Vengeful

Eli didn’t need coffee, just as he didn’t need to eat or sleep, but some habits were psychological. The steaming mug was a small piece of change in a static world. A concession, a prop, but one that allowed him to pretend, if only for a moment, that he was still human.

“Did you always know,” she’d asked Marcus once, undoing the buttons on a blood-stained shirt, “that you had what it took to end a life?”

“Not until the gun was in my hand,” he’d said. “I thought it would be hard, but in that moment, nothing was easier.”

He was right.

But there was, it turned out, a crucial difference between destroying things and destroying people.

People screamed.

Or at least they tried. Bethany certainly would have, if Marcella hadn’t already grabbed her by the throat, hadn’t eroded through her vocal cords before anything more than a short, futile gasp could escape.

And even then, the men in the other room might have heard, if they hadn’t been laughing so loudly.

It didn’t take long.

One second Bethany’s mouth was open in a perfect O of surprise and the next her plump skin had shriveled, her face twisting into a rictus grin that quickly pulled away to reveal the skull beneath, and then even that turned to ash, as all that was left of Bethany crumbled to the kitchen floor.

It was over so fast—there was hardly any time for Marcella to savor what she’d done, and no time to think about all the things she should be feeling, given the circumstances, or even to wonder at their peculiar absence.

It was just so easy.

As if everything had wanted to come apart.

There was probably some law about that.

Order giving way to chaos.

“You don’t know what it’s like, having other people decide who you are, what you’re going to be.”

Marcella resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Of course she knew. People looked at her and assumed a whole lot. That a pretty face meant an empty head, that a girl like her was only after an easy life, that she would be satisfied with luxury, instead of power—as if you couldn’t want both.

Her own mother had told her to aim high, that she should never sell herself cheap. (The correct saying, of course, was short. As in, don’t sell yourself short.) But Marcella hadn’t sold herself cheap or short. She’d chosen Marcus Riggins. And he was going to choose this.