Chapter 28 - Faith
Luca carries me through the mansion’s halls, past closed doors where his family sleeps. My clinical gown clings to me, heavy with blood and sweat and the weight of finally, finally getting justice.
His bathroom is all marble and gold fixtures, too beautiful for the horror we're about to wash away. Or maybe perfect for it. Beauty and blood have always coexisted in the Rosetti world. Now they coexist in mine too.
I catch my reflection and freeze. Blood spatters across my face like freckles, my eyes wild but finally, truly alive. The woman in the mirror isn't the librarian who reads to children. She's not the dutiful daughter who sits through Sunday breakfasts lying about everything.
I try to speak but only manage: "I look…" before having to stop, pointing at my reflection, a woman covered in blood. I'd be scared of her if she was anywhere else but in the mirror.
Luca steps behind me, his chest against my back, and meets my eyes in the mirror. "You look like yourself."
His hands move to my gown, peeling the fabric away slowly. It pools at my feet, and I'm naked except for Neumann's blood. My body is a map of transformation. Purple fingerprints on my throat where Neumann tried to kill me, a nick down my ribs from where the scalpel slipped.
"The water's ready," Luca says, testing the temperature with the same care he uses when measuring chemical compounds.
I step into the heat, and the water turns pink immediately. I sink down, watching the blood swirl and dilute, carrying away the evidence but not the satisfaction. My hands disappear beneath the surface, and I flex my fingers, remembering how the scalpel felt, how Neumann's skin parted like silk.
"Thought…" I manage, then have to stop, pressing my hand to my throat. I shake my head.
Luca kneels beside the tub, reaching for an expensive washcloth. "Thought you’d feel guilty?”
I nod, grateful that he understands.
“Do you?"
I shake my head again, then manage one word despite the burning: "Free."
He begins with my face, each stroke of the washcloth removing blood but revealing something rawer underneath. The hot water makes every bruise throb, every cut sting, but the pain feels like baptism. Like being born into who I really am.
The laugh that escapes me is dark, satisfied, though it comes out more as a rasp.
Luca's hands still for a moment. "You wanted more than just his death. You wanted to be the one holding the blade."
"Yes." The single word burns but I need him to hear it.
His hands resume their movement, fingertips massaging my scalp in slow circles that make me moan despite everything.
The water laps at my breasts as I lean back to rinse my hair. Each mark on my body tells a story. This bruise from Luca's grip on my hip, that cut from my own desperate nails, those purple shadows on my throat from almost dying. I'm written in violence now, authored by both of us.
“Your mother would be proud of you,” Luca says. “Proud you survived what she couldn’t.”
I don't argue because maybe it's true. Maybe she would understand choosing survival and justice over innocence. Maybe she would have made the same choice if she'd had the right weapons, the right monster on her side.
The tears come then, mixing with the pink water, and suddenly I'm shaking. Not from cold but from delayed shock, from the adrenaline finally fading, from the recognition of what I've done and can't undo.
Luca doesn't offer platitudes or comfort. Instead, he strips efficiently and slides into the tub behind me, pulling my back against his chest. His arms wrap around me, holding me together while I shake apart.
"The first time I killed for the family, it was necessary, mechanical. But the first time I killed for you?" His lips find my ear. "That was different. That had meaning. Purpose."
I turn slightly, the question in my eyes.
"The construction worker. About a week after I started watching you. He made a comment about your body, what he wanted to do to it." His arms tighten. "I made sure he never commented on anyone again."
I try to speak but only manage a questioning sound.
"Yes, it's sick," he agrees simply. "And you're wet thinking about it."
I can't deny it. Even exhausted, even shaking from emotional release, my body responds to his darkness.
He understands my unspoken question. "We're perfectly matched."
His cock hardens against my lower back, the throb of it as honest as a confession.
Despite everything—the blood, the ache, the shadow of Neumann’s hands still imprinted on my throat—I want him.
I want to feel anything other than the afterburn of violence.
I want to be filled with something that isn’t memory or trauma or even justice. I want to be filled by him.
I turn in the water, knees bumping porcelain, and straddle his lap. His gaze never leaves mine. He looks at me like I’m the most precious and most dangerous thing he’s ever seen. The movement makes me aware of every sore muscle, every fresh bruise, every mark we’ve left on each other.
