For a brief moment, itโs akin to a standoff, even if Max knows he holds no weight in it. Not when it comes to her and a blade, a woman beneath her knife's edge, awake and hollowed breathing. His gaze flickers between them, wary and so very clearly on edge, the brush of her fingers against her victim's cheek, as though Victorine is capable of a gentle hand. As though her caress could ever be anything other than horribly violent and proprietorial.
Max himself knows the force of her heel well, pressed right to the jugular, every so often testing the give of the sensitive organ of his flesh with varying degrees of pressure. Looser when he's good, when he gives her something to work with, only to press right back down when he makes it hard. Right now, he feels it choke him, the restriction of air from his lungs. Focus on what you can do right now.
That's the issue, he thinks, is that there's so very little he can do in this moment. Take another step, and the knife embeds in the girl's throat, tell her what she wants to hear, and she won't believe him anyway. No way out, even beyond this midnight rendezvous, his grave is well and truly dug. Deeper still, because even when she loosens her hold, her mistrusting nature will never allow him full freedom, and he won't ever give her complete and total complacency. It's not an option, not for Maxim, not even he realizes it sometimes; it would benefit him to lie down and play nice, do what she tells him, but he's never been a very good domesticated dog. He'll tug on the leash every chance he gets, as though dying to escape, growl and snap, just to still be at her feet and make her regret choosing him, too.
The palm of her hand reaches out to him, facing the ceiling. A simple demand, a request for confirmation of a task completed. The girl's blood is still beading, bright and obscene against her skin, and it drags his focus for half a second too long before he rips his gaze back to Victorine, jaw tight enough it aches. Focus, she'd said.
He takes a deep breath, steadying, willing his pulse to quiet. Focus, focus, focus. The kind of breath you take before stepping onto a stage, and he's performed on so many of his own making by now, this should be nothing. A lie, he's fluent in them, and when he speaks again, it's different, still strained, still threaded with something brittle, but controlled and intentional. His gaze flicks back up to her, and he says outright, "I didn't give it to him."
Max knows the second the words leave his mouth that he's digging the hole deeper. That thin, precise thread he's balancing on, stretched tight between what she already knows and what he's trying to make her believe. It's a familiar place, one he's lived on his entire life, spinning half-truths into something convincing enough to pass inspection, but this isn't a gossip column, or a boardroom, or some socialite he can charm into forgetting inconsistencies. "He wasn't alone, there were people around him the whole night." It comes easy now, the lie building itself in real time, clean and plausible, stitched together from a lifetime of watching rooms, reading dynamics, knowing exactly where pressure points sit. He digs into his pocket, removing the little bottle holding the contents that will likely make his fucking life harder.
She wouldn't tell him why that specific man - she rarely gave him the why, only the what. Part of him wondered if she had any vendetta against him at all or if she was simply proving she has the upper hand always, that she can pick out any rich man in a crowd and have him beneath her blade in a moment - she's already proved it with Maxim, what's one more to the mix? But Maxim couldn't do it, plain and simple, and he's not under the impression she expected any different. "I can't poison a man in a crowded room and let it trace back here." That's more truth than anything; he's certainly got people to get him out of it but he's also not in the business of keeping his pretty mouth shut. He speaks carefully, "If the cops bring me in and start digging, do you think they won't come find you, too?" Unspoken is the veiled threat, playing ball but only just, if I go down, you go down, too.
Max's fixation on the suffering womanโs neck wound was traitorous in its ability to plate an idea on a silver platter for Victorine to unveil for her own delight. Something she could tuck in the back pocket of her figurative toolbelt, a dog-eared chapter ร la taunting tactics catered to trifling humans. Most revolved around the same mortal peculiarity of dispensed blood holding no allure or erotica, despite being handled with the intimacy of clay and slip. Sheโd forgotten the sensation of such innocence, or else part of her might have envied the naรฏvetรฉ in his concern. Some endings were foretold.
Despite all indications which implied, on this evening in particular, Victorine was especially hungry, greedy, and irritableโ she had fed recently, in the earlier hours. Had she been anything less than adequately satiated, she might have considered draining the woman in front of him for sport right then and there, knocking out all birds with one boulder. Overkill. He didnโt deserve such theatrics, her playfulness had retired until further notice, but a version of the torturous venture survived intact.
He reveals that godforsaken intact bottle and it's as intolerable a sight as the news bearer. Victorine bites down on the inside of her cheek, the mild pain able to ground a predictable flair of livid intent. Did just enough to prevent her from lurching ahead and shoving the vial between his teeth until the glass macerated his tender insides. If she informed him it was a dud, more theoretical than conclusive, would the next course of action even matter? He had failed, knowingly, and had the audacity to face her with nothing to show for it. It would be worse to repeat history and entertain the insanity it demanded. She could re-assign and be patient. Wave him off, spin him around, and re-distribute him into the world for another shot. Just to watch him crash and burn, again. To act righteous and sensible, reaping all the benefits of that sprawling business disguised as a family. A bright star of a son, burning up with disappointment. It was irksome, how maddening the golden boy could be in his persistent quest to suffer, forcing Victorine to plan for an alphabetโs worth of contingencies. Every selective pursuit of his existenceโ just another way to rewrite the same problem. Only the faint hammering of his heartbeat, markedly less controlled, gives her hope he would do more than bend.
