The look he gave Mary before he left the room.
The day he made that promise, was that… was that the day Mary found out? What I thought was mercy…was it even that? Did he save me, or simply stop Mary from talking?
I jerk my hands from hers, my skin, my bones, everything burning like acid. “You lied to me,” I mutter, gaze on the floor, staring at nothing. “You’re all. Fucking. Liars.”
Mary reaches again, desperate, but I step back. She’s shaking, hands out like she’d apologize for oxygen if I told her it was the wrong shape.
“You have to forgive me,” she pleads. “I just…we were alone, Reth. Had nothing, no one?—”
“So you chose to stab me in the heart.”
“I chose a life!” she cries. “A life for both of us.”
I laugh—this broken, manic, thing. “For both of us? I died, Mary.”
A sob breaks from her.
“I fucking died in a basement below the floor where you slept!”
“No. No. No?—”
“I lost my life,” I spit out. “While you were dressing up, going to parties, to prom, having your fucking wedding, I was ripping out my veins so you could have your fairytale.”
Mary falls to her knees, fingernails scratching the floor, sobbing, the sound making the insides of my skull itch, and it’s obscene, the way I want to comfort her even now, even as she confesses to knowing how many times I died for her, and she never did a thing about it.
"You were the reason," I say, something warm dripping down my cheek. "Everything I did, every person I killed, every piece of myself I handed over, every year of my life I gave to her,” I point at Valeria “I did it for you."
“I'm so sorry. I would give anything—" she gets up on her feet, tries to scramble toward me, “I’ll do anything?—”
The wet, sickening sound of metal punching through flesh cuts her off mid-sentence. A thick iron spike erupts from the front of her throat. Mary’s eyes blow wide. Her mouth opens in a silent, gurgling scream as the poker spears through her windpipe and tongue, the jagged iron tip glistening red just beneath her chin.
She stays upright for one horrifying second — impaled, trembling, blood pouring down her front in thick sheets — before Valeria gives the poker a vicious twist, and Mary falls.
I stare. I can’t move.
My mind is blank, white noise and static. This isn’t real. This can’t be real. Mary was just reaching for me. She was justtalking. She was going to say she was sorry. She was?—
“There.” Valeria’s voice cuts through the fog, soft and almost amused. “Much better. She never knew when to shut up.”
I blink.
Once.
Twice.
A crushing weight forces me down on my knees.
The blood keeps spreading. It touches my knee now, warm, soaking into my pants. For one suspended moment, I’m numb. Veins frozen. Insides dead. But then it explodes. Pure. Blinding. Endless. My hand moves, fingers closing around the karambit. The grip is slick with blood. Theirs? Mine? Hers? I don’t know. I don’t care.
I rise.
Valeria is still standing there in her perfect silk, watching me with that calm, almost fond expression, like I’m a particularly interesting experiment.
I take one step forward, karambit raised, vision tunneled on her throat, and I see how I split it open. How I tear out her trachea. How I rip her tongue out. Reach in deep through slippery muscle and cartilage, past everything soft and human, until I close my fist around the rotten core of her. Until I reach her heart and feel it die in my palm.
I’m already dismembering her in my head, and I scream. Violent, vicious, hollow.
A sharp pinch blooms in the side of my neck. Fast. Clinical. Like a wasp sting, and my hand freezes mid-air. The karambit suddenly weighs a thousand pounds. My knees buckle. The room tilts, colors bleeding together, the edges of my vision going soft and blur.
