Hell sighs, shrugging off his jacket, rolling up his sleeves, getting ready to do what I asked.
“What the fuck are they here for?” He asks, still pressing and trying to make small talk.
I don’t answer as my eyes drop to the woman in front of me, swollen, terrified eyes streaked with tears, locked on mine. It’s the only thing either of them can do. They’re fucking paralyzed. Only kept alive by meds and tubes connected to their dying veins.
They can’t move, can’t scream, can’t even hear. I took care of that already. Their vocal cords and eardrums are severed. Realistically, I did it so they can’t piss me off, but they fucking are. They’ve been alive far too long as it is, but it’s not time yet.
I don’t like the way she looks at me. All pleading and shit as if she’s searching for a soul inside me that just isn’t there. So tonight, while Hell inserts that bomb, I’m sewing her annoying green eyes shut for good.
I would usually just scoop them out, but the client wanted me to keep them intact so he could witness her fear before her doom.
Typical sadist.
I poise the needle over her right eye, my hand jittering and I notice Hell pauses, watching me from across the small room. I can almost hear his thoughts. The judgement. The questions buzzing on the tip of his tongue, but I grit my teeth and shake my head once, trying to shove Arabella’s pretty face out of my mind.
This hasn’t happened before. She’s done something to me from the second I looked into her fucking eyes. Yeah, I’ve always been an agitated motherfucker, and I have this twisted need inside me, but this is different. It’s under my skin, swarming through my veins, making my senses unsteady.
“You good?” Hell asks, his voice low.
I side-eye him, hating that he can read me so well.
Pushing her to the dark corners of my mind once again, I refocus, and hand comes down, the sharp needle piercing the woman’s bottom lid before hooking underneath and pushing it through the top. I pull tight, the thread slicing into her skin, forcing her eye tightly shut. Blood wells instantly, mixing with her tears, streaking down the side of her face in thin red paths.
Her other eye, wide, glassy and frozen in terror, stares straight at me, but not for long. I press the needle in again, slower this time, dragging the thread through her tender flesh with more force than necessary.
“Wonna talk about it?” Hell pushes, hands coated in blood, voice tinged with that fake calmness he does when he knows I’m on the brink of losing my damn mind completely.
Talk about it? Like he doesn’t already know I don’t talk. Yeah, I choose to sometimes, but only to him and Soul. Even then, it’s rare and minimal. Single words or a few sentences at most, nothing more. Me and Soul don’t need words. We sign—our own fucked-up version no one else could ever understand.
But Hell? He doesn’t need to sign. He’s got this gift where he reads me too fucking well, picks up on shit I don’t want him to, and yet, he still pushes, still digs his fingers into wounds I don’t want opened.
He’s the most psychotic motherfuck to the outside world, feared by all here, but to me and Soul, he’s just the big brother. The leader of the Hollows, and he takes that role like it’s the only thing keeping his black fucking heart beating.
He’s dragged me back from the edge more times than I can count, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
“No,” I growl, sharp, low, and laced with warning, hoping he will take the answer and move the fuck on.
But I know exactly why he’s pushing. This is about Noir. They have this thing, this weird, can’t-breathe-without-each-other bullshit. I get it, she makes him feel something, and he clings to that like she’s his last fucking thread of sanity. And me screwing and killing her sister? Yeah, that’ll snap that thread clean in two.
“Me and Noir are leaving tomorrow,” he says while inserting the bomb inside the guy, tucking it away between his organs. “Am I gonna have to call the whole thing off just to stop you from…”
My teeth grind, my muscles locking into place, and my eyes snap to him. He doesn’t even look at me, just keeps moving his hands inside the guy’s body, blood squelching between his fingers, face taut.
“I’m not saying you can’t play,” he mutters. “Just don’t fucking unalive her.”
Easier said than done.
Every time I’ve fucked a chick, my murderous hands always find her neck. It’s instinct, an itch buried so deep inside me that I don’t even realize I’m scratching it until it’s too late. I squeeze, watching the light flicker and die, feeling her body go slack beneath me. It’s not even about control. Not really. It’s about the moment—the shift between life and death, the way it seeps out of them like a whispered fucking secret. It turns me on so much, it’s like a sadistic drug I can’t stop taking.
I don’t know how to do it any other way. I never have. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could stop. It’s a compulsion, a need so ingrained in me it might as well be stitched into my fucking DNA.
He’s asking the impossible.
I don’t think a woman has ever survived me.
That’s why I stay the fuck away if I can and keep to myself, until the urge gets too strong, the craving too loud. Then it’s back to the same cycle. Hunt. Fuck. Kill. And continue to fuck until I’m satisfied.
Then, if I’ve really fucking lost it, so deep in the void that nothing else matters, I might even position and preserve them. Or if I’m feeling sentimental, I give them a little coffin, tuck them in nice and tight like a fucking bedtime story.