Chapter 5
Royal
You only see the porcelain. Not the cracks, not the smoke behind the smile. Not the boy who clawed out of church basements with poems instead of prayers.
You called me sweet. But I’ve been rotting sugar on a rusty blade since the day they marked me saved.
I would bleed out behind this mask if it meant you never had to cry again.
I wait until the light in Becki’s trailer flickers off.
Not that she’s sleeping.
I know she ain’t. Becki don’t sleep easy, not when her world’s unraveling.
Not when I’m pulling at the threads.
But it’s not me, she’s heartbroken over. Legend’s found someone else to warm his bed.
I’ve always been the quiet one. The shadow. The slow burn nobody sees until they’re scorched clean through.
Legend? He’s the storm. The firework. The king she crowned in her fantasies.
But I’m the one who’s been watching her for years.
Who’s bled for her without her knowing.
Tonight, I bleed again.
I slide the mask on, black and white, cracked like bone, and pull my hood low. Yeah, I was wearing Legend’s hoodie before. Snagged it from the clubhouse to throw her off my scent.
The weight in my chest tightens as I cross the trailer steps and test the door.
Unlocked.
Becki trusts the dark too much.
Inside, it smells like her. Pumpkin spice and desperation.
It guts me.
She's curled on the couch in a tangle of blankets, one leg bare, throat exposed like an offering. There’s no TV playing tonight, no slasher flicks. Just her breath, too fast for sleep, and the thump-thump of her heart I swear I can hear across the room.
She knows.
I don’t say a word as I step closer, my boots squeaking on cheap linoleum. Her eyes stay shut, but she shifts, like she’s bracing.
Good.
Let her be scared.
Let her be wet with it.
I kneel beside the couch. My gloved hand grazes her calf. She doesn’t flinch.
She exhales.
Then she turns her face toward me, eyes flying open, wild and feral.
“It’s you again,” she whispers, but I hear a thread of fear in her shaky voice.
I nod once, still hidden. Still a fantasy. Still a sin she hasn’t confessed to. She licks her lips. I watch her chest rise, nipples hard under that threadbare tee.
“You gonna kiss me again or do worse?” she breathes.
Worse.
I could do so much worse.
Instead, I press my hand to her thigh and drag it upward, slow, deliberate, teasing. Her breath catches.
She should stop me. She won’t. Because even though she’s scared… She’s aching.
“I dreamed about you,” she says, voice hushed and shaking. “I came in my sleep. Thought I was going crazy.”
I lean down, lips by her ear. I change my voice into poison and longing. “You ain’t crazy, baby. You’re mine.”
Her thighs part. “So, you are a biker?”
“Sure,” I answer in the same fake voice as I slide my hand up, under the long shirt, under her panties that are damp and begging. She gasps and rocks against my gloved fingers, greedy.
Damn, I want to take off the gloves, feel her juices.
Her hands fist in my hoodie, and I know she wants to tear the mask off, see who I am.
I won’t let her.
I want her to want the monster. I’m not ready to give her that. But I rub her pussy until she shakes. Until she clutches my arm like it’s a lifeline and moans into my shoulder.
My cock is more than ready, but I don’t fuck her, not tonight. Tearing myself away, I vanish out into the woods.
She follows me to the old cemetery behind the trailer park like a moth to a flame.
Losing her, I follow her now. Always two steps behind. Always watching.
The place is older than Hell, Kentucky itself. Tombstones lean like drunkards. The dirt sinks in patches, where moles have infested the earth, making it look like corpses are digging out. Broken stone fences bite at the earth like broken teeth.
Becki walks among the dead like one of them. She stops at a grave she knows too well. No name. Just a stone cross with faded letters. Mama. I swallow back the heat in my throat.
Behind me, a twig snaps. I turn, teeth bared behind the mask. There’s a man. Drunk. Loud. I’ve seen him before at the gas station. He’s following her?
Big mistake.
He slinks toward her like a coyote thinking it’s found easy prey. But I’m the predator here. I step from the shadows, still masked, still cloaked.
He freezes. “Who the fuck…”
I rush him. My fist connects with his jaw before he can finish. He hits the ground hard, groaning. I put my boot to his ribs and press.
“You walk away,” I snarl low, distorted through the mask. “Or I bury you next to her ghosts.”
He scrambles, pants wet, and bolts like a rabbit. I file his face away for later.
Becki turns, too slow to catch what happened. She looks around, shivering. Clouds block out the moon. It’s too dark for her to see me.
“I feel you again…” she murmurs. Then in true Becki fashion, she gets loud. “Biker Boo, are you still there? Why don’t you finish what you started?”
I don’t answer.
Fuck, it takes all I have to walk away.
Back in my room above the old jailhouse, our clubhouse, I pull out the leather-bound journal I never let anyone see.
Inside are pages filled with her name.
Not written. Etched. Like wounds. Lines of poetry no one would ever believe came from a bastard like me. Unless they knew.
She is the holy fire I was told to fear, burning through me like revelation.
She kissed my monster and called it hers, not knowing he wore her lover’s face.
I am the shadow behind her smile, the boy who never left the graveyard.
I thumb over the page corners like a rosary, each one soaked in longing I never gave voice to. I’ve wanted her in a hundred lifetimes, across every version of myself, the boy with nothing, the man with blood on his hands, the ghost who never stops watching.
My body aches for her, but it’s the ache in my chest that carves me hollow.
That Halloween, hell, we couldn’t have been more than thirteen, still lives in me like a scar under the skin.
We were supposed to be bobbing for apples at the church carnival, but I’d slipped away, like I always did. I hated the way the Reverend looked at me, like I was the sin his sermons warned about. Like the devil wore my face.
I remember standing behind the shed, dirt on my knees, clutching that pocketknife I’d stolen just to feel like I had some control.
Then Jacob, one of the preacher’s favorites, found me.
“You don’t belong here,” he hissed, grabbing my wrist so hard the blade clattered to the dirt. “You’re just trailer trash. Demon blood. You’ll end up dead or behind bars, same as your mama.”
He shoved me into the wall. I remember the crack of my head, the cold sting of humiliation more than the pain.
And then she came.
Dark hair flowing behind her, fire in her mix matched eyes.
Becki.
“You don’t fucking touch him!” she screamed, slamming her tin pail of candy straight into Jacob’s face. He reeled, nose spurting red like a faucet.
“Freak,” he cried, stumbling off. “You’re both fucking freaks.”
I’d expected her to run after him. But she didn’t. She stayed. Bent down. Picked up my knife.
Held it out, hilt first, like a peace offering. “You gonna carve pumpkins or fight back next time?”
I didn’t say a damn word. Couldn’t.
But I never forgot it. The first time someone chose me.
Later that night, I slip back to the cemetery.
The cold bites harder now. October’s end draws out the dead things, the ones that never rest.
Like me.
I kneel at the grave she visits. Mama.
Her mama. No one but a ghost story in this town now. The Reverend’s wife, who disappeared and ended up floating down Crooked Creek. Now, everyone who goes missing from Paradise, from Hell, they claim Mama Crowley got them.
The town made her mama the evil one when real evil probably pushed her into the creek, one way or another. And Reverend Crowley still rules one side of Paradise.
I light a match and let it burn down until it kisses my glove.
“I protected her,” I whisper to the grave. “Like you asked.”
The wind answers with a hush, the rustle of leaves like bones scraping.
“I can’t stop.”
I close my eyes, and I see Becki again, arched under me, lips parted in shock and need, her eyes begging for a name I wouldn’t give.
She doesn’t know it yet, but I’m hers.
I’ve always been hers.
And I’ll keep haunting her until she admits she’s mine.