Unsure if she could go through with the quick decision she’d made, she grit her teeth as she shifted her weight between her feet. She loved this man, more than anyone she’d loved before, but he was so utterly broken, so incapable of repair, that she couldn’t see a way to mend the damage. Like a wounded animal, injured and in pain, Max had no hope of a bright and beautiful future, no chance to survive a normal life in a world that had done nothing but hurt him.
Alice knew that pain, and she couldn’t allow him to continue leaving bodies in his wake, couldn’t stand silent any longer as he stripped innocent futures away from people who had done nothing to him besides having had the bad luck of walking in his path.
Certainty became her strength to end him. Her love became the mortar holding together the wall she’d constructed around her heart in order to follow through with a decision that would end the dark cruelty of a man too shattered to exist in this world.
Raising the cleaver above her head, she cried her angry tears and waited silently for the basement door to open.
A flash of surprise and betrayal behind blue eyes, her arms coming down in a sweeping chop that landed the cleaver at the junction of his shoulder and neck. Her heart crumbled beneath her ribs, her soul tearing apart in one painful rip as his body sunk to the floor at her feet and she heard her sister’s body fall down the steps into the basement below.
He didn’t die from the first strike she’d made, his eyes opened wide as he watched her drop to the floor beside him.
With a gentle hand, she wiped the splatter of blood from his cheek, her body shaking with a keening sob as she bent down to kiss him one last time.
Whispering so that her voice was a soft caress against his mind, she begged his forgiveness for the choice she’d made. “I love you for eternity, my dear husband.” Her voice cracked and shattered, her eyes blurred from the tears that wouldn’t stop. “I love you.”
Kissing her fingers and pressing them to his lips, she gripped the handle of the cleaver with the other hand and pulled it from his body. “Until death, Max,” she promised.
One strike, and his gorgeous face was split apart.
Two strikes, and his skull was crushed on one side.
Three strikes, and his shoulder was separated where it met his neck.
Four strikes, and the hollow of his neck was gouged open.
Five strikes, and the blade of the cleaver was buried into his chest.
With five vicious blows, Alice silenced the monster inside her husband and freed the man trapped inside the body of pervasive darkness. Alice watched the blood running off her hands in rivulets of crimson red, and prayed that the good part of the man she’d known could escape to find the light.
*
The time following Max’ death was a blur. She remembered bits and pieces: the bloody trail left behind him, the difficulty she’d faced to drag his weight through the house. By the time her thoughts were clear enough to follow the sequence of events that occurred around her, Alice found herself kneeling at a shallow grave, the land open and cradling the body of her beloved husband.
Bending down to run her hand over the freshly turned soil, she felt a tear slip down her cheek. She said her goodbyes with whispers that were stolen from her lips by a peaceful wind that blew through the canopies of oak trees and carried the sweet scent of roses as it floated by.
She had no idea how long she’d stayed there, but the sun was high in the sky. Sweat slipped down her face to land in a muddy puddle on her white dress, a dress now splashed and stained by the blood of the man she’d loved.
Alice didn’t regret the decision she’d been forced to make, didn’t cry for the loss of the monster Max had been. Instead, she cried for the man he might have been if fate had been kinder to the child.
Balancing herself by grabbing the handle of a shovel, Alice stood up from the soil and walked past the unmarked graves of the people who’d failed Max, her hand slamming the iron gate closed when she left the small cemetery behind.
Unhurried, she wound her way along the trail through the garden and entered the house to look upon the filth that had been left behind.
He would have hated this mess, she thought. Would have hated the ugliness and scars the sweep of blood had left along the tiles.
Fighting the urge to clean up the mess, she grabbed her cell phone from the island counter and forced herself up eighteen steps into a bedroom that was pristine white. Her muddy, red footprints marked her trail across the carpet as she made her way into the bathroom.
She stared at herself in the mirror, the cell phone held in her hand as she lamented the choices she’d been forced to make.
Setting the phone on the toilet by the tub, Alice sat on the rim and reached over to turn on the water.
And at 12:30 p.m., on a Thursday afternoon, with the birds singing outside and a grave left open to the rain that would eventually fall, Alice lowered her body into a warm bath, her pale skin turning red in response to the heat of the water as she washed away what remained of the nightmare her life had become.
12:41 p.m.
The tap of a pen.
The tick of a clock.
Water dripping from a leaky faucet.