Chapter 21
AZRAEL
This place feels like hell on earth.
The air in her apartment hasn’t changed, the furniture is in the same position, and Cat is still zooming around. Nothing has really changed.
The only thing different is the woman standing in the center of it all, and it gives me chills. A statue that embodies every reason I should have turned around and run.
“Missed me, love?” I ask, my eyes scanning her body for any sign of a new wound that would explain her absence. Nothing. She’s just as perfect as I left her.
The words drop, but she doesn’t even blink.
She just stands at the edge of the kitchen, arms over her chest in a sweater that is swallowing her frame, with a half-empty glass of wine in her right hand and a kitchen knife in the left one.
The indifference of her posture is contradicted by the tremor of her hand.
I step closer trying to close the distance, but she just mirrors my movement, stepping back.
With each step I take toward her, she takes one of her own, keeping an even distance between us, all the way until she reaches the kitchen island.
Then she turns to it, like I’m not even here, and tops off her glass.
“Aren’t you going to offer me some?” I ask, in a poor attempt to get some sort of conversation going. And wine is one subject my Victoria will always enjoy discussing.
She sighs, like I’m bothering her just by existing in the same space as her. I want to scream, to tell her that I hate myself for what I’d done just as much as she does. That I would do anything—taking my life in the process, if needed—if she’d come back to me. I just need her to let me.
“Scotch’s in the cabinet. Same place.” she say as nonchalantly as ever.
Same place, same voice, but a different fucking tone.
I pour a double, moving my hands unnaturally mechanically.
If I don’t, I’ll just throw the bottle and, as of now, I am not sure which direction it’s going to go.
To the wall, to see it shattered and maybe calm my nerves down?
Or maybe toward her, so I could finally get a reaction.
Even my head is an option. Maybe it would get her out of my mind, and I could function properly again.
I want to ask her if she has any idea what she’s done, how it feels to be dismissed without a word, but starting a conversation before I figure out how fucked up the situation is, is a terrible decision. So instead, I drink. The burn is so weak and not nearly enough.
I walk toward her again. On cue, she jumps up onto the kitchen island with the same grace she’d used in the past to climb onto her bed. The image of her, on the bed…no, I don’t have time for that.
“What the fuck happened?” I ask. I put my hands on the counter next to her, to keep myself from doing something more stupid than what I’ve already done.
I expect venom, or some version of the hurricane she usually throws at me when things don’t go her way, but I don’t get that. I just get another sigh followed by the sound of her blade tapping on the edge of the island.
“Victoria?”
An almost furious expression shadows her face for a moment, but she quickly erases it and sips her wine, ignoring everything again.
Eventually, she answers, “I got bored.”
I laugh. The sound comes out wrong, too dry to be humorous. “Cute. Try again.”
“Things stopped being interesting.” She doubles down in a monotone voice.
“You disappear,” I say, louder than I should, “and that’s your line?”
“You storm into my apartment,” she replies, eyes skating over me, “and think I owe you an explanation?”
She shouldn’t be this calm. It feels…faked.
What on earth could possibly be going through her mind right now? Is she really this detached? Maybe she really doesn’t care. But how could she dare to be this unaffected when I am barely alive without her?
She tilts her head, casually. “And for the record? Who calls nineteen times? Fucking psychopath.”
There is some sort of intimacy in the way she insults me.
But isn’t that what she wanted in the first place?
For me to destroy her? Not that I don’t blame myself.
If today doesn’t go the way I want it to, the universe should prepare for what I’m about to do, because it would make the Facility look like child’s play.
I stare at her—really stare. Her hair isn’t black anymore.
Now it’s a dark shade of blond. It pisses me off.
Everything about her pisses me off and turns me on at the same time: the faintest line on her cheek from lying on one side for too long, the skin that is too clean, with no trace of her usual makeup, having scrubbed off the last version of herself that I know.
She cannot be okay, but she is pretending better than I ever could.
“You said you wanted to feel something,” I say, calmer now. “So. Did it work?”
For a fraction of a second, I think I can see it. The expression on her face changes into something too painful to mention, but it’s gone as fast as it came.
