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February 27 - February 29, 2024
Being a serial killer who kills serial killers is a great hobby … Until you find yourself locked in a cage. For three days. With a dead body. In the Louisiana summer. With no air conditioning.
As if on cue, there’s a quiet tearing sound, like wet paper ripping apart.
The skin splits open and a white mass of maggots tumbles out, like little orzo pastas. Except a significant number of those pastas is crawling toward me at a glacial pace, looking for a quiet place to complete the next stage of their maggoty life cycle.
“Oh my God. I knew it. I fucking knew they had it wrong. It had to be a woman. The Orb Weaver! Such a cool name. The intricate fishing line, the fucking eyeballs. Amazing. I’m such a huge fan.”
“Come on, Blackbird. I’m in the mood for barbecue. What do you say?”
The Orb Weaver. I’m sitting across the table from the fucking Orb Weaver. And she’s fucking beautiful.
Her body is curvy and strong, working some kind of witchcraft on her stolen clothes that should look anything but sexy given they came from Briscoe’s closet.
When I face Sloane once more, my smile is conspiratorial. Wicked and wanting.
“You know what they say, Blackbird. ‘It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,’” I whisper. “And that’s when the real fun begins.”
One Year Later … The need. It starts like an itch. Irritation beneath my skin. Nothing I do releases the constant whisper of it in my flesh. It crawls into my mind and doesn’t let go. It becomes pain. The longer I deny it, the more it drags me into the abyss. I must stop it. I’ll do anything. And there’s only one thing that works. Killing.
By day, Lachlan runs Kane Atelier, his specialist leatherworking studio where he creates beauty from the skin of death. But by night, whenever Leander Mayes calls, my brother becomes the ruthless tool of the devil.
“He looks like he should be trying to pick up girls with a dumbass avatar that looks literally nothing like him as he streams on Twitch or something, not running a hotel in nowhere, West Virginia,” Rowan grumbles.
Rage descends like a red curtain as I watch the slow, labored movement of the disoriented driver within the smoking hunk of metal.
His fear is like a drug that invades every cell in my body, every desire coursing through my veins.
“That woman you were watching …?” My fingers tighten around
His jaw breaks next with a pop. Broken teeth slice his lips and fall to the driveway like chips of porcelain. Like memories I want to forget. So I fight them away. I grit my teeth and hit harder.
Destruction with my bare hands. Suffering where it was meant to be found.
“He looks like a Picasso,” she continues as she nods toward Francis’s destroyed face. Her hand flows in his direction with birdlike grace. “Eyes over here, nose over there. Very artsy, Butcher. Embracing your cubism era. Cool.”
breath shudders past my lips as a drop of sweat falls from my hair to slide down my cheek like a tear. “Are you okay?”
She could slip away into the night. Leave all this behind. Do whatever it takes to never be found. But for the next three days, every time I think she might disappear, she proves me wrong.
And every night when I close my eyes, I still picture him in that sliver of moonlight on the driveway in West Virginia, bent on one knee, like he was about to swear an oath. A knight cloaked in silver and shadow.
My chest aches. It does every time I remember the way he called my name like a broken prayer. The defeated slump of his shoulders is a vivid image in my mind, even now. “He seemed so vulnerable, despite what he’d just done. I couldn’t leave him like that.”
“You don’t have to have some excuse. I bet he’d love to see you. Just go. Even if it is just to be friends in person for more than once a year. You miss him, right?” Christ, I do. I miss his faint accent and his big smile and his ever-present jokes. I miss his teasing and his warmth and how easy it is to just be myself around him, how nice it is to lay the mask aside. I miss the way he makes me feel like I’m not an aberration, but unique.
should just leave. This is dumb. Dumb and so stalkery. Not in a sexy stalker way either. More like a weird, creepy serial-killer stalker way, which tracks. So I need to take off, before—
There’s a beat of silence. Thorsten and I stare at the man sleeping on a bed of salad with thinly sliced rare human steak hanging out of his mouth.
“Fucker drugged me,” I manage to grit out when the heaving finally stops and I wipe my mouth with a napkin, my hand clammy and shaking.
No duh dumbass
“Boobs plus murder don’t equal a relationship, Lark. That math ain’t mathin.’
He knows my darkest secrets. I know his. We can be monsters, and maybe we don’t deserve the same things that other people do. Happiness. Affection. Love. But I can’t seem to stop the way I feel when I look at every facet of Rowan, from his brightest light to his deepest, most dangerous dark. Maybe I don’t deserve it for the things I’ve done. But I want it. I want more with him than what I’ve got.
