Chapter 15
XV
When Ophelia saw the cut, she didn’t smirk or speak.
A strange flicker in her eyes hinted at something other than celebration, though I struggled to pinpoint the emotion.
She dampened a towel and wiped the blood from my cheek.
Unlike our usual encounters, the gesture held no sexual connotation.
She looked at me with something closer to pity. The cut looked worse than it felt.
Had Gunnar punished her as well? He must have. I wondered in what ways. The only time I'd seen her broken was when I slit her throat, yet that wound had long since vanished.
She cast one last look at me and drifted downstairs, retreating into her box without a word.
Left in this invidious silence, I struggled against a sudden, unwanted ache of sympathy for her.
She had been only a child when she was married off, and then broken.
Then she was taken—saved?—by Gunnar, and forged into something new.
I languished in bed and pondered the possibility that I needed to be placed in the soil, too. What did that mean for me? What had I become?
The following evening, Ophelia slipped out to hunt. Gunnar occupied the time in his room with his collection of bones, leaving me without a chance to speak to either of them or ask what I should do.
But with Gunnar, we shared a reticent agreement, and tonight was the night.
I had hoped for more time. Perhaps Ophelia would stay out until there was no time left at all, just enough to satiate herself and play a little before dawn forced an end to it.
Don't come home, don't come home.
But she was efficient this time. She returned before the hour had even turned, bringing with her a man who looked in his early twenties.
She'd brought women only a few times. It had nothing to do with the way they tasted.
I assumed men were easier, more eager to follow a stranger into the night, chasing the promise of pleasure in the sleepless hours.
Usually, she chose older prey—in their fifties or sixties who were easily drawn to her beauty and her eternal youth that hovered right on the edge of the age of consent.
They were so drunk on it they grew careless.
They also tended to carry more cash; the older the man, the thicker the wad of paper bills in his wallet.
She once told me, laughing, that she didn’t even lie to them. She told them, “I will eat you alive,” and they followed, led by their eager manhood. And then she did—just not in the way they imagined.
This one was blond and tall, almost handsome, though his face was equine in a way that made him look perpetually uncertain.
Ophelia led him into the room, kissing him as she removed his jacket, then his shirt. He was so entranced by her that he noticed nothing. Not the stains in the carpet. Not the damp metallic air. Perhaps he was drunk. Perhaps she had already begun working her quiet influence on him.
She pushed him onto the bed, and I watched from the corner, hidden in shadow.
I could see them clearly. He exhaled sharply as he fell back, his eyes caught in the gravity of her presence.
The silk dress slipped from her shoulders, sliding down her body in one slow motion.
She nudged it aside with the tip of her toe.
The boy fumbled with his clothes, urgency clinging to every movement. She watched him with mild-interest, her attention already elsewhere, already anticipating the next phase of her design.
When his clothes joined hers, she moved over him with a strange tenderness, each gesture deliberate, almost reverent, as though enacting a ritual older than either of them.
Hovering above him, she paused for a long moment. Then she lifted her eyes to me. The look was brief, but unmistakable. I nodded to her. Only then did she lower herself onto him. Her lashes quivered as she steadied herself.
Their movements quickly grew erratic. She gripped the bedpost with one hand, red hair spilling over her shoulders and down her back. In the wavering candlelight, she seemed almost unreal, a figure carved from sex and sin.
He held her hips, guiding her, unable to look anywhere but at her. I knew the hypnosis of her beauty—the way she made you feel like there was no one else in the world. But some beautiful things existed only to be destroyed, and perhaps their beauty lay precisely in their fleetingness.
Her gaze flickered toward me once more. I understood. I had learned to read her silences. I knew her well.
I took a step forward from the corner where I had stood the entire time.
I circled them, and Ophelia closed her eyes, trusting me.
I approached, shedding my nightgown. I placed the knife beside their bodies, sliding it into the bloodied sheets, and then climbed onto the bed and held Ophelia from behind.
“What the fuck?” the man mumbled, growing aware of my presence. “Who is she?”
But he was already too far gone. Ophelia did not stop moving, and soon he didn’t seem to mind the presence of two of us.
A cold current. That was how I knew Gunnar was there, too. That was how I knew it was time.
