Page 603 of Rage

He looked up at the sculptures and nodded. “Yes.” His voice carried a quality that sounded almost wistful. He did not elaborate.

He placed his large hand over my chest where gore and viscera still gaped against the ruined front of the shift I’d been dressed in. His thumbnail caught and severed the soaked tendrils of linen with gentle care. I watched with the same detachment I always felt when I disposed of the butchered flesh of one of my marks. The only moment marked by cognitivedissonance was when the pad of his thumb brushed the sensitive skin on my sides and tickled.

I wasn’t numb, then. Something just divested me of my pain.

“You’ve really been with me since Penny died?” Warmth spread across the space around my ribs. Light bloomed. My flesh and sinew reached across the cavern of my ruined heart.

“Yes.”

I watched on, not missing that my heart did not reform as the cage of my ribs canopied my lungs again. For some reason…that felt right.

“Why didn’t you save her?”

His eyes were ruby-like in their vigil over me as skin, new and pink, covered the fibrous muscle moss growing over stone. “It was through your loss of her that I found you,” he said. “Once Death claims his bounty, I cannot get it back. But I could protect you. Strengthen you.”

“Why me?”

“Asking such things is like asking why your sister went through the cruelty that brought me to you.” His hand brushed into my hair, his thumb brushing my cheek bone. “Some questions have no answers.”

That wistful quality returned to his eyes as he carefully set me down on soft cushions that smelled stale but felt clean. He tore through the remaining sheds of my shift, baring me to him with ease. When he removed the blood-soaked fabric from my body and discarded it like refuse, like he wouldn’t abide the reminder of the man he’d ripped in half.

Blood still clung to my new skin. I was healed, but not clean. His eyes roved down my body, pausing at the peaks of my breasts, the curve of my stomach, the silken-haired mound between my legs.

His voice was rough, almost reverent, as he asked for the final time. “Are you ready to become?”

“Is there a choice?” I wanted to hide my face where I felt the flush of hot blood gathering there.

How your blood blooms like roses beneath your skin.

“There is always a choice,” he crooned.

I knew this, somehow. And yet it felt good to hear him say it all the same. In truth, I had already made my choice. I made it when he came to me in the darkness, made it every time I sliced into sweating, hairy flesh. I made it the day I looked into the mirror image of my own face and found nothing behind Penny’s eyes.

I will make you bleed but once so that you can bathe the world in blood.

No more girls dying at the hands of cruel men. No more sisters weeping. No more mothers burying their children. No more girls dying, sweating and vomiting in beds after unwanted life was carved out of them. No more brothers, uncles, fathers, taking what they wanted from sisters, nieces, daughters.

“I’m ready,” I said, reaching up and cupping the side of his face.

He closed his eyes in comfort before kissing the inside of my hand, his mouth just about as large as the span of it.

Another kiss followed: the inside of my wrist.

The belly of my forearm.

The swell of my upper arm.

The curve of my shoulder.

The valley of my collar bone.

My breaths came in sharp gasps as his split tongue circled around my small breast, sinuous movements winding around the soft flesh before converging on my hardening nipple. I let out a whine as he took the bud between his teeth and increased pressure.

My hips bucked and he released it, pressing the gentlest of kisses to the affronted flesh.

“You will tell me if I hurt you.” It wasn’t a question.

“I like that it hurts,” I sighed.

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