Page 36 of Love Her Ruin
“Eat it,” I say. “Boil it first for tenderness.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Maybe,” I say, smiling at Sera’s kitchen window where the plastic’s gone and the plywood’s gone and the night breathes through the curtains. “Or maybe freedom is catching.”
They start on consequences. Access revoked. Numbers dead. Assets frozen. I hang up on them mid-word, then slide the phone back into my pocket. I dinnae care about access or numbers, and my assets cannae be frozen because I’ve made doubly sure.
The house exhales, and cold shadows lick my neck. Approval, that.
I go find her.
Prayer’s on the floor in the living room with her murder face on, legs crossed, hoodie slouched, hair like midnight, a spread of sticky notes and half a bag of jelly beans sorted by color like she’s planning a war with candy.
She looks up when I step in, and those eyes… Och, they’ll unmake a lad if he’s not built of wire and worship.
“Hey, beautiful,” she says. “Who called?”
“The past rang,” I say. “I told it to get in the sea.”
She blinks. “Meaning?”
“Meaning they want me out of Wichita.” I let the boyish grin show, all teeth and church steps. “So I’m nae leaving.”
A twitch at the corner of her mouth. A flare at the throat.
“James.”
“Aye.”
“Your…job.”
“Was an excuse for stalking and killing I mistook for a calling.” I step nearer, kneel in the paper mess, careful of her jellybean piles. I take her hand like I’m swearing on scripture and a switchblade both. “You’re the calling. Daft I took this long to say it out loud. I’m staying. With you.”
The quiet goes deep. House-hush, a graveyard between bells.
She studies me, and I let her, wrists open, leash offered. She could shove me away with a word, and we both ken I’d fold myself into the shape of that word smiling.
“What will you do,” she asks, “with all that ruin inside you if you’re not renting it out to governments?”
I laugh. “Build a chapel.”
“Explain,” she says, but her eyes glitter like razors catching candlelight.
“I met ye on the dark web,” I say, and my voice goes warm remembering it, her posts like a hymn and a dare, how she smelled like trouble and absolution. “A place where folk whisper the truth because all the lights are out. I want to make a door there. For the women nobody listen to. For the wee ones who are growing in nightmares. They post. We answer. No cops, no committees, no forms. Just…happy solutions.”
Her smile isn’t pretty. It’s holy. “What kind of happy solutions?”
“Ye already know the happy solutions. The kind that make graves busy,” I say. “We’ll take prayers and turn them into outcomes. Quiet. Clean. No strays left behind. We charge per dead man.”
She leans in, the soft-sweet part of her nobody else gets bleeding through the bone-saw hardness.
“We’ll need proof,” she says. “We don’t kill on stories. We verify. We protect our own. No splatter for sport.”
“Maybe a wee bit of splatter for sport,” I say. “Maybe I should embroider that on a tea towel.”
She laughs, a short black sound, then nods like a queen bestowing knighthood with the flat of her blade. “Okay. What do you need?”
“Ye.” I take her hand and kiss the heel of her palm. “To say aye again even if this gets ugly. And Eddie to scowl the edges straight. Daddy to haunt wires the way he haunts walls.”