The entire explanation leaves an unwelcome taste in her mouth, greater nonsense and borderlining threats. She refuses to take the object back into her custody, leaving the tampered bait hooked. Instead, select fingers of the hand she held extended curled inwards as he spoke, revulsion laid on thick in each recoiling motion; both a functional tally and countdown. The palm of her hand, given to be eaten out of and taken away just as swiftly.
I didn't give it to him (1)โฆ He wasn't alone (2)โฆ I can't (3)โฆ
One man, three excuses. One failure, three strikes.
She flattens her tongue at the roof of her mouth, tracing the firm ridges of her palate to soothe the slight stirring in her gums, withholding the flex of fangs in favour of muscles and velocity. โHm,โ softly humming, her eyeline flit upwards, feigning a moment of deliberation. As if, for a moment, she could consider his stance as valid and reasonableโ one without cost, punishment, or violent repercussions. His ability to do worse would always be at odds with his ability to do better, coiled like an ouroboros that he poked at with inflammatory twigs instead of wrenching apart to break lacklustre patterns with a viciousness the world didnโt have to kill and re-animate to weaponise. He had the selfishness and arrogance of a sucker down pat, but miserable were his aims and motives. Plied with an objective or not, he played deception with the cocky spirit and immunity of someone not knowingly gambling with lives above and below his station. In a revised sequence of actions, bent digits raised in time with her next words until Victorine held up only three fingers, โThatโs. Too. Bad.โ Succinct and clipped, the soundtrack of her voice needled between the grooves of the actions which followed.
The largest con of using a boxcutter in the place of a kitchen knife or scalpel was the imbalanced nature of its design: partially slanted with a singular point, the length of the blade in was too angled to make perfect incisions with even pressure. Perfect for tape, less perfect for bodies. Where a Damascus Steel could slice, mince, or filet like butter, a flawed boxcutter required hacking and heaving to successfully sever. To Maxineโs credit, the woman made an utterly statuesque guinea pig. In the minutes afterwards, their guest of (dis)honour was unlikely to even take notice something was wrong until the numbness set in or the cold hit a bisected nerve and convinced her pupils to tick sideways. Even then, sheโd be more likely to see a flurry of red admirals, a cluster of pomegranate arils, or bejewelled rings of dripping rubies... Altogether kinder side effects of the bespoke substance cocktails flooding her system, laced with hallucinogenic properties; a merciful attempt to keep her cottoned from what literally transpired as much as possible. That isโ to not interrupt progress where progress was overdue.
Victorine leant over and lowered her blade to take three strikes at the womanโs unsuspecting hand in quick succession, marginally travelling each time, hitting the ligaments of proximal phalanges like bullseyes. She tore wounds through three layers of skin with ease, striving to annihilate as much surface area as she could in each rapid stab and tug. The dull sound of leather hitting metal on the other side of each flourishing movement halts her forceful motions like a guard rail. THUD. THUD. THUD. The smell of metallics, copper and iron, leaks in a dark cast from each jagged slash, mingling with the natural oils and salts of the womanโs perspiring skin. The splurting liquid from each broken seal is silent.
The affected areas of the pinky finger, ring finger, and middle finger bloom with red where each knuckle had been; three pulsing trickles that merge into a steady stream. Victorine's swinging descents had successfully hacked through enough cartilage to clip each adjoining fingerโs metacarpal base and ruin a root system of nerve endings: the soft flesh of the tendons nearly ripped in half, grievously perforated save for the last few stubborn fibres of salvageable sinews clinging to each appendage. The sloppy execution mattered little to Victorine compared to Maximโs reaction to it, letting the strangerโs blood vessels pour over the side of the loveseat with a trivial expression on her own face. Like a sample pot of paint had been dropped, spillage too pigmented to make the upholstery salvageable. It was too late. A show of power and ostentatious flair fit for the abode she intruded upon. Didnโt socialites pay millions for Pollock pieces?
For good measure, she pushes the suffocating thickness of an illusion into the vacancy of the room until dense walls of curtaining darkness flank the air from either side, light sources effectively extinguished beyond their pocket of tension, denying him the escapism of a safe place to look or retreat. It was to set fire to a neon sign, bathed in the glare of a crimson-tinted spotlight: PAY ATTENTION. Victorine uprights herself, colder than before, speaking in a register devoid of vitriol yet which continued to carry volumes of applied pressure in the stress of each word, โWhen you hesitate, when you do not follow through, when you act to save yourself, someone else gets hurt. Do you understand?โ
