Darkly, Madly Duet

by Trisha Wolfe

London wants answers, I can give them to her. The only question is how far she’s willing to go to get them.

“What am I supposed to feel ashamed of? I could be weak like Bundy or BTK, and inflict my sickness on the innocent. Instead, I’ve learned how to control my impulses and direct them toward the wicked.

“I’m inside you now…” His teeth graze my shoulder. “Under your skin. I want to break you, so I can piece you back together.”

“You’re many things, London. Demure isn’t one of them.”

“You’ve always been too tempting,” he says. “Alluring, seductive…making me question myself. Seduction is one of your sins, did you know that? Are you aware of your power?”

I hate him—I hate the way his words fracture my mind. The way his touch sears my flesh. I hate the way my body arches toward him against my will, the ache deep within my core a pulsing heat that demands to be sated.

“I love everything about you—even your sickness. It turns me on and drives me mad. The bad things you’ve done. I should despise what you are, but you caught me in your web, and I’m begging you to bleed me dry, that’s how twisted you got me.”

All these years, I’ve been missing an important aspect of the process. Torture isn’t enough. Physical pain isn’t enough. It’s the psychological element—the total mental destruction—that breaks a person.

“Come on. Is lying a part of my disorder?” She looks away, paces the cell. “No, but creating an elaborate disaster is. I won’t fall victim to this. I won’t become your next disaster.” “Oh, London.” I love the way her name tastes; like fresh lilacs. “Why do you think I was so tempted from the start? You came to me as a beautiful disaster already.”

There’s a fine line between passion and obsession—and I crossed that line the moment I saw her.

“We’ve already established your sickness, baby. What you have…there’s no cure.”

“Do we love each other, or are we merely crazy for each other? I know I’m crazy—maddeningly crazy for you. Obsession is a far more evocative emotion than love.”

“I wasn’t born this way.” I turn my head away, my fingers seeking desperately for the string. “We weren’t born the day we took our first breath. We were born the moment we stole it.”

“We’re monsters.” I look at him then, breathless and torn. “And our love is this monstrous thing that will devour us.”

“I didn’t kill them,” I say, so low I can barely distinguish my own voice. “No,” he says, removing the printed pages from my lap. “You didn’t kill them. You just gave them the means to kill themselves.”

Right. I’m trying to reason with a psychopath.

“I may have passed your test, but I failed mine.”

To everyone else, Dr. Noble is a truly burdened soul. A survivor. A hero. To me, she’s a dark goddess that should be feared.

And I am lured. Completely. She owns my entire being. Flesh and bone. My black soul belongs to her. With one look, she takes me down. If she demands I kneel right here, I’ll drop to my knees, offer penance for my sins as I plead for her to devour me.

“The truth is, Larry. You’re not worthy. She could snap your mind like a twig without breaking a sweat, then have you groveling at her feet, begging her to do it again, before you slit your own throat just to make the torment end.”

Love and obsession are so closely linked, the emotions evoked by obsession easily mistaken for love. And when obsession rules your world, you become a slave to its demands.

Frontal lobe damage. The areas of the brain that control behavior, judgment, and impulse control. Not to mention sexual conduct. A neurologist would have a field day dissecting me.

Love—that all-consuming love artists pen sonnets about—is a short-lived emotion. That kind of love can’t be sustained. It’s wild and passionate and consumes you like a wildfire tears through a forest, burning hotter and raging rampant until its only option is to die out. That’s what Grayson and I are: a wildfire. We’ll burn through each other until our resources are expired.

Amid our Folie à deux—our madness shared by two—I am the dominant.

I’m a devil with a heart. Pure lunacy. But then, even the devil loves passionately, ardently, coveting this world…so much so that he rebuffed heaven.

“We’re connected on some deeper level,” I say to her. “Through bars and cages and prisons…in the physical sense and the mind. That’s why you could never be expendable to me. You’re my match.”

For Grayson and I, those lines are blurred more than usual. We can just as easily commit murder as we can make love. Both give us a climactic satisfaction and completion in possessing the other. Love and murder. The same innate emotion fuels both.

Juliette planned to fake her death—but she didn’t put in enough planning beforehand. Had she had a little more patience, she and her Romeo would’ve ridden off into the sunset together.