Did you?
Did you really?
Or did you see what you needed to see?
The compass. I look down at it. Black ink. Needle pointing north. Pointing at Sophia, at the only clean thing, the only —
No. That’s not clean anymore. Valeria’s all over it. Herfilth. Her poison. It seeped into the ink, and now she’s in me and I can’t get her out. I’ll never get her out. Just like them. The men. The ones she gave me to.
Blood starts oozing out of the tattoo, along every line. “What the…” I wipe at it, but it only leaks out faster, draining down my wrist, syrup-thick.
“What?” My pulse thunders. “Stop. Make it stop!”Wipe, wipe, wipe.
It’s not your blood, Nazareth.
I still. It’s her voice, and I’m trying to figure out where it’s coming from.
It’s their blood. Every person I had you kill.
I look up, and she's standing in the corner of the cell.
My eyes narrow. “Mary?”
The white dress she’s wearing hangs wrong on her, soaked through, dark at the collar. Her hair is plastered to the side of her face in thick, wet ropes, and where her throat should be there's a gap, wide and ragged, the edges of it black with dried blood and the inside of it still wet, still glistening, and every time she breathes—if that's breathing—it makes a sound. A wet, sucking sound. Air moving through a hole that shouldn't be there.
"Mary." My voice cracks on it.
She tilts her head.
The movement is wrong. Too slow at first and then too fast, a snap, like something testing the limits of a body it doesn't quite fit. Her eyes find mine, and they're Mary's eyes—except they're not warm. They're flat. Patient. Amused.
"Mary, I?—"
“Look what you did to me, brother.”
Her mouth doesn't move quite right when she says it. Too wide. Holding the smile a half-second too long, the way a mask holds an expression after the face underneath has stopped meaning it.
"I didn't—" My back is against the wall. I can't get farther away, and I'm still trying. "I didn't, I would never, Mary, I?—"
She takes a step toward me. Bare feet. Wet, leaving dark prints on the stone, and the prints don't look like water.
“Wouldn't you?”
Another step. The wound in her throat gapes wider as she tilts her head again, and inside it, deep inside it, something moves—not blood, something underneath the blood, dark and shifting?—
“You know that hate you felt when I confessed?”
Tears stream down my cheeks. “I don’t hate you.”
“But you did, remember? Just for a second, you hated me enough to want to kill me.”
“No.” My head shakes so hard my teeth rattle. “That’s not true.”
“You hated me, big brother. And that poker was right there.”
"Stop." I'm shaking. The compass is still bleeding, running down my wrist, pooling on the stone between us, and Mary's reflection in it—when did the blood become reflective?
When did it start showing things?
