Hades

I figured myself pretty lucky that no one stopped me as I signed out of the Prince of Wales just four hours after surgery on my shoulder. The press mobbed me in the parking lot, their voices echoing off the bulbous glass awnings that crested over the patient intake center. They were there again on the steps of headquarters, milling around a coffee vendor, raining cigarettes around him as I stepped from the cab. No one touched me. I was poison. The owls scattered when I entered the bull pen, unable to meet my eyes. Two street cops had been waiting for me there, helplessly pacing around my desk, chewing on my pens. The two who had been assigned to watch Martina’s apartment, to protect her after I’d left. They rushed forward, unable to look at my face. I already knew what they had to say. They had received a call in from a public phone that another patrolman was taking a beating from a gang of youths in an alleyway a few streets over. They had gone, instantly. It was an old trick. Beck had known they would protect one of their own over a stranger. He knew they were loyal dogs. I walked past these men without allowing them their explanation.

She lifted her eyes and locked them to mine with an expression I had seen many times—a cold exterior hiding weighty thoughts the way the black ocean surface will hide a shark. She had been sitting with her hands beneath the table, staring at an empty pale yellow notepad, the pen aligned beside it like a scalpel.

This is my life now, I thought. Each moment, each sensation, could be afforded directly to the hands of the woman sitting across from me. The seconds and minutes and hours that had ticked by since she had killed her brother to save my life were hers and hers alone. I knew, looking at her now, what he had been to her. Partner and savior, tormentor and protector. She looked smaller without him in the world. More frail, yet something new, something wavering in unknown sunlight, daring to grow. I knew, looking at her eyes, that some part of her had hated him. But she didn’t know how to live without him either. Eden owned me because she had chosen me to take his place and, rightfully, she was beginning to hate me for it and would hate me for some time. She owned the agony that I had still refused to address, the aching details that would come with the processing of Martina’s body, with the collecting and distributing of her things. Eden had given me this. Eden owned my every breath. I felt hatred swell, hot and tickling, through my chest and down my arms.

She owned me, and yet some part of her was now mine, the way I had unconsciously desired it from the moment we met. I was stained now with her life, with the understanding of what she was, the dark hollows of her being. Intimate. This is my life now. I think I had known somehow from the moment we met that she was a wild thing, that she was different from any woman I’ve ever known before. In the beginning it had drawn me in, lured me, a calling that made me curious, a danger that I wanted to test and feel. I hadn’t known then that I was dealing with a monster. Now I knew and there would be no way I could get away from her. To run would be to awaken that predatory instinct in her, to invite her to cut me down. I would have to remain her partner, her secret keeper, her watchful slave. I had promised her a secret once. Now she had it.