“Open it.”
The worst sentence I’ve ever heard. The amount of pain in his voice was staggering. He wasn’t faking this; I was sure of it. But I didn’t know what to expect when I opened the box. It was more photos. But these were not happy photos, not like the one in the jewelry box. These were all Polaroids, so dark that for a moment I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Then I did.
My stomach heaved. The top Polaroid was the same little boy. This time he was wearing only underwear. His body—
Oh, God. Oh dear God.
The boy was naked. His body was covered in bruises.
“Look at them,” he ordered. I froze, my hands clenching the cardboard box so tightly my fingernails dug back into my cuticles.
“Please—”
“Look.”
I couldn’t say no to him. I picked up the photographs with trembling hands and went through them. The second photograph made me lean forward and retch dry air.
He was bound with rope, his underwear dirty. His back was discolored: yellow and purple streaks and the edged impression of a belt, over and over again marked into his skin. Tears burned my eyes.
“Look,” he said again, his voice duller. I looked. It was too much. I couldn’t look away, and the only thing that saved me was the blurring of my tears. The photographs showed the life of a tortured child, instant by agonizing instant. The record of a body so damaged by bruises that they had worked their way to the inside.
“Who could do such a thing?” I whispered.
“This is what I look at before I go out to kill them,” he said. “This is all I see when I tie them down, when I slice them open. I see all this darkness. It overwhelms me. It creeps into my vision. There’s only one way I can get rid of it: I cut it out.”
He left me there, in the room, crying over the photos of a boy who had lost his innocence a long time ago. He washed his hands and brushed his teeth and crawled into bed.
My sobs subsided. My gasps for air turned to shuddering breaths, and then to a slow inhale, exhale. I put the boxes away and turned off the light.
Then I crawled in next to him and held him tightly. His arm curled around me. Without speaking, he folded me against his chest and we lay there, bodies tangled, cradling each other until we fell asleep.
It was then that I realized I was the one torturing him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Kat
I woke before him in the morning. His arm was curled over my shoulder, and his lips grazed my forehead. When I shifted, he murmured, his lips moving against my skin like butterfly wings.
When I was a kid, I caught a butterfly in a glass jar. I remember taking it out and holding it in my hands. My mother scolded me.
“Its wings are delicate,” she said. “Just brushing them with your fingertips will destroy them. It’ll never be able to fly again.”
I felt the same way now. Without knowing, I had touched something delicate, something horribly damaged. I didn’t know what to do to keep from damaging him any more.
I did not want him to leave, but I did not know if I could force him to stay.
“Kitten,” he murmured.
“I’m here,” I said softly. The morning light had turned the room gray, but when he opened his eyes I saw the glint of blue-green that always swirled there below the surface.
“You didn’t leave.”
“Your arm was kind of in the way.”
He smiled and rolled over. I felt cold without the touch of his skin on me as he sat up on the edge of the bed.
Had we really slept together like this? Like lovers, entwined like two strands of frayed rope amid the silken sheets?
Was I falling for this monster? Was he a monster?
My eyes refocused on his back and I saw that he was looking at me. I reached out and touched his skin gently. Imagining the belt. Imagining the bruises.
Don’t touch the butterfly’s wings.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
“What?”
“Today. Do you want the same thing?”
I wanted to tell him the truth: that all I wanted… was him. I wanted him to stay with me, to hold me, to pin me down and torture me with kisses like he had the first time. God, I wanted all this and so much more. But I couldn’t let him know how much of a hold he really had over me.
Not for the first time, I wondered if this was all a trick. Then I remembered the photos of the boy, and I swallowed my doubt. No, he was real. This was all real. The note of desire that crept into his speech when he talked to me, that was real too.
“What do you want?” he repeated, wearily. As though preparing himself for the Sisyphean task ahead: to try not to kill anyone today.
“I don’t know.” I didn’t say the things I wanted to say. Come to bed. Kiss me.
Make me yours.
“How about a trade?”