The red is gone from both hands, every nail scrubbed clean, down to the quicks, not a trace of Crimson Kiss left on me. Someone was thorough, careful, and they did it while I was unconscious because they understood what that color meant on my hands without anyone having to explain it.
I stare at my bare nails in the dim light. Ten small, clean, unpainted surfaces. Ten tiny declarations ofthis was undone. This was not allowed to stay.
My throat closes at the simplicity of that action. The kindness with which it was done. The depth of how much that means to me.
"Eddie," I whisper. “You took it off.”
"First thing," he says quietly.
The sound I make is not a sob. I don't sob. I haven't sobbed in years, since Kansas City, since the version of me that knew how to cry without it feeling like a structural failure. But something cracks behind my sternum, a small, clean fracture, the kind that lets light into a place that's been sealed shut.
My breath hitches, and my eyes burn. I press my bare fingertips against his hand on my waist and hold on.
He just pulls me closer, tucks my head under his chin, and continues to hold me.
This must be what it feels like when someone fights for you in a language you didn't know you spoke.
Another cough wrenches from my throat, and I reach for the water on the bedside table. Eddie beats me to it. He rises, skirts the bed, pours, and holds the cup so the bendy straw reaches my mouth without me having to lift my head.
I drink. The water is room temperature and tastes like plastic, and it is the best thing I have ever put in my mouth.
And that’s really saying something.
He retakes his spot in bed, and I put my head on his chest. The heart under my ear beats steady, steady, steady, and soon I close my eyes.
The dream comes fast, the way bad ones always do, with no preamble, no slow descent, just a door slamming open in the dark.
Vincent is standing in the hospital corridor. He's wearing his sheriff's uniform, his badge catching the fluorescent light. His face is arranged in that expression of concerned authority that makes people trust him, that makes them step aside, that makes them say, “Of course, Sheriff. Right this way.”
He walks toward my door and smiles at Officer Palmer, who is just a blur.
She instantly opens the door for him and steps aside.
The light from the corridor spills across the hospital floor in a long yellow rectangle, and his shadow stretches ahead of him, reaching for my bed before his body does.
Behind him, in the corridor, Red Hands stands under the flickering fluorescent. He follows Vincent inside.
They don't speak to each other. They move in parallel the way predators do when they've agreed on the same prey. Two hungers aimed at the same point.
Vincent reaches my bedside and looks down at me.
"Ready, Penelope?" he says and undoes his belt buckle. “I won’t fuck you until you bleed this time. I’ll fuck you until you’re dead.”
I try to scream. My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. The shadows under my skin don't answer. The cold fire is gone. I'm empty, hollowed out, a woman with nothing, watched by two men who believe they own different parts of her.
Red Hands prowls closer, trailing his fingertip along the wall and leaving a red smear behind.
A lit cigar appears in Vincent’s hand as he crawls on top of me, his pants around his ankles. The mattress dips under his weight.
I can’t move, can’t breathe.
Red Hands holds a hooked scalpel as he stalks closer. “Who do you think will kill you faster, Penelope? Him or me?”
Vincent reaches his cigar between my legs, the cherry-red tip lighting the room and casting a glow onto my red-painted nails.
His tongue snakes out and licks the seam of my mouth. “You’ll taste better when you burn.”
Pain erupts between my legs.
