Chapter 2 #2
I snap back into myself with a hiss through my teeth. Fog beads on my face and runs down like sweat. He pats his pockets, frowns like he’s misplaced something, and mumbles a curse under his breath. Then he tells her he’ll be right back.
Strokes her cheek like he’s earned the right to touch her, kisses the top of her head, and jogs off toward the corn maze, alone. Leaves her standing by the cider wagon with their friends, chin tucked low, smile thin, eyes darting.
As if she’s safe.
I trail him into the rows, his humming threading in and out of the fog until it cuts off. A glow breaks through the dirt ahead.
A phone.
I crouch, lifting it out of the dirt. The screen blinds me, stupid-bright, and the wallpaper punches me in the ribs. Salem. Her face lit by someone else’s camera, smiling like she’s happy.
My grip tightens.
Then the messages flash. Bubbles rolling in, one after another, like the phone itself can’t wait to spit out his filth. Another girl’s name. Pet names. Baby. Hearts. Promises for later tonight.
Not Salem.
The glow stabs up through my hand, showing me exactly what he is. What he’s been doing while she waits for him.
My jaw cracks with the sound I don’t let out.
My vision goes sharp, veins buzzing with a heat hell could never burn out of me. He’s touching her, smiling at her, making her laugh, while feeding sugar lies to someone else.
The stalks rustle. He stumbles back into view, patting his pockets, muttering under his breath.
Then his gaze snaps up, catching me standing there shirtless.
Mud streaked across my chest, blood dried under my nails, tattoos black down my ribs and arms. Jeans clinging to dirt and grave-sweat.
Boots sunk in the soil like they belong here more than he ever did.
My buzz-cut hair bristles in the cold wind, crow-shadowed.
“Holy shit,” he blurts, a nervous laugh breaking out. “Man, you scared me. You look fucking insane.” His eyes drop to the phone glowing in my hand, Salem’s face still bright on the screen. Relief spreads across his dumb grin. “Oh, you found it! Thanks, dude, I thought I?—”
I don’t move. Don’t speak.
The crows above click their beaks like teeth. My grip tightens around the phone until the glass strains.
He steps closer, relief dripping off him like sweat, and plucks the phone from my hand with a grin.
“Christ, man. Thought I’d lost this for good.”
I stare. Say nothing.
He scrolls, smirks, shakes his head.
“Women, huh? Can’t live without ‘em. The one I’m here with—gorgeous, tight little body, face you wanna bite. But she’s not… adventurous. Doesn’t have that freak streak.”
“Right.”
He tilts the phone, showing off a picture of some half-nude bitch with sultry lips. “Now this one? She knows how to keep me coming back. Sends me shit like this all fucking day. Begging for me to come through after I’m done with this other one.”
“Uh-huh.”
He chuckles, smooth and arrogant, like he’s passing down wisdom.
“You need variety. The girl you take out, and the one you call when you want it messy. Can’t expect one woman to be both.”
“No.”
He grins wider, reading agreement where there’s only ice. “Knew you’d get it. Most guys don’t. Lucky I ran into someone real. Most preach love or loyalty, like that’s gonna keep you warm.”
“Doesn’t.”
He laughs again, pocketing the phone. “Exactly. At the end of the day, it’s about ass. Who’ll give it the way you want it,” Nathan says, relief dripping out of him as he takes the phone back. “Man, you really saved my ass tonight. Hell—saved my life.”
That’s when I laugh. Low. Wrong. It snaps his head toward me.
My grin is teeth in the dark. “I didn’t come here to save your life.” I lean closer, voice steady as the knife in my grip. “I came here to fucking end it.”
His face drains. “Wait—hold on, man, whatever this is?—”
The knife answers before I do, sliding up under his ribs. The first sound is wet, a thick choke swallowed by the fog. He folds against me, shock and panic in his wide eyes, and I press my hand hard over his mouth.
“Don’t beg,” I whisper, though he tries anyway. His words break against my palm, hot and damp. He thrashes. Fucking pathetic . “You think you get to plead after touching what’s mine? You think you get mercy when you put your filthy mouth on her?”
I slam him back into the stalks, the corn splitting around us like a wound. He claws at my arm, at the air, anywhere he can, but I hold him fast. His tears cut channels through the grime on his cheeks.
“I bled for her,” I growl, twisting the blade deeper. His body jerks. “I died for her. And you” —I wrench the knife free and drive it higher, angling for the heart— “you thought you could use her.”
He makes a bubbling sob, a broken animal noise. His knees buckle. I lower him to them, force his gaze to mine, making him see the feral grin behind his own death.
“I’m not the god who takes prayers,” I whisper as his body starts to fold. “I’m the fucking thing that answers them.”
The second thrust splits him open. His breath rattles out into the fog. I hold him up for a moment, staring into his panicked, stupid eyes, then let him crumple into the dirt, dead weight swallowed by the rows.
He gurgles, fingers clawing at my wrist. Useless.
Good. Let him thrash. Let him rage. I want him to know he was weighed and found wanting, damned before he even had a chance to whisper a prayer.
Heaven never had his name, and hell doesn’t even want him.
He’s just meat caught between my hands and the devil’s teeth.
