Prompt: "I just wanted to protect you."
“I just wanted to protect you,” she whispers, eyes glimmering with that sort of rotten regret.
You don’t know how to respond to it.
She has bodies. Cut up. Lathered down the stairwell’s gaping windows.
It’s awning dusk. The glow hollows out the mansion’s darkness.
And then there were none.
You stare at her. At her cheeks. Where once there were tears. When she’d sobbed at you, in the cell-cold rooms, pleaded so deeply the fortnight it became all too much.
Please, I don’t want to die on this island, Ri, you know I didn’t do it, didn’t kill Jeanette Hackman. This fucked-up game, I-I’m done. We don’t belong with these corrupt fucks, Judge Finley that damned proven innocents to prisons, Leo Hudson that money laundered grannies to their deaths. You shouldn’t be here, I shouldn’t be here. We need to go before—
Elaheh doesn’t look at you with fear. A hazy light glistens in her irises. You think it’s the dusk.
“This isn’t protection,” you whisper. “Why? They were just like—”
“No. They weren’t like us. We would’ve died.” Elaheh says. “They would’ve gotten us. Honest to god, Ri. This—” and she waves at the dead corpses, strewn about the stairwell, “—is just a preventative measure.”
Then again. Maybe it was always there.
“How else was I supposed to save you? They were hardly innocent.”
It’s true. You plucked them from their hells into here for a reason. Corrupt lawyer here, rapist there, fucked-up fearmonger, another and another. Loose lips sink ships; paid vacations net damnations. It was easy getting them to come.
Getting rid of them was even easier. You relished their deaths: chopping Michael Farrell’s fingers off, hacksawing Leo Hudson’s rows of liar teeth. Pasting together newspaper letter notes like a terrorist, left under their rooms, You’re next, do this or you’re dead, darling.
Your heathens scrabbled like pit bulls in a cage fight. Slinging blame, degrading into animals in liquid retrograde.
On your island, you are god.
You didn’t think Elaheh would do it. You didn’t think she was—
(You were about to spare her, too. You were convinced. Elaheh’s lips quivered with mortal fear, the night she pled her case in your bedroom. They framed me for Jeanette Hackman’s death. I shouldn’t be here. No murderer would seem so terrorised.)
(Then her lips met yours, and you tasted tears, desperation, salt and need and nectar-sweet truth.)
“Which one do you think was the killer?” Elaheh murmurs. She swishes her knife around: the dusklight arcs with it, glinting a spotlight upon the bodies.
“My money’s on the Judge. He’s got that crazy look in his eye.”
You have a crazy look in your eye, you want to tell her. You want to tell her it makes her that much prettier.
“Or maybe it’s Risha Auborne. Would be a nice plot twist. One of the girls killing wendigoes in business suits. How good would that be.“
You’ve cut my game short, you want to say. You want to annihilate her, rend her flesh from throat. Strip of it. Bit by bit. You want to kiss her.
The light in her eye is manic.
You think the dusk was always there.
(You fell for her for a reason, after all.)
“Or none of them,” you say. “Darling.”
“Oh, Ri…” Elaheh’s lip splits open. “Fuck, that’s funny. Fuck.” She laughs. Cracked out, hoarse— nectar-sweet truth. “I won’t say sorry.”
Her knife thunks on the floor, a wet noise.
“Actually,” you whisper. “I have a proposition.”
(Next year comes with vacations, paid in full, sealed and sent to 12 corrupt fucks. Upon an island that hosts an arena for pit bulls, two gods rule.)
