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I’m still not afraid.
Willa pulls away slowly, then sets the knife on the shelf behind my head.
“Is that how you met her?” she asks, then sits down on the chair beside me.
“Why do you want to know about Seraphina?”
“I don’t,” she says. “I vant to know about you, my dear Freedrik. And to know about you, I must know about her.”
“But I don’t want to talk about her.”
“You will, or I will cut out your eyes,” she says so casually that it’s the part that stuns me, not the threat itself.
I sigh and look at the wall.
“I’ll tell you what you want to know,” I begin, “but I would like the same from you. Is that so much to ask? We had a bond, Willa, and I’ve never forgotten you and your kindness. I’d like to know about the girl who once cared for me. What happened to her? Which blade was it that finally killed her? And why has she been hunting me?”
I know she won’t tell me any of these things. She won’t because I doubt that she remembers any of it herself. I’m only trying to buy myself time.
Willa lowers her eyes; her folded hands move restlessly within her lap—it’s the first sign of human emotion I’ve seen in her since I woke up as her prisoner. Restlessness. It’s such an odd emotion. Then again, any emotion would seem strange coming from her because, in my heart, I know emotions are unnatural to her. It’s not that she rejects them—she doesn’t understand them. She isn’t human. She is, as she said herself moments ago, a monster wearing human flesh. Maybe she’s right, and I am too, but we are very different monsters, she and I. Very different monsters.
(But are you, really?)
The emotion is gone as quickly as I had seen it appear. Was it ever really there at all? Or was I just imagining it? Maybe it was a remnant of her old self before she died.
She smiles. Vacant. It raises the hairs on my arms.
Yes, Willa is definitely not human; there is nothing behind those eyes but madness disguised as innocence, frailty, and naivety. She is the epitome of darkness, a wolf walking among sheep, a demon wearing the skin of a young woman who was like everybody else once upon a time.
I realize in this very moment that there is no way Willa has only murdered criminals—there’s noway. The men she killed and the trail of bodies she left behind for Kenneth Ware to hunt her were a means to an end; they were revenge killings. But she isn’t like the rest of us in Victor’s Order—particularly me and Izabel—she hasn’t gone on this long, only taking out men who violated her and other malicious people. She has murdered innocent people, too, because she can’t help herself. She needs to kill, just like I need to torture. I know it. I feel it. Like Seraphina, Willa is a danger to society.
Like Seraphina…
But unlike Seraphina, Willa is calculated and methodical; she isn’t reckless or maniacal. And most of all, Willa is utterly devoid of emotion—Seraphina was inundated by it.
Seraphina was born insane.
Willa was made that way.
“How did you know about her, anyway?” I ask.
She hooks her fingers behind the elastic at the top of her one-piece romper and slides it down her body.
What is she doing?
She stands before me naked; a woman who is at least thirty-eight years old has the body of a twenty-year-old: soft and supple, unaffected yet by age; her breasts are perfect, her hips the smoothest hourglass. And she is so pale it looks as if the sun has never touched her. Even in her face, I see a young woman no older than twenty. It’s as if time stopped when she died all those years ago, and because she is unaffected by the emotions and stressors of daily life, there’s nothing left to age her but time itself.
Oh, if only we were all emotionless—we’d live for so long it would seem like forever. Perhaps we could live forever. Trade emotions for immortality.
Willa steps up next to me. She looks down into my eyes, searching them, but for what I can’t even judge a guess. What are you looking for, my dear sweet Willa?
I take in her scent; I find comfort in the warmth of her body so close to mine. But it’s all I do—it’s all I can do, bound to this chair by my wrists and legs and torso. But a part of me wants to take her, to break her beneath me, to fuck the emotions back into her and give me the reason I need to let her live.
But I forget—I’m the one in the chair this time.
I wonder how long it’s going to take her to kill me. I wonder why I feel anxious for her to do it.
Willa pulls away, taking her scent, heat, and nakedness with her. She isn’t trying to be seductive—I doubt she understands the concept. I don’t understand the purpose of her nakedness, but it’s not seduction.