I slid my hand into the sheets, retrieved the knife, and pressed it lightly against Ophelia’s chest. I let the blade trace down her skin, slow enough to raise a shiver in its wake.
At the same moment, the man reached his end. His face tightened as release overtook him. He groaned and came inside her, one hand gripping her hip while the other squeezed her right breast.
That was when I slashed his throat.
He gurgled, hands flying upward, but I withdrew the knife almost immediately.
Ophelia bent over and latched onto his neck, working as the man convulsed beneath her.
Gunnar came closer and lowered himself onto the bed, preparing to drink.
Fresh blood stirred my hunger, and I swallowed hard to resist.
Now.
I had to do it now.
The man between Ophelia’s thighs was alive but weakening.
“Gunnar?”
He raised his face to look at me, hearing me speak for what seemed like the first time ever. And I lowered the knife once more.
Unlike our guest, Gunnar did not yelp.
When the knife went into his left eye, he growled like an injured animal, dragging us both from the bed as he slammed me into the floor.
The air fled me in a broken rasp. Pinning me by the throat with one hand, he gripped the handle of the weapon, wrenching the blade out of his eye before flinging it somewhere behind him.
His spit struck my cheek. Blood was pouring out of him, and I squeezed my mouth shut to avoid catching a drop.
Ophelia was easy to understand. She took because someone had taken from her.
It was all she had ever known. But Gunnar was a different kind of beast. He enjoyed it: the blood, the suffering, the death.
The owning. He thought he owned everything and everyone—and he did.
Just like I had looked at Sylvie and thought I owned her. We were so much alike, he and I.
Perhaps this is why his gift of talking to the dead was passed to me.
But two of the same kind can never coexist.
And in Gunnar’s eyes, I read everything. Regret. Fury.
I didn’t deserve to live.
Despite his wound, he pinned me to the floor, his weight crashing down on me. He would take my body apart, and I wouldn’t resist.
I closed my eyes and stilled myself.
A hiss of silk tickled my face as a fresh weight fell over me.
Ophelia. Fighting for me!
She grabbed her silk dress and used it like a rope, strangling Gunnar to try and pull him off me.
I thought she kept me to punish me for almost killing her, but it was the opposite. She clung to me because I took from her.
In a world where men had always carved pieces from her, she didn't know how to recognize a hand that wasn't a fist. When she saw me do the same, she naturally latched on. I was simply the next strong thing to claim her.
She was mine.
Ophelia straddled Gunnar’s back, her face tense, teeth bared. And then she drove the blade into his heart from behind.
She forced the knife deeper. Gunnar roared, tangled in pain and disbelief.
Our meal dragged himself from the bed. He crawled toward the door, one hand clamped to his neck, trying to hold himself together.
Lost to the noise and motion, I only turned back when it was already too late.
Gunnar had torn free from Ophelia’s grip.
Somehow, he had wrenched the knife from his back and driven it into my thigh.
I roared. He tore the blade free, ready to end it, but I twisted away with what strength remained. I crashed into the man’s body. He lay limp beneath me, unresponsive, already emptied. Life had abandoned him before he could escape the chaos.
His penis brushed my leg, soft and inert.
Gunnar lunged, and I dragged myself backward. He stumbled over the corpse I had just fallen across.
“No!”
With that cry, Ophelia leapt on him once more. Without hesitation, he caught her by the hair and slit her throat. Not the clumsy tearing I had done that first night, but a clean slice from side to side. Blood filled her mouth, her body turned against itself as her own vitality entered her system.
“Oh . . .” she croaked, trying to stifle the flow.
I searched the floor blindly, fingers striking fabric, buttons, damp folds of clothing. Nothing. Nothing that could be used.
Then I found it.
The Stanley knife. The same one Ophelia had used on Sylvie, on me, on so many others.
In one motion, I drove it upward—no aiming, no overthinking, guided only by speed and panic—straight into Gunnar’s second eye. He howled, clutching at the ruins of his face as he tried to reach me.
That was when Ophelia, one hand still at her throat, forced the second knife into his chest.
Blinded, Gunnar dropped to his knees.
She did not stop.
Minutes passed. Ophelia struck again and again, keening in grief.
I was screaming too. The sound swallowed everything, a miasma of noise, alive inside the room. And then I joined her in the frantic unmaking of the man who’d made us.