August 2547

I don't really know how I got here. I remember dressing myself. Short gold dress with heels so high I feel like a ballerina. I used paints and brushes on my lips and eyes, and now I hide behind the face of a whore.

Everyone is interested. Short, tall, fat, thin, old, young, married, single. No one's eyes can discriminate when they are looking at me. I'm truly surprised I'm not more recognizable by now though, but I suppose a seedy sex club is the last place on earth the people would expect to see their leader's wife.

I find the perfect person half way through the night. She's strung out on some sort of drug, eyes glazed and shirt dipping half way down her body, exposing her breasts and half of her stomach. She is a sloppy drunk and probably doesn't even remember where she is by now.

It's easy enough to lead her out of the place and onto the warm street. The air is heavy. It feels like rain.

We walk for a while and I support her as she leans against me, stumbling and dragging. I have to carry her half the time because she seems to forget that her feet are for walking every few minutes.

It takes us exactly twenty two minutes to reach the house, and by the time we're there she has reached some sort of emotional high. She's laughing manically with tears streaming down her face, and every so often the laughter will stop and she will just sob against my shoulder, tugging at my clothes and running her lips over my throat. She's saturated the front of my dress with her saliva.

I push the front door open effortlessly. He's not home yet and I'm grateful for it. It gives me time to prepare. I drop the drunk girl onto my couch, tell her not to move. She nods, not really hearing me as she begins to shake and then retch across my shoes. My nose wrinkles and I kick the heels off, leaving them in the puddle of vomit.

I climb the stairs, barefoot and quivering. There's something exciting in the air and I can feel it tingling across my skin in waves. Our bedroom door is unlocked and he is gone, but I slip in quietly anyway. Over the last few months, this room has become his more than mine, and I feel almost invasive as I cross to the chest at the end of our bed and open it.

Whips and chains and handcuffs on top. Rope on bottom. Candles, fletches, clamps and blindfolds strewn throughout. I reach for the bottom, grabbing and coiling the rope expertly around my arm.

I pause a moment in the doorway before going back downstairs. The room is a mess. The bed is unmade and he has books strewn everywhere. Dirty clothes are piled in one corner and old, used dishes cover the bureau. I can smell him in the air here. Spice and sweat and the salt of tears.

Downstairs, the girl has managed to cover herself in vomit and urine. Her red hair is matted to her face and her pale skin, covered in freckles, is clammy. It's an easy enough task, sitting her up and promising that if she only sits still and lets me tie her up she can go to sleep. She's so damned drugged up she hardly knows what she's seeing. I wonder momentarily whether it's a drug of her choice or if she was slipped something before I decide it doesn't matter and wrap the ropes around her wrists and ankles.

I make the knots tight, and when I'm done I admire my handiwork.

She's fallen onto the floor, hands tied tightly and mercilessly behind her back. If she ever wakes up again she'll be sore. But there is little chance of that.

I find a nice stationary somewhere in the house and write out a note before gagging her and attaching the paper to her forehead.

I picked this up for you.

You've been looking stressed.

Love, Claire

I leave her in the middle of the living room rug, three knives of varied lengths and widths on the inn table and several long and thin pieces of sharpened wood beside them.

She doesn't even struggle.

Gabriel comes home around three am. I listen from the bedroom as the front door opens and closes. I don't know where he's been, but I assume he's been doing something political. It does, after all, take quite a great deal of time to run the world.

No sound comes after that, not for several long minutes.

And finally, I hear it. The muffled echo of a stifled scream and a sickening thunk as organs hit the floor.

I smile, pleased for the first time in months. And something inside of me cheers. He's taken it, this gift I brought for him. It's the first time he hasn't rejected one of my overtures since we got home, and I don't care if its because he wants to kill and not because he forgives me.

He has been so sad, so broken. And maybe this will fix him. Maybe what it takes is murder, some good old fashioned gutting and the smell of death. Maybe then, after he's finished, he'll come upstairs and lay down beside me, smelling of blood and of entrails. Maybe he'll kiss me and tell me everything is better and that he's very pleased with me. Maybe he'll forgive me and love me here on our bed and make me his again.

But when he is finished, that isn't how it happens at all.

He comes up to the room. There is blood on his arms and his clothes. He's covered in it. He looks at me. I don't know what he's thinking and I want nothing more than to ask. But before I have the chance he's making his way to the bathroom. The door closes and the shower turns on.

I close my eyes for a moment, imagining the feel of him beside me with the spray of the hot water steaming around us.

And then I go down stairs, move the corpse to the kitchen, scrub the couch cushions, and lay down to sleep.

A/N:Don't be sad! You're support meand the world to us, all of you. And when this series ends, we're not going to stop writing. Please leave your comments/prayers/thoughts in the review section. Thanks. :)

--Mel and Chuck