His hands come up, slow and reverent, and I can’t tell if he’s trying to worship me or atone for something.
"Need…" I whisper, the word raspy and weak, but it’s all I have left. I reach for him, thread my fingers into the wet darkness of his hair, pull him closer so our foreheads touch. I could kiss him, but it feels bigger than that.
He sees the plea in my eyes, the way my body trembles on the edge of something I don’t have a name for.
"You need to know you're still capable of feeling," he says.
His voice is a low rumble, soothing and raw. He lifts me, guides me down onto him. The stretch is immediate, sharp, almost cleansing. Pain that’s not terror or harm but a reclamation. I let myself settle, let him fill me, let the water slosh and overflow as we find our fit.
Each movement is a test. My hip screams where the bruises are deepest. My knees slip against his thighs.
But his hands never stop—one on my waist, the other tracing the shadows on my ribcage, the fresh cut, the fingerprint bruises, the tiny bite mark just below my collarbone.
The places where I end and he begins are written in violence and tenderness.
I wonder if we’ll ever be able to tell the difference.
We start slow, rocking together. This isn’t like before, like any other time we’ve fucked.
There’s no power struggle, no games, no punishment or reward.
Just two broken things trying to become whole.
The water amplifies sensation, heat and friction and movement, and sometimes I forget where the pain ends and the pleasure begins. I don’t care. I want all of it.
I try to say something—thank you, don’t leave, please don’t let me go—but my voice is gone. I press my palm to his chest, feel the hammer of his heart, then touch my own where it’s beating double-time. I drag his hand up and place it over my heart, hold it there, let him feel what he’s done to me.
He understands, of course. He always does.
"You gave me a reason to be more than empty violence," he says, and the words go deeper than anything physical ever could.
His thumb moves in slow circles over my breastbone, grounding me, making me real.
His mouth finds my shoulder, then my jaw, then the hollow behind my ear.
He doesn’t kiss me so much as breathe me in, like he’s trying to memorize the way I smell, the way I taste after victory and blood and tears.
His teeth scrape along my clavicle, not enough to hurt but enough to remind me that I’m alive, that I survived. That I am, for this moment, safe.
The rhythm between us builds gradually, like a tide returning after a storm.
The ache in my body becomes a kind of music.
I let my head fall back, water spilling down my neck and over my chest, and I moan.
There’s nothing polite or pretty about the sound.
Just need, raw and animal and so very human.
He moves faster, but I don’t want it to end.
I cling to him, nails digging crescent moons into his shoulders, silently begging him to stay inside me, to keep me anchored, to keep me from drifting back to the place where Neumann was alive and I was helpless.
The pleasure crests and fractures and reforms, and when I come, it isn’t a fireworks-burst but a long, shuddering quake that leaves me sobbing.
He follows a moment later, my name on his lips. I feel the heat of him inside me, the way his body tenses then collapses, and I realize we’re not separate at all. We’re one thing now, tangled and bruised and somehow more alive than before.
The water is lukewarm now, tinged pink with diluted blood. I watch the ripples settle, the aftermath of our violence, and I know I’ll never be the same. I don’t want to be.
We stay joined in the cooling water, neither willing to separate.
Finally, we rise from the water as the last traces of pink disappear down the drain. Luca wraps me in a towel like I'm precious, and I catch my reflection again.
Same face but different eyes. Harder. Clearer. Honest.
He carries me to his bed, laying me down with the kind of care usually reserved for holy things.
"Rest," Luca says, sliding into bed beside me. "You need to heal."
But his hand is already between my legs, fingers finding me soaking, still ready despite everything.
I push Luca’s hand away. “My father…” I manage to croak.
"By the time he calls," he murmurs against my neck, "your voice will be stronger. You'll tell him you're safe. And all he'll see is his tired daughter. He won't see the killer you've become. Won't taste the blood you've spilled."
I moan softly as his fingers slide between my legs again, working me, the sound ragged from my damaged throat.
"But I'll know," he continues. "I'll know that under your cardigan, you're covered in my marks. That your pussy is sore from my cock. That you've got a killer's blood under your fingernails and you loved every second of it."