“You tried, Professor,” she answers in a monotone voice. “And failed.”
I step in closer, leaving just a few inches between us, to where I can smell the wine on her breath. Her detachment has a scent now.
“I did not.” I don’t need her to admit to knowing I’m right. She felt something. The only question is: what? Was it that dark, that disturbing? “What did you feel?”
“I said nothing.”
“First lie. What?”
“Nothing.”
“Second lie. What.”
“Leave.”
“I’m not asking again. What.”
VICTORIA
He wants to know. The fucker wants to know.
The most macabre laugh escapes my mouth, and I can’t help but wonder if I’m losing all my marbles. So this is what insanity feels like. It takes hours, or minutes or maybe seconds until I calm it down.
“You want to know what you did, Azrael?” I ask, still not fully recovered from the hysterical laughter. “You almost did it, you almost broke me. What was it? Step 2? I failed.”
“You—”
“Yes, I did,” I say proudly. He should have known I would find out about his little experiment.
“But—”
“I know everything.” Now my expression is in full-blown crazy mode. My eyes are looking straight at him, a sadistic grin covering my face from one ear to the other, and I think I forgot how to blink.
“Yet you stayed.”
“It was a one-time mistake.”
Right. Mistake. Like everything else that involved him. Knowing him was a mistake, meeting him was even worse. And by asking him to help me, I signed my death sentence.
“This—we— are not a mistake.”
“My blade and my forty-four numbers tend to believe otherwise. Want a demonstration?”
I know it’s the adrenaline talking, but the next thing I see is myself in front of him with my hand holding the knife right at his throat. Stop lying to yourself, Victoria, you can’t. I will. I’ll kill him. Because nothing is worth losing myself again.
“Is this what you want, little ember? To kill me? Do it.” He doesn’t believe it, but he doesn’t need to. Neither do I, but I still will. I’ve never asked a target before if they want to be killed, yet here we are. Well…anyway.
“It will hurt, Professor. And unlike you, I’m not doing hypothetical shit. You played with me. You fucking played with me. My mind, my brain.”
“You asked for this!”
“I did not ask to become your fucking puppet!”
“Yes, you did. You fucking did! What was that? Oh, right. ‘Break me, fuck me.’ Sound familiar?”
He’s a fucking lunatic and turns out I’m just a fucking whore. God, we’re a match made in hell.
I take a couple of steps back and point the tip of the blade toward the wrecked door. “Leave. Get the fuck out now, before I show you who I really am.”
“You think I didn’t know? You think I came here and was surprised by this?”
“You came here to see how fucked up I am. Well, congratulations, dear Professor. I. Am. Fucked. So leave before I turn you into a number.”
I don’t like the way he’s looking at me, like he’s moments away from crumbling. This doesn’t look like the psychopathic Professor who took me to that warehouse. Or that room. Who left me as a victim to my own demons.
“You are fucked? You? Did you even look around for one second? Do you see me standing here?” The exasperation in his voice is palpable.
“Oh, what an honor. Want to play a game? It’s called leave now or feel my blade. I will surely enjoy it. Send my regards to hell.”
I raise my blade, and there is no hesitation when I slice it through the air toward him, but the fucker evades me.
“Fuck, Victoria!”
He’s saying something. The fucker is probably trying to beg for his life. He should have thought of this before he fucking played me. This is exactly what he wanted.
“You’re so down deep into your ass you can’t even see what’s around you.” Another cut through the air, another miss. Die! His words go right past my ear. All I can focus on is that I have a target. Azrael is my target. The Professor is my target, and I want him to be gone.
“Die, fucking die, Azrael, go to hell!”
If I had even the slightest sense of reality, my actions would probably disgust me, seeing how I’m succumbing to my inner demons. This is exactly what I was trying to avoid. Luckily, my last drop of sanity abandoned me last night, and right now I’m on a blood spree. For his blood, specifically.
“Just fucking stop!”
“I will, after you arrive in fucking hell!”
I’m trying to stab, to slice, to hurt him somehow. Yet all I achieve is engaging in a sadistic dance, each of my steps being met by his retraction. We move around the kitchen island, and under normal circumstances this would look like foreplay, but even he knows I’m not playing this time.
