It was a gruesome way to love someone, but it was the way I felt about Lionel Danner and I knew that would never change.
“Yeah, Lion,” I said, placing a hand on his strong-boned face. “I fucking love you, okay?”
I gasped as he slid me down his body, each hard plane gliding against my slight curves like a rough caress, and he took advantage of my parted lips by sealing them with his own.
He kissed me like he owned me, one hand going to the skin over my heart and pressed there, warm and heavy, and the other diving into my hair so he could hold me how he wanted. I felt his claim almost painfully as he tattooed himself into every inch of my skin, synchronized himself to every beat of my reborn heart.
“Fucking love you too,” he rasped against my damp lips before pushing me back against the counter. “Brutally, savagely, fucking endlessly.”
I felt my broken heart in my chest, the poisoned blood beating through each chamber until it pumped out through my veins suffused with light so my plasma felt like champagne. Giddiness swelled in my belly and I let it out with a diaphanous giggle that didn’t suit me at all.
He was a good man.
The kind to help old ladies across the street, save kittens from lofty tree branches and open car doors for his dates.
But he was a bad man too.
The kind that liked to mark my skin with ruddy bruises and stripe my ass like a fucking candy cane with the harsh lash of his belt.
He was good gone bad and it was all because of me.
The truth of it shouldn’t have razed through me like a forest fire until I was just cinders and ash in his hand, but it did.
He wasn’t all good and I wasn’t bad.
Not separately, and definitely not together.
Together we were a lot of things, and none of them made any sense, but all of them worked.
I focused on his lips on mine, the feel of his warmth around me, the way his hands cradled my face as if I was precious. And I realized that rotten seed in the center of my soul was gone, that implant from Farrah that had always told me I wasn’t worthy eradicated by his love.
Danner was the best man I knew, and he loved me.
Actually, loved me.
Tears pooled in the backs of my eyes and slid down my cheeks.
I held him close, kissing him with the entirety of my ferocious passion for him and carefully moved one hand across the counter to the cutting board. My fingers clenched around the cool handle, the weight of the knife so similar to the cleaver, but the situation in such contrast to the one with Cricket that for a brief moment, I hesitated.
I pulled away from him so he could see my eyes, filled with tears and the wreckage of a self-broken heart and I whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
Then I plunged the heavy blade into his soft flesh.
His breath froze in his throat, his lips parted over mine in stunned confusion.
I slipped off the counter and gently pushed him away so I could step back.
He swayed, his hand moving to the weapon protruding from the top left of his chest.
“Rosie,” he whispered and there was so much bewilderment in the word, my heart collapsed under the weight of it and I started to sob. “Why are you doing this?”
I wasn’t doing this. It was done.
But I said, “Never gave a fuck about you, Danner,” because I didn’t want him to get up and follow me if he could, if he was stupid enough to do so after I stuck him like a pig.
I watched as he tried to take a step forward and fell sideways, slamming to the ground on his opposite shoulder and rolling with an anguished groan to his back.
Hero barked at me, growling and yipping beside his master, unsure if I was the threat or under attack as well.
I don’t know what I expected except that I’d always thought of Lion as immortal, a deity of old, made of flesh and bone but animated by something stronger, surer of spirit than mere mortals ever possessed. I guess that’s why I was so stunned when red blood flowed out of the wound gouged in his muscle-plated chest and spilled in silky torrents down his front.
I blinked at the sight of Danner caught like a fly in the web of his own sticky blood. Then I blinked again at the sight of the thick handle of the butcher’s knife sticking out of his flesh.
The butcher’s knife I’d put there myself.
I wanted to go to him, prove to him that we weren’t the modern re-telling of Romeo and Juliet yet, that I wouldn’t let him die and that I wouldn’t be moved to kill myself if he did.