Page 19 of Love Her Ruin
"Let's find out what you remember, Vincent.” I smile as I lean over him, a dark one filled with too many sharpened teeth. “Let's find out together."
I reach into his head.
My hand passes through his skin, through his skull like all of it is made of water, and I close my fingers around the thing that powers him. When I squeeze it, memories spill out of him like ink.
I see myself.
Five years younger, blonde hair, forty pounds lighter, laughing at something a friend said in a bar in Kansas City, the laugh of a woman who still believed the world was basically fair. I see Vincent in tux at the next table, watching. A group of men surround him, obviously drunk.
I see his friend, David Farley, the man who testified against me in court and called me “confused,” cross over to me and slip something into my drink when my head is turned. I see my fall from grace when I slam that drink back.
I see the world tilt.
I see the alley. The dark.
And what follows…
I wrench my hand out of his head and curl my fingers into a fist.
And the thing that makes my cold fire burn white, the thing that almost breaks me even now, is thathe remembers. Every detail. Every sound I made. Every word he said.
He has kept it all. He has never forgotten a single second of what he did to me. Because he liked to revisit it?
"I see you." My voice sounds like Daddy’s, like I’m gargling hellfire and blood. I lean in close again, and my breath on his ear is winter. "Now let me show you what else I see."
I reach back into his head. This time I don't take. I give.
I open my mind to him.
I give him me, rising from the ashes in Kansas City, my court, my pact, my shadows, and the basement in my demonic house. I give him every hour we spent there skinning Red Hands alive and piecing myself back together out of the shards.
I give him all of me. The full weight of what he made me. The thing that rose from the wreckage of the woman he destroyed.
His body convulses in the pew's grip, his back arching, his mouth opening in a scream that comes out silent.
I step back, and I take his brain with me.
I pull it out of his skull with a wet, tearing sound. Then I hold it up so he can see it. It's smaller than I expected. Grey and pink and threaded with dark veins that pulse weakly in my palm.
I let it fall.
It hits the stone floor and comes apart like wet sand, collapsing into a grey smear that spreads across the frost and dissolves into nothing.
He stares at where it landed, his breaths ragged.
“Wake up. Please wake up,” he whispers.
The pew releases him. He spills forward onto his knees in the aisle, retching, his palms slapping the stone, his body convulsing with the effort of expelling what I've put inside him.
I watch him dry heave. I watch him choke. I watch the shell of Vincent crack across the middle and begin to peel away from whatever is underneath.
He’s finally encountered a consequence he cannot escape, deny, reframe, or bury, and he’s acting like a little bitch.
Why am I not surprised?
I advance on him. “I want your heart next…or maybe your sad little cock.”
With a wounded animal noise, he backs away from me in a crab-walk, his hands and feet slipping on the frozen stone, his eyes never leaving my face. He makes it three feet before the floor beneath him softens, the stone turning into melted marshmallow.
