Page 172 of The Beautiful Dead

“Yes.”

His whole body went still. His breath caught in his throat, his pulse visible in his neck, his lips parting on something between a gasp and a laugh.

“It’s really his?”

I rolled my eyes and reached forward, turning the skull in his hands, my fingers brushing over his knuckles, over the scars and violence now etched into his skin.

“If you look here,” I murmured, tapping just above the left temple. “You’ll see where your bullet went through.”

Remi let out a sound. Low. Guttural. Pure fucking reverence. “Fuuuuuucccckkkk.”

He tilted the skull toward the light, tracing the delicate spiderweb fractures left behind by the impact of his kill shot.

“This is one of the best things you’ve ever given me.” His voice was breathless. Almost shaking.

Remi was… interesting.

He didn’t care about jewelry. Clothes. Money. As long as he had a dry place to sleep and enough food not to starve, he didn’t want anything. Not the things normal people craved.

He craved this.

The dark, ugly parts of life. Blood and pain. Power and suffering. Control. And I was here to give them to him.

The skull rested on the counter, and his fingers tightened around it, pulsing, curling, shaking with something sharp and raw.

I watched. Fascinated. A starving man watching his lover feast.

Remi’s tongue darted out, wetting his lips as his eyes darkened, his pulse jumping beneath his skin.

Slowly, deliberately, he tilted the skull toward his face, his fingers drifting over the hollowed sockets, over the place where he’d once seen the world before Remi ended him.

He parted his lips. The tip of his tongue flicked out, running over the jagged cracks, tasting the ghost of gunpowder and bone.

A shudder ran through him, his lashes fluttering, his breath catching in his throat like he was suffocating on power.

“God,” he whispered, voice wrecked.

It broke something in me. I stepped closer, my fingers wrapping around the back of his neck, my grip tight, possessive. His breath hitched. I could feel it. Feel the heat of him.

His obsession.

His worship.

I dragged my thumb along his pulse point, pressing just enough to feel it flutter beneath my touch. And then I leaned in.

Voice dark. Low. “Do you like it,piccolo agnello?”

Remi turned his head, eyes gleaming, wicked, fucking manic. His lips curled, his grip still tight on the skull. “I love it.”

Remi’s lips were curved in something sinful, his breath still ragged, fingers clutching at the skull like a relic.

A prize.

A trophy.

A testament to what I had done for him. And yet—it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. His obsession fed mine. His darkness reflected, refracted, amplified in the twisted mirror we had become.

I needed him to show me. To prove that he knew. Knew what I had done. Knew how far I would go. Knew that he belonged to me.

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