And then his phone rings with the sound of a siren. “Fuck,” he hisses, his curse spilling across my lips. He draws away, the would-be kiss lost to another dimension, another Butcher and Blackbird who finally collide.
What if I just try again? What if I do.
Please try again
Surrounding the edge of the hole are bones that dangle from strings of wet yarn like wind chimes.
“Sloane,” he says, his eyes soldered to my lips. My name is a whisper of salvation and suffering as he says it again. A thick swallow catches in Rowan’s throat. “I can’t lose you.” “Then you’d better kiss me,” I whisper back. Rowan meets my eyes. His hands warm my cheeks. We’re just a breath of space away from one another, and I know everything will change once his lips touch mine. And it’s true. Everything transforms with a kiss.
Finally
And it only grows with every passing moment. Sloane bleeds into every thought. When we’re apart, her absence is an entity. I worry for her. I dream of her. And yesterday, I almost lost her. Killing bound us together, and it’s a compulsion neither of us can live without. This need, and now this game between us, consumes me as much as she does.
I think you’re beautiful. Like some kind of vicious, battle-hardened goddess of vengeance.”
My hand folds around her throat, one finger at a time pressing into her skin, her pulse like music beneath my palm.
Rose snorts. “Exactly. Shoot your shot, bro.”
Please!!!!!!!
Did I ever really free her? Or will I be her destruction?
Ooh
The artistic director of Ashborne Collegiate Institute.
Wtf
“That color doesn’t remind me of eggplant, for what it’s worth. It reminds me of blackberries. The best berry, if you ask me. It reminds me of irises. They have the best scent of any flower. It reminds me of night, just before dawn. The best time of day.” The other buckle clicks free and I close my eyes against the pain as Rowan slides the sling from my arm.
It flows over the ridges on my sternum. It veers left and slows over my heart. It traces the rose gold piercing encircling my peaked nipple. Gooseflesh rises on my arms and I shiver as his gaze crosses my chest to the other side and the matching piercing on my right breast. “Something caught your eye, pretty boy?” I whisper. “Yes,” he says, his voice pained. “God, yes, Sloane. All of you.”
“It took everything in me just to get you undressed without bending you over at the bathroom counter and fucking you until you beg me to stop.”
“Hey, do not shade the game. It’s the most fun I’ve had since … maybe ever. As long as I can remember. It’s the thing I most look forward to every year,” I say, the amusement slipping away from my voice with every word spoken as the truth rises to the surface. “You are the thing I most look forward to, Rowan.”
Before you came along, something was missing. You, Rowan. You were missing. You made it safe to feel seen. Safe to play on our terms. Safe to have fun, even though our fun might not be everyone’s idea of a good time.”
I drag his hand across my skin. His breath shudders when I stop at my breast, the piercing at my nipple resting in the center of his palm. A conflicted groan escapes Rowan’s control. His hand presses harder to my flesh. But the kiss is still not the same as it was in the barn, not when it felt like we’d escaped one fate to fall into a better one. So I move his hand. I pull it to my sternum. Glide it down my skin. Let his hand slip into the water, slow and gentle over my navel. I know he likes that piercing too. I could see it in his eyes when he watched me in the mirror. Our kiss breaks when I
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Foreplay
My hand floats away as I let him explore. His fingers find my clit and the triangle piercing there and I bite down on my bottom lip at the burst of sensation. He then moves down to the symmetrical outer labia piercings where the bars on each side are capped with small titanium balls. By the time he reaches the fourchette piercing, he’s nearly vibrating with tension. “Out of the fucking bath,” he growls as he grips my good arm and hauls me to my feet. A wave of water sloshes over the edge of the tub and soaks the bottoms of his jeans, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “But I just got in, as
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She has a piercing everywhere
“But I’m no fucking angel, Sloane.”
“I’ll make it wet—” I don’t even get my last word out and he’s in my face, barely an inch away, his hands bracketed to either side of my hips. “Do I look like I give a fuck? Do you really think I care?”
“I’m done running around this, Sloane. I’ve wanted you for four years. And you’re going to show me what I’ve been missing.”
“Wider, Sloane. Stop trying to hide from me, because I promise you now, it’s not going to work.”
“The clit piercing. Tell me.” He doesn’t look up when I pause. He just waits, watches. “I was eighteen,” I say. “It was my second body piercing, after my navel. It hurt, of course, but not as bad as I thought it would. Once it healed, it helped, I think. With orgasms.” “You couldn’t orgasm before?” “I don’t know. I didn’t have the right … situation … up until that point. But it felt like it gave me control.”
