You are capable, Milano.
He was wrong; I was the worst kind of predator to exist when I needed to be.
The assassin had barely taken a step over the fence before I wrenched him against my body, his legs twisting and kicking awkwardly as I dragged him back onto the balcony. I thrust the tip of the knife against his throat. “Do you even know who she is?” I hissed into his ear, my spare hand tugging the black mask away from his face, only enough to reveal his neck and present his throat to my new wife.
Sicily said nothing as the man grunted out a strangled “no.” She still remained silent when his scream pierced through the cold air as the blade, still sticky with her blood, dug underneath his skin.
I tore a layer off, just a small slice of flesh, but it swelled with black blood instantly, dribbling onto his skin and clothes. “Look at her.” I forced his chin down onto the blade, copying his stare at my new wife.
Sicily was as pale as the remaining white on her gown. Her brows were furrowed, her palm clasped around her bleeding one, her lips parted slightly. She was fixated on the blade, on where it met the Camorrista’s throat, and I could conclude that she was disturbed, perhaps evenscared.
My wife had a disruptive attitude, but now she was vulnerable, and vulnerability needed protection. I had to prove to her that I could keep her safe despite my inability to have done so with the other women in my life, despite how I did not find our marriage ideal.
I held the blade like a pen, delicately and precisely, and chipped away at him again, shaving away at his throat. Each layer of skin got thicker, and the deeper I went, the louder his screams became.
The more he bled.
That was the part of murder and torture that made me hold my breath—the blood. If people did not bleed, I would never hesitate before taking lives, but they did. Alot.
“She is a part ofmyhousehold,” I gritted through my teeth, shearing a longer layer from his throat to his shoulder like peeling an apple. “She holdsmyname.” He shook in my grip, his body convulsing through the screams that bellowed from his chest. “She ismywife, and you will be punished for touching her.”
My mind was calm at that moment. The assassin’s grunts and quiet cries of pain were sounds I’d grown accustomed to in my lifetime; they were a lullaby, a soothing reminder of my childhood, but even that was taken when I heard the heel of Sicily’s pearly white shoes scraping along the bloodied stone as she took a step toward me. My head jerked up in time to see the tears beading on her lashes and the slight sway to her stance.
“Milan,” she said in a weak, strained tone. “Can we leave?”
I frowned. Why would we leave when the man who had harmed her was still breathing?
She slammed her eyes shut as she sniffled. “Please?”
Sicily required this to be over, and I did not much appreciate the blood on my clothing either.
I shoved the assassin to the floor and kneeled over his body, caging him beneath me. I ripped the mask from his face to reveal a younger male with dark hair like Brenno’s. He was flickering between conscious and unconscious, but he was awake enough to feel how I was going to end his life.
I twisted his face to the side to face my wife. “Apologize to her.”
Sicily whimpered, and it was a sound so small that it made me look at her too. I had not expected a sound like that from her. “Milan, don’t,” she cried. “Let’s just?—"
“I will killanyonewho touches you; that is my job.” I turned back to the assassin, pushing his skull into the stone until he groaned. “Apologize to her!”
“I—I’m—” he began, but before he could finish the apology he did not deserve to give, I struck the knife into the Camorrista’s chest, yanking it directly down the center of his body to his stomach, halving him into the pieces he deserved to be in.
My body numbed, muffling all sound, including my wife’s screams that I was vaguely aware of somewhere beside me, but it heightened everything that I needed to experience. The need to kill held me in a bubble of nothing but me and the body, me and the knife.
Me and the blood.
I withdrew the blade and slammed it into his throat this time, and then his torn stomach, and then his legs, his hands, his shoulders.
“You are capable, Milano,” I muttered. “You are capable, Milano. You are capable, Milano.”
When I withdrew it the fifth time, my eyes narrowed on the thick spread of deep crimson and chunks of flesh coating the knife. It was on my hands, soaking into my suit. It was warm and thick, the coppery scent heavy in the air.
The knife clattered to the floor, the sound making me aware that I had dropped it. I turned my hands over to find my palms, and I watched the blood dribble through the creases and scars on my fingers.
My brain told me to stop, that the sensation on my hands was sickening, but I did not want to stop.I could not stop the overwhelming voice inside that reminded me that I was defective, that bad things happened when I existed, so I did it again, and again. Nobody stopped me.
I was not defective.
7