I tilt his chin up with the blade’s point. Make him look at me through the black holes of his own fear.
He vomits pink and bile across my boots. I let him choke on it.
“Did she make the sounds for you?” I press, leaning close, words hot enough to fog his eyes.
“No. Because you don’t know where they live in her.
You don’t know what her body does when she's close to breaking apart, or how it feels to be loved by her. You don’t know her body, how she got the scar on her thigh. You don’t know a goddamn thing.”
His pupils blow wide, horror-struck. He tries to pull away but can’t. I set the knife beneath his jaw and lift his face like a chalice.
“You laid hands where you shouldn’t,” I murmur. “But you’ll choke on the truth, that you never touched her the way I did. Not where her heartbeat stutters. Not where her body sings.”
I lay him back in the dirt, head tipped into a nest of broken stalks. My left hand seals his mouth again. The blade’s edge kisses the skin below his ear. He makes that clogged-drain noise. I stroke once. Twice. Clean cuts are the kindest. They let what needs to leave, leave.
The artery bursts. Warmth jets across my wrist, my forearm, and my throat. Iron-sweet air blooms in my lungs.
He thrashes, choking on his own wet breath, eyes bulging as if prayer might crawl out of them. Useless. I straddle his hips, ride the panic out of him until the fight empties like a gutted animal. He claws, slips, slows, until nothing is left but twitch and silence.
He dies beneath me, and it still isn’t enough. It will never fucking be enough.
Anatomy is a language with slippery grammar. You learn the rules, then you make poetry.
The cult taught me how to cut clean. How to make the body fold quietly. They even taught me when it wasn’t deer, when it had to be done, when flesh needed to be language and blood the answer to a prayer.
I’m not thinking of either of them now.
I’m thinking of her.
Her vow, the sounds she’ll make when I take her back.
I free the head with the patience of a man who once learned to braid hair by watching Salem twist her own in a cracked mirror.
The spinal tether snaps like knotted tissue, and the weight shifts. It always surprises me how quickly people become portable when you take the argument of their blood out of them.
The face is its own project. Bone wants to keep flesh; it believes it’s a house.
I remind it that it’s going for a walk. The knife slides under cheek, peels slow, and deliberate.
The fog thickens, condenses on the edge of the blade.
The corn whispers. The crows perch along the row click their beaks like their applauding.
I work the skin off in a single, careful sheet.
Lay it aside like a pale wet question. Lift the skull into my lap.
Slick. Stinking. Mine. I spit into the hollows, grind dry dirt into the bone with the heel of my palm until it goes matte, hungry, honest. Somewhere in the maze a girl shrieks and laughs to prove it wasn’t fear.
Good for her. Fear has better plans tonight.
Beside me, the phone he dropped lies in the dirt, screen glowing, buzzing faint against the soil.
Another girl’s messages spill across it: baby, can’t wait to see you later .
Photos too. Her body, mouth, and lies. My jaw knots.
My hands tighten on the skull until bone creaks.
He had the gall to touch Salem and still crawl to another bed after.
Rage floods me. The phone buzzes again, an insect begging to be crushed.
I grind my heel over it until the glow dies in glass splinters.
Black twine coils in my pocket the way other men keep promises. I thread it through the orbital sockets, hug it under cheekbones, lace it behind the occipital like I’m tying a ring onto a broken finger.
Tug. Knot. Tug.
When I lift it by the strings, it swings like a lantern. The teeth grin with architectural certainty.
“You touched her,” I tell the skull, because Nathan is too dead to be troubled by my opinion. My voice drips with the certainty of scripture. “And now, I’ll wear you while I take her back.”
I set bone to face and cinch the twine. The skull kisses the ridge of my nose, the shelf of my brow, the hard line of my cheek. Weight settles in. Sight narrows. The world frames itself in white and dark—jaw and emptiness. Breath fogs the bone and warms it, as if it approves.
I stand, wipe the blade clean on his shirt, and sheath it. My boots sink an inch into the soft ground. Fog fingers my calves like kin. Above, the crows shuffle, black priests at their sermon.
Vision tilts. For a second I’m a doubled, skull-faced bastard breathing fog, a crow on wire with the night jammed in its chest.
I let the bird’s eyes bleed into mine. The maze flattens into a grid of light and shadow, motion the only law worth keeping. People flicker warm like cheap lanterns.
Her? She doesn’t flicker.
She fucking burns .
Not soft. Not safe.
She’s a coal buried under ash, waiting for me to claw it out with my teeth.
There you are .
The crow croaks once and rips off across the maze, a black stitch pulling the night tight. I fall in behind it like I was made to, breath and hands steady, heart anything but. That chaos? Useful. Faster. Meaner. Tuned to one goddamn frequency, her .
And anyone dumb enough to step into that frequency? They don’t walk back out. I’ll turn their bodies into warnings. Their faces into fucking tools. And when I take her back, when I drag her home, she’ll remember exactly what my love is.
Not mercy. Not forgiveness.
Fucking conquest .
The lights stutter. Fog thickens.
The speaker somewhere plays a looping woman’s scream; someone laughs to prove they know it’s fake.
I don’t laugh.
I follow the fucking crow.