I shouldn’t collapse down beside her, high on the aftermath of the sex. But what the fuck. She can’t seem to move, either, so I decide to chalk it up as a victory. I let my eyes drift shut, and I nearly convince myself that she isn’t here.
“Who hurt you? Was it a man or a woman?” There’s no hint of fear or restraint in her voice. Just plain, shameless curiosity. “Who made you carve those marks into your skin?” she adds when I don’t respond.
My eyes open, and I can’t stop my hand from sliding down my left thigh, sensing the tiny nicks and scars left there. Irritation gives way to suspicion. “How do you know I made them myself?”
She sighs and the mattress shifts beneath her. Suddenly, her forearm juts across my vision, but she makes no attempt to attack me with it. For a moment, my eyes trace the pale skin until I notice the near-invisible flaws that catch the glow from the alarm clock: ten thin, delicate scars that form a neat row right before the juncture of her elbow.
“The first days,” she says. Exhaustion thickens her accent, and I try to remember where she said she was from.Brazil.“The worst days. I needed to remind myself that I was still real...”
It’s a morbid topic for pillow talk. I close my eyes again and ignore her, unwilling to take part in her post-sex game of tit for tat. But the joke’s on me. I close my eyes and I see his face. I hear his voice trickle into my ear while my face is pressed into the pillow.“God forgive me...”
I bolt upright and rise to my feet. She’s watching me, her eyes tracing my own row of scars, openly curious about the story behind each jagged line.Fuck her.
“I needed to remind myself that I was still real,”she said. I needed to remind myself that I was still human. That I could bleed. That I still had control over some part of my skin. An injured beastcaught within a trap will chew its own limb off to escape, after all.
I grit my teeth and try to smother the emotions by shoving my legs into my jeans and dragging them up. It doesn’t help. Thanks to Stacatto’s nosy bitch, I will need to find some asshole to punch to drive the fucking buzzing from my skull. I let the anger push me to the door, and I slam it shut behind me.
But, somewhere between the front door and the couch, the buzzing dies down, and I slump onto the cushions instead.
I don’t sleep.
I breathe. I feel. I count every surging beat of my heart, and I tally up all the ways I’m still—biologically, at least—somewhat human.
Daniela
Lucifer is breaking me.
In three days, he’s cast five years’ worth of Vinny’s hard work down the drain. Lynn wouldn’t ask questions. Lynn wouldn’t defy. Lynn wouldn’t crave the fiery hell only the devil could deliver...
I would give anything in the world to be that cold shell of a woman again, if only for a second—it would certainly make it easier to drive a blade through my chest.
Lucifer has his own demons, it seems. Secrets he just won’t spill. Vinny loved to spin the tale of the poor immigrant boy who—with“fucking hard work and determination”—grew up to be one of the most feared crime lords at the ripe age of twenty-nine. He saw himself as an inspiration, I think. He saw himself as a warning sign. The little, meek, poor boy most men picked on could one day grab a gun of his own. His heart, hardened by years of neglect and bitter jealousy, could easily pull the trigger.
Monsters are never born—not the evilest and most demented, at least. They are made, forged within the fires of rage and pain.
Vinny and Lucifer have been cut from the same cloth, but they aren’t entirely similar—a bit like steel and silver. Both nearly identical at first glance but made from different materials at their core. One is meant mainly to adorn and be adorned. The other is for cutting. Carving. Slicing. Killing.
Which one was which?
Silver,I thought, picturing Vinny. Lucifer’s ice-blue eyes were puresteel.
He doesn’t like me. He doesn’t like that he has to tolerate me. It is so strange to be around someone so open in their hatred—someone who calls it what it is and doesn’t try to describe it as something else. In Lynn’s world, violence was always garnished by love.I love you, Daniela. I’ve done it all for you. I would bleed the world for you.
How ironic is it that Lucifer can’t even seem to hit me? Oh, he’s wanted to. Some moments, he’s even come close to it. I learned to steel myself around men when their shoulders tense or their eyes get mean. Vinny rarely showed restraint, and the warning signs were almost always followed by a blow.
Lucifer displays his anger in nearly the same way. Sometimes I’d swear he is about to lash out. But he still has yet to hit me.
Even when I’ve prodded him to.
You never ask a man—a beast—about his scars. Even Vinny, for all of his bravado and “success,” got touchy if someone remarked on his limp or stared too long at his unsteady gait.Touchy, as in he’d break their jaw—or, even worse, he’d give them a scar of their own to ogle.
Lucifer has thirty-three marks on his hips, each one carefully cut into the skin. Not too deep. Not too light. Just enough to bleed, but not enough to draw attention. It’s a careful method I taught myself. Poor Vinny learned within a week of moving me in that it was better if he stripped my room of razors and scissors. One cut per day—just one—like a morbid trail of breadcrumbs left behind for a woman in danger of going insane.
Daniela was still there somewhere, screaming through pale skin. She wasn’t dead yet.
Vinny chalked the mutilation up to grief at first, but it wasn’t long before he realized that every cut on Lynn’s pure flesh was an insult to him. They were my way of saying that I wasn’t his, not really. Not back then.
I bite the memory back and drag myself upright, pulling on the gray boxers with my knife still inside the pocket. Gray light streams in through the windows, fighting back the shadows that still linger stubbornly in the corners. Shadows linger over me as well—dark marks over my hips and thighs and most likely my throat, left by groping fingers and brutal strength.
