This looked like the work of more than one man or the work of a man who’d gone manic with rage, the final threads of his sanity cut irreversibly. After spending the past few nights with Bea and running out after his accomplice in minimum clothing, the fucker might have deduced I was sleeping with his obsession. If he was so enamoured with Bea, so indentured to the idea of her as his “holy” wife, my corruption of her body and soul would be enough to shatter any remaining semblance of his lucidity.
Amelia lay cold and dead beside me, pale eyes unseeing. It seemed she hadn’t survived the same wounds as Cleo though they were more meticulously done, the knife wounds clean and deep, perfunctory where Cleo’s were impassioned. Some old religious impulse urged me to close them, to place two of the coins I kept in my pocket to her lids and bless her way through death.
I didn’t.
Cleo was still living, though barely, and I knew enough about death to know she had a slim chance of holding out.
When I rolled Cleo just slightly to wrap a scrap of fabric around her left arm, I noticed the crumbled, blood-soaked note pressed between her body and the earth like some kind of fucked up dried flower.
This one wasn’t typed, the words penned in cramped, almost illegible script. Most importantly, it wasn’t a Bible verse.
Submit to my love, Beatrice, as it will heal your multitude of sins. Submit to be my wife, and I shall make you holy once more, for you have sinned and are corrupted by the Devil.
The devil, of course, was me.
When I found this man, and I would, I would stab him eleven times, cut him into twelve pieces, feed those to the wolves, but keep his goddamn head for myself and mount it on my fucking wall with a tent spike.
He deserved to suffer in all the ways he’d made these women suffer.
Made Bea suffer.
Because I knew, staring at the blood-softened note on the ground as I tended to Cleo, that Bea would not recover from the responsibility she would mine from this.
This was the work of a seriously fucked-up psychopath.
The difference between us was that I was a psychopath tethered to the right path by good people who had somehow found a way to forge connections with me against all odds. This killer had got lost in the forest of his own fucked-up mind, and there was no getting out for him now. No one could reach him there.
A rush of winter wind slammed into me, stirring Amelia’s hair beside me and dislodging another note, this one typed.
“An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, but she who brings shame is like rottenness in his bones.” Proverbs 12:4.
Amelia’s death had been premeditated, Cleo’s had not.
One was an act of his fucked-up faith, the other an act of passion.
He was slipping.
And when he fell, I would catch him in my deathly claws.
I worked calmly, efficiently, cutting down on the bleeding in Cleo’s extremities, then pressing against the worst of the lacerations in her torso with hard pressure that made blood bubble up beneath my fingers.
The pain spasmed in Cleo’s face, her lids trembling and blue.
A second later, they fluttered open but unseeing, and a choked sob fell from her mouth.
“Cleo,” I said, leaning down so she could see my face. “Cleo, it’s Priest. We’re gonna get you some help.”
But those unseeing eyes, as light as the frost on the ground, didn’t register me. Instead, her lips moved, her breath through them mumbled with speech. I ducked closer, almost pressing my ear to her mouth in a mad bid to hear what she spoke.
“I just…” she breathed wet and hoarse. “I just wanted to be closer to God…”
“Cleo,” I demanded sharply, hoping to rouse her from her pain-induced stupor. “Cleo, can you tell me who did this to you?”
I watched with cold, deep fury as blood trickled from her mouth and her lashes fluttered over blown-open pupils. She struggled just slightly, and even that seemed to take monumental effort.
And then she stilled.
So fucking still, her pulse even slower, so weak I had to dig for it in her bruised neck with the pad of my thumb and I found the faint thread of it still gently pulsing.
I didn’t know the plump, sweet-faced daughter of my brother, Axe-Man, beyond the fact he’d adopted her years ago. Over the years, I’d noted she chewed her fingernails when she was nervous, that she referred to Axe-Man as Dad every time she spoke to him, like she was relieved and grateful to be able to do so, that she never swore and often carried around self-help books even at club parties. I knew all of this, but I’d never cared.
I only worked tirelessly to save her now because of Bea, because they were best friends, and this death would break my sweet girl right down the fucking middle.