PROLOGUE
Poppy
“Karma is a cold-hearted bitch, Doc,” I say as I flick the rainbow butterfly knife inches from Sebastian’s nose. “Isn’t she?”
His curses can’t quite make it past the wad of black lace panties stuffed in his throat. But I can imagine their flavor—the curses, not the panties—to be dark, bitter. I’m betting he’s a café noir kind of man.
My lip curls in disgust. Never,evertrust someone who takes their coffee black.
“Oh, hush.” I slide the spray-painted blade down his blood-stained shirt, hooking it into theGof his Gucci belt. “There’s no need to shout, Doc. I hear you, loud and clear. Butnomeansyesin your book, right? Well, here’s a taste of your owndiction.”
My wrist flicks, slicing both the belt and the crotch of his tweed trousers. Out springs his flimsy cock, uncut and half-hard.
Gag.
The free-balling bastard manages to spit out the panties, barking, “Fuck you!”
“Oh, I kindly thank you for the offer.” The tip of my blade flirts with Sebastian’s navel. He stills as if he’s looking straight into Medusa’s stony gaze. “Sadly, you’re not my type. Stalkers are romanticized and all. But, in reality, it's actually a sign of psychosis.”
A flash of rainbow slices through skin and sinew. Scarlet spurts from Sebastian’s femoral artery in his left thigh. Splashes across my gleeful smile. Paints my leather pants and biker jacket with death’s favorite color.
He blinks.
And then he screams.
A bit delayed, but understandable. Hewasexpecting me to cut off his dick.
I have something much more appetizing planned.
I always follow in Papa’s carefully placed footsteps: maim my prey, let them suffer long enough to feel the grim reaper’s breath on their necks. To feel the same fear of inevitability their own victims felt. People like Sebastian don’t deserve swift ends. Neither do they deserve the solace of a crawling stop.
“Kill them too quickly, Poppyseed, they’ll have no time to fear death,” Papa warned me when I was old enough to wield a knife, using my childhood nickname while teaching his nine-year-old daughter a lesson on torture. “Kill them too slowly, they’ll beg for death’s embrace. Kill them somewhere in between, dearest daughter. Give them a reason to shit themselves in terror before their undignified ends.”
Sebastian is nearly there. He just needs a little…nudge.
“Go fuck yourself, you psychotic bitch!”
“I kind of already did that today,sooojoke’s on you.”
I open up his other thigh from hip to kneecap in a crimson arc.
“So pretty,” I croon over his deafening howls. “Red isdefinitelyyour color, Doc.”
Sebastian’s screams reach a fever pitch. No one can hear him but me. The fool chose to build his house in the forest outside the city, far away from civilization. Probably so no one would hear his victims scream for help that never came.
Such kismet, isn’t it? Poor bastard probably didn’t ever stop to think about ifhe’dbe the one screaming.
Idly adjusting the skull mask over my face, I twirl a strand of pastel-pink hair around my forefinger. The tread of my combat boots sticks to the bloody planks as I pace back and forth across the floor of his living room. It’s a habit I’ve had since I was little, to keep my mind grounded during chaos. It stems from the days Papa would come home soaked in death, murder’s adrenaline gleaming in his arctic blue eyes. Mama would lock me in my room with my books. At the time, I didn’t know why. It took me years and miles of wearing down the floorboards to understand what he does for a living, why he’s always caked in blood after particularly long days at work.
My father is the king of Salem’s underworld, a Nosferatu of corruption.
And I’m the apple sulking in the shade of his dark and twisted tree.
“Go to hell, you fucking cunt!”
Slowly, I turn toward Sebastian’s lightless glare. “You first.”
His attention slips over my shoulder. He immediately pisses himself.