“I’m already there!” His voice is getting louder and louder, almost matching mine. Because I am…screaming? Rage? No, I know what rage feels like, and this is something else. Fuck, another result of his experiment.
Another useless slash through the air, another step, and now we’re standing inches apart, him trapped between the fridge and my body.
I can smell the scent of his body wrapping around me with a subtle hint of mint as he levels his head to look me straight in the eyes while he’s talking.
“I’m the one who’s fucked. I’m the one who’s craving. I am the one who didn’t ask for it. Yet I am the one who’s here. But you? So poised. You stayed up there and pretended I did it all on my own.”
He keeps talking, and I want him to stop. I don’t want to hear it. “You did.”
My hand trembles, every muscle tensed as I move the blade closer, the silence broken only by my ragged breaths. With one last gesture, I put the blade back to his throat, where it belongs, and I’m about to whisper his final new name.
“But you wanted me to!”
He screams, and I stop, the spell I’m under lifting a little.
He actually screams. The Professor doesn’t scream.
He’s too cynical for emotions. Yet, he does it this time.
I look at him for the first time with a semi-clear mind, and I see it.
A broken man, just as broken as I am. No, that is not accurate.
A man who does not understand what the fuck is going on, just like I don’t understand.
There is a hint of confusion in his eyes, but also something else.
Every time the Professor looked at me in the past, there was always a barrier up, like he was denying me from truly understanding what was going on in his brain.
But this time, I see everything. And above it all, I see the defeat.
He’s accepted whatever this is. I’m the one who didn’t.
I drop the knife on the kitchen island, useless now.
Suddenly, I’m tired. Too tired to fight him, too tired to listen to him and way too tired to understand.
The adrenaline that was keeping me together just seconds ago is now flowing out of my body and all I want is to see him gone so I can go back to my wine, get shit-faced drunk and spend the rest of eternity in my bed.
I take a few steps back, moving to the counter and grabbing the wine bottle.
I don’t need to talk to him. I don’t need to listen to whatever he has to say. All I need is my house, my bed, and a world where Azrael isn’t present.
“Seriously? You almost killed me and now you’re pretending I’m not even here?” His voice cracks. “You’re not even going to ask why I’m here?”
“I really don’t care. Just make sure you replace my door.”
“Stop this.”
Oh, the audacity. How dare he? I look at him, but that defeated expression doesn’t sit well with me, so I look away.
“I’m trying, but you just don’t want to leave.” I answer, while grabbing my wine, because yes, I’m not above pretending I’m just bored if it keeps me safe.
“Bullshit. At least tell me you are done. That I fucked up because you felt something. Fuck, tell me something, anything. Just don’t run away,” he demands, throwing his hands in the air dramatically.
His voice is almost pleading.
I open my mouth, trying to say something, but no sound comes out. How am I supposed to tell him, when I’ve prohibited myself from admitting it in my head?
After what feels like eternity, I gather the strength to say my final piece.
“You fucked up, Azrael. Your something ruined my job. So no, thank you. I’m out. Out and done. Rule one.” I’m not even sad, or mad, or enraged. My voice comes out monotonous, and I can feel the numbness invading my body once again.
It’s over, I’ve done it. I’ve given up.
I take the bottle and start walking to the door, ready to immerse myself in my self-proclaimed pity party again. The bottle is half full, and I’m half alive.
“Go home, Azrael,” I say over my shoulder, with a hand on the doorknob.
But does he do what he is told? Of course not.
“Fuck it.” That’s all I hear before my body is pressed to the door.
His hand catches my wrist and presses his body against mine. Everything I’ve pushed down for weeks resurfaces in a tidal wave and I can feel it deep in my core.
“You’re breaking the rules,” I try to argue, but my body betrays me, moving closer to him until there’s no space left between us. I want to push him away, to bite, to do anything but this, but even my brain hates to admit how much I need this.
“No, little ember,” he whispers next to my ear. “I’m rewriting them.”
And for one breathless moment, we stand at the edge of the abyss, one built on brilliance and brutality and every goddamn emotion we cannot name.