23. Luna
There’s blood between my thighs.
Wolf carries me through the dark, placing me down on my feet once we get inside the bathroom. He pulls on the light, reaching over the tub to start the shower. But I’m just staring down at my legs, a weird mixture of disbelief and horror clawing through me. This nervous thread of panic tying me all up in knots.
“Luna, it’s okay,” Wolf tells me in that quiet, softness used just for me.
“No it’s not,” I whisper, voice cracked, my breath catching in my throat.
“It’s fine, really, Luna, it’s my fault, we didn’t know.”
I’m not looking at him, gaze fixed on my blood smeared thighs, but I imagine Wolf is shoving his hand through his hair, and I should look up, I should tell him it’s okay. It’s not his fault.
Logically, nothing is wrong here at all.
I wanted him. He wanted me.
It was perfect, for us.
But all that’s happening to me is a sharp seizing sensation in my heart like locusts have hatched inside my chest cavity and are swarming wildly around my heart like a crop field they’re going to devour.
“Luna.”
“I need to clean the mess,” I mumble, shaky hands reaching out towards the sink.
My fingers fumbling over the taps, I swallow past the lump in my throat. I’m not even sure what this means, but I think about it, my virginity, and pure terror washes over me. I scrub my hands under the scalding water, lathering soap in my palms and slapping them against my thighs, clawing at the soapy, red skin.
“No, no, no, no.” A cry wrenches up my throat, dry and scratchy. “I shouldn’t have done that.” My fingers bend back with a sharp pain, the tape holding them together drenched, washing away the adhesive.
Wolf snatches up my hands as I cry out, pinning both of my wrists in one of his big hands, and raising them high, away from my legs.
I’m breathing hard, my eyes wide, bulging in their sockets and I have the most vivid imagery of them popping free, hanging down my cheeks.
“Luna,” Wolf grunts sharply, his free hand grasping my chin. “Baby girl, look at me.” He tilts my chin, my neck craning back, “You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
My teeth chatter, skin rippling with a tremor, “Something’s wrong.”
“Okay,” he replies calmly, just like that, listening, unquestioning, not making me feel crazy.
“I don’t know why,” my teeth chatter so hard they clack in my mouth.
“It’s okay,” he soothes, cupping my cheek, pulling me into his muscular body, moulding my softness into his hard ridges. “It’s okay.”
“Wolf,” tears streak down my cheeks, “I’m sorry.”
“No, no, no, Little Moon, you don’t have anything to be sorry for,” he tells me, “nothing, okay?”
“I don’t think I was supposed to do that,” I confess in a small voice.
I feel him inhale sharply, his grip on my wrists releasing to haul me into his arms. He sits on the lip of the bath, cradling me to his chest, his palm curling over my head, protecting me.
My armour against the world.
“I know things right now are hard for you,” wolf says calmly, his deep timbre gruff and low, softening, as it always does, for me. “But I’m not ever going to let anything bad happen to you. There will be no punishments, no scolding, no cross words. You could murder every bunny on the planet,” he snorts at that, as though he finds it amusing, “and I will still-” he inhales sharply, his chest expanding beneath my cheek.
I blink, feeling him hold his breath, his arms a tight barring around me. The rush of the shower pounding against the base of the bath echoes in the quiet like hail on a tin roof, the spray dusting us, him more than me because his big body shields me from it.
“You will still what?” I whisper, my fingers pressing firmly to his chest, my eyes on the lumpy, red scar.
I cover it with my hand, my palm directly over the thrashing of his beating heart. Something that stopped, multiple times.
Because I bring death.
There’s blood and bone and that putrid, sticky-sweet aroma filling my nose. It is sunken into the walls, staining the white ceilings yellow. The drapes are always closed, the fire always lit, but I am forever cold inside this house.
A spectre drifting through guarded halls, always watching and invariably watched.
“Luna?”
