Page 95 of The Blood we Crave

The touch of a familiar person leans over my prone one, shoving my wet hair away from my face as my name is chanted. When my brain receives the air it was neglected off, the rest of my senses trickle back.

I can make out the smell of something fresh. My skin feels his cool hands, and my eyes make out the details of his face. His silver hair stained red, dripping maroon. Blue eyes so starkly clear, I could almost see my reflection inside of them.

“Thatcher,” I breathe, a prayer on my lips. “Thatcher.”

With a wobbly hand I lift my fingers, tracing the line across his eyebrows, the deep V creasing his forehead. I can feel him. He is real. I’m not sure I’m really thinking, or maybe it’s because this still feels like a dream.

I sink my fingers into the wet strains of his hair, drawing his head down.

A dream in which he came for me, he heard my plea, and he came for me. The villain who’d given up his plan of revenge in order to save the girl the hero had been sacrificed.

“Lyra.”

My lips touch his in a quiet collision. The very first snowflake of winter grazing my mouth. A falling star slipping across the sky in stealthy wonder. The whisper of his last exhale rattling between my teeth, filling my empty lungs. The breath of life from the angel of death. His lips were firm against my own, a gift from the gods.

There are no fireworks. It isn’t a kiss overwhelmed with hunger or washed in passion. Just our lips rest against the other’s, a brief rest in a moment of chaos. Our mouths, speaking without words.

“Hello, you are safe here. You are safe with me.”

He is the first to pull away, just enough to create a thin veil of space between our lips. I blink several times, watching his passive face stare down at me.

“I didn’t,” my voice is hoarse. “I didn’t want to die without kissing you first. It felt too cruel to die before I knew what it was like.”

Thatcher drags his thumb across my swollen mouth, softly massaging the feeling of his kiss into my skin. Pressing the taste of him into me. The edges of his mouth twitching.

“My darling phantom,” he whispers. “You’re not dying, not until I’m done with you.”

blood bath

NINETEEN

thatcher

This was not my normal routine.

I had not spent months tracking, hunting, and gathering intel on this victim. Not able to spare the time to create the beginning and middle of his concerto. I hadn’t written notes, erased, and composed gruesome music to set my stage. Simply fast-forwarding the end with no thought of what his death would sound like paired with my piano.

Normally, being out of a pattern would throw me off. Not being in my space, with all my weapons and disposal supplies. No classical music playing in the background.

This was not how I killed people. My destruction of the human body was an art. One that I often took my time with, spent months planning, crafting the perfect piece of music for each section of the kill.

This moment, this was how I made a man pay for touching what belongs to me.

I looked ahead, seeing a man tethered to a circular board. A thick black belt stretched across his waist, both hands clasped above his head, and feet secured in cuffs. The wisps of red stars painted on the board appear and disappear behind his limbs.

I’m sure they had used this prop as a part of a knife-throwing act. Where a confident man stood in front of a crowd and blindly threw weapons at a half-naked woman. Barely missing her skin by mere inches and leaving the crowd exhilarated.

Except I was running the show now. The circus ring was my arena of death and I didn’t plan on missing.

“What are you going to do?” My target urges. “Man, please, what is he going to do? Is he going to fucking kill me?”

Alistair remains silent, only looking at him from his chair that he’d pulled from the audience. A cigarette burning on his lips, a haze of smoke floating in front of his passive face.

It had been him who’d caught one culprit before he could scramble away. Drug him back to the ring, and waited for my instruction. Knowing better than to lay a finger on my prey. He knew this kill was mine and mine alone.

I wanted every drop of his pain, his fear, his life. My stomach growled, hungry for the power that came from the final pump of someone’s heart.

My body shifts, peering down at the open knife roll exposed in a chair, individual blades tucked into separate pockets neatly. My fingers graze the sharp tips, the craving for revenge leaving me famished, savage.

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