covered in soot and the blood of better men, kneeling in the dirt of his own obsession. I press my face against her stomach, breathing in the scent of her—the honey, the salt, and the raw, electric smell of her fear. My hands slide down, cupping the backs of her thighs, pulling her closer until there is no space left for the lies to breathe.
“You want me to die for you?” I whisper against her skin, my voice a broken, rasp.
I reach up, my fingers ghosting over the heat of her pussy, not to take, but to worship. I find the damp, swollen centre of her and press my thumb there, a slow, rhythmic pressure that makes her let out a sharp, involuntary gasp. Her hands fly to my hair, her fingers tangling in the mess of it, her knees buckling as I hold her upright.
