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Then, a hand at my throat, pinning me. Something silver flashes in the corner of my eye, and I startle.
He’s holding a knife.
“One more thing,” he says as I track the blade’s movement. Now that he’s trained me to hold one, to throw one, I can spot the expert skill in his elegant fingers. The black handle, the silver tang, the honed edge, it’s all a part of him.
He uses the hand that holds the knife to stroke the tendrils of my hair back from my face. “I have waited for this moment since the morning you left me.”
The morning I shot him.
He waves the blade in front of my face. I’m pinned by his hand at my throat, limp from the gauntlet of agony and ecstasy he put me through. But I’m still strong enough to fight.
I don’t fight. I don’t move.
I want to know what happens next.
He sets the knife at my heart. “You marked me. And now I’ll mark you.”
I hold his gaze. The thin line of frost around the rising darkness. If this is the end, I am not afraid. “Do it.”
The first cut is perfect. The sides of my flesh peel away from the sharp edge. Then the blood wells up, darker than I imagined. And it hurts. It hurts like he’s cut too deep. Like he’s carving his mark on my heart and not just the layer of flesh above.
A second slice, angling towards the first. He’s carved a V over my left breast. V for Victor. Proof of his victory over me.
His eyes are fully black now. He doesn’t stop but gives me another three strokes to form a second letter. My breath stutters in and out of me, my nerves screaming. But I don’t tell him to stop.
I crane my neck to see, but the blood streams in every direction, blotting out what he’s carved.
This is the end, yes, but it’s also the beginning.
“Lula.” He captures my lips, pressing down against me with an insistent hunger. He tips my hips back and slides into my ass again. This time, I can watch him invade me, inch by punishing inch. When he’s fully rooted, he presses on my sex, scrubbing the sodden folds until my orgasm blooms and I soften and accept another quarter inch of his cock. My ass is full of him.
My brain is full of warring sensations. I push against his hard, bare chest with arms weakened by the pain over my heart. The smooth marble of his muscles is pink, stained by my blood. I plant bloody handprints all over him—his shoulders, his pecs, his face—until our lips touch, and I taste metal and salt and us.
And then he’s coming, deep in my ass. Another part of me has ceded to his rule. But I don’t care because he cleans me up so carefully and rolls us to a fresh, clean section of the king bed so I can fall asleep in his arms.
I wake to him bandaging me. I still haven’t seen what he carved into me, but I can feel it throbbing through my chest like it went all the way to my back. The soreness extends into my left arm.
He pauses, his hand hovering over the white bandage. A shark’s smile hovers at the corner of his mouth. He’s happy with his work.
He feeds me some pain pills and holds a glass of water to my lips. The pain recedes behind a gauzy curtain.
“Sleep,” he orders. “It’s still late.”
It must be night. I savor this sliver of the outside world he’s gifted me. “Late?”
“Yes.” Another kiss. In the darkness, he moves beside me, warm and familiar. A partner, a trusted lover, coaxing me back to sleep. “I’ll wake you in the morning.”
Mornings with Victor, barefoot and shirtless in the kitchen. Eggs. Pancakes. I fall back asleep, smiling.
Victor
I’ve never slept as well as I do with Lula. Even as a boy, I rested in fits and starts, listening to the cacophony of the crime-ridden neighborhood where we could afford to live. Angry voices, slamming doors, back-firing cars and shots fired, I never got used to it. I learned to sleep lightly, to startle awake, warn my mother, and protect her.
But now I rest deeply and fully, my arms full of my captive. My vicious angel.
She makes me feel things, and I’m not used to feeling things. But the small, stunted part of me recognizes that she is the only one who can awaken these emotions. I need her close. She is my soul.
After two REM cycles, I rise reluctantly. I leave Lula sleeping on her back, the bandage over my initials bright in the darkness, and head to the locked drawer in the kitchen that holds the most important of my burner phones.
