I need to eat. I know I need to eat. I just need to stop thinking about eating and get it over with. I need a distraction, but nothing pulls my brain away from its route of self-destruction.
The sushi rice isn’t too sticky. I washed it thoroughly for five straight minutes, inspecting every grain, before I cooked it. It’s perfect. It’sfine. It is safe.
Forcing down three more bites, I reach into my pocket with my free hand and turn over my crystal heart, begging it to make things easier.
Ease doesn’t come. Instead, different thoughts plague me.
Malcolm touched my crystal heart today.
My fingers snap out of my pocket and tremble.
After he touched her, I washed her. I washed her with my usual Lysol wipes that I use to clean everything. They are good enough foreverything.
She’s safe again. Shehasto be.
But my brain refuses to relent, reminding me that killingninety-nine point ninepercent of germs isn’tone hundred percent.
Dropping my chopsticks in my barely touched bowl, I sink in on myself.
“So…” I whisper, “…today’s a hard day, huh?”
My shoulders slump, because ofcourseit is. I agreed to kill someone last night, and I saw that someone today, and I had zero regrets or intrusive thoughts about my decision. It’s uncomfortable to think that my brain—which is normally fixated on rules and justice and all thingsgood and pure and right—doesn’t have a single corrosive thing to say about my decision to murder Malcolm Swallow.
Every part of me believes he deserves to die.
Justiceis a world without him.
It would be wrong and bad of menotto kill him.
I believe that.
I believe some people don’t have a single good thing in them. Some people cause suffering wherever they go. Some people see someonestrugglingand smile before crushing them further beneath the sole of their boot.
Malcolm Swallow is the kind of person who revels in causing pain. He is evil, and he iswrong.
So even though it’s a bit uncomfortable to know that my otherwise overactive, self-effacing mind is silent on this topic, at least I know I must be doing the right thing.
No matter how ugly this right thing is, one thing is sure.
Malcolm Swallow must die.
Chapter Two
?
Seduce me, darling.
Malcolm
Sighing, I sit at my long, black dining room table and stare at my dinner. The last few slices of my last olive pizza peer up at me, heralding a trip to Ivy’s soon so I might petition his home chef, Birch, for a restock. The man’s a saint, keeping my little brother’s least favorite food around that I might be fed on the nights when I’m too tired to cook.
Nights, notably, like this one, where the horrific truth of my reality is ever so obvious.
On the precipice of defeat, I close my eyes.
Pure white fills the darkness.
I whisper a gentle curse as Azalea Pastella bleeds against my eyelids. She was so…cutetoday. When I touched that little heart she carries with her everywhere, hopelessness consumed all the perfect, bleached inches of her, and my elation soared. Whenever her facade cracks, I get to see somethingreal. Something powerful. Something perfect. Her emotions—usually kept so dull and diminished—are like a bomb. And I long to get caught in their blast.