“There’s a house with big windows that never open and doors that are forever locked. A garden I can’t play in and guards always on watch.” The words stream out of me like birdsong at dawn. My eyes lift to Wolf’s perfect yellow-caramel orbs, “I think-” I glance back down staring at my pale fingers flush with Wolf’s suntanned olive skin. “I think I know where my house is.”
Wolf drives us slowly down the dark roads, it’s the first time I’ve left Cardinal House and the further away from it we get, the worse my tummy feels.
He thinks it’s good for me to see if anything jogs my memory by seeing it, a house, he confessed, he had also driven by earlier today. I didn’t ask why, but he told me anyway.
To protect you, Little Moon.
That was enough for me.
There are tall street lamps dotted along both sides of the road we come to a stop on, and Wolf parks the car a little way down from the house, in a spot that isn’t under any light.
We sit quietly for some time, just us in the gloom. It”s late now, early morning hours, but I’m not even a little bit tired.
“Do you recognise anything, Little Moon?” Wolf breaks the silence with his deep gravel, low tones, my right hand in his left, our fingers laced together.
Without words, I lift my left hand slowly, pointing at the large white house of horrors a little way up on the opposite side of the street. I don’t know what happened to me inside that house, but somehow, deep inside, I know it wasn’t good. Evidently, someone or something inside that large mansion killed me. It could have been something else. A stranger attacking me when I went out for a walk, perhaps. But deep down in the pit of my stomach, I know it was this house.
“Do you remember anything else?” he asks me a few more silent minutes later.
“No,” I reply quietly.
“Luna?”
“Yes, Wolf?”
“The rabbit,” he starts, his head turning towards me, his eyes burning into the side of my face, I keep my own gaze on the house. “Did you kill it to frighten Haisley?” he asks me so simply, emotionless, I almost feel like smiling.
Blinking, without turning my head in his direction, I glance at him from the corner of my eye, “No.”
“Did she do something to upset you?” he asks next, my focus back on the house, the curtains drawn, no light spilling out from inside.
“No,” I say, but I frown, and this time it shows.
“Are you sure?”
I think of the frothing water and the rainbow pinwheel and the blue eyes.
“I killed the rabbit because it was sick.” The words drift out of me almost silently, my frown pulling at the healing skin of my head, making me want to wince.
“Luna-”
“There’s a man,” I gasp an inhale, squeezing Wolf’s hand as a man exits the house.
He steps out onto the front porch, dressed in all black, and I have an urge, like a compulsion, to drop my gaze, to look away. Instead, I can hardly even blink. My throat gets tight, my mouth dry, tongue thick and heavy in my mouth. It feels as though I’ve licked sandpaper and shaved off all of my tastebuds.
“Do you know him?” Wolf is quieter now, watching the man like a predator readying to pounce.
No. That’s what comes to mind first, but my gaze drifts to the spark of a lighter, his fingers pinching a cigarette between his lips, and even though we’re far enough away that I can’t see any details, my skin crawls as though it can feel his phantom hands holding my naked body down.
“Yes.” I answer, taking in a nice slow breath.
“Did he hurt you, baby girl?” It’s a loaded question.
I can hear the violence in the strain of his voice.
Can feel it thrumming through the interior of the shadowed car we sit in.
Taste it on my tongue, blood, as we sit here in the quiet.
A ghoul and her monster.
‘The only monster here is me, Luna. And I’m yours.’
“Yes,” I breathe, heat building between my thighs, my heart racing in my chest.
Anticipation.
He told me to use him.
‘Use me, muzzle me, unleash me like a hound of hell and I’ll tear out the throats of all of your demons.’
Wolf was right.
He is a monster.
My monster.
But… so am I.
“I want his head,” I breathe, my entire body trembling, hands shaking, chest quivering.
Wolf’s hand tightens in mine, strong fingers flexing until his fingertips dig painfully into my broken knuckles and I want to cry out at the pain. But I am silent, we are still, and then he brings my hand to his mouth, laving his hot tongue over the shattered bone like he knows he hurt me.
“Anything for my Little Moon,” he breathes across my wet skin, placing my hand gently in my lap.
Then he gets out of the car.
An unholy terror released into the night.