To know love, one must learn how to love.
Yet how can one spawned by darkness, a creature born of winter, ever expect to learn love when all she has been taught is hate, spite, and contempt? How can she accept love when all she has ever loved either betrayed or deserted her? How can she trust instincts honed on false hope and delusion, grasping for any sense of self-worth and belonging?
Pathetic, I know. Make myself sick with my own whining. Better to let the Beast out than be a silly, simpering female.
Maybe that's why the blood feels so luscious between my toes.
Once again I stand; trench dripping gore, blade black with blood, yet another fool who thought to take advantage of my vulnerabilities whimpering for mercy at my feet. Yet another who used his beauty and charm to will me to his beck and call, my senses blinded by his implied affections.
That is, until he spoke his true sentiments in drunken revelry when I had once again done his bidding.
"Red cow!" he spat. "You have served your purpose- now get out!"
He thought I'd be reduced to tears, slinking away like a beaten dog while he and his friends had a laugh at my expense.
He thought wrong.
His buddies reduced to so many broken mannequins, and he groveling in their pulp, I smiled cruelly even as a tear rolled down my cheek. Looking down upon my traitorous lover, my beautiful Judas, I took his chin and forced him to meet my gaze.
"Get up," I commanded softly.
He obeyed: his finery ruined, hair matted with blood and gore, face swollen and bruised, he was a vision of pathetic beauty. He winced as I kissed his broken lips gently.
"You have killed every hope, every joy, smothered every speck of Light in me," I breathed in his ear. "For that you'll pay with your life: a life of always watching your back, not knowing what's around the next corner, not knowing if the man serving you coffee is really one of my minions. I will play with you the way you played with me. And if your window opens one night-"
He shuddered as my tongue trailed down his neck. "-you won't know whether I'm there to fuck you or kill you."
A smirk of amusement crept across the sadistic little prick's face, angering me so I pushed him back into the filth.
"I leave you to it then," I snarled, "and with the knowledge that they could've been spared had you not included them in your little games."
With that, I turned and walked away, wiping my blade on a curtain- the only clean piece of descent cloth in the place- and sheathing it with a sigh. I heard him begin to snicker behind me, then giggle, finally breaking into hysterical laughter.
Sometimes madness is the best punishment.
