Chapter 3. Candle
The church was quiet, left empty by the living, its walls still imbued with the spirits of the dead—amongst which was now the recently deceased Ginevra Potter, who had been buried that very morning in the church's cemetery.
The musty scent of incense invaded Pansy's nostrils as she walked in, a gold lighter in hand. Bellatrix would have told her to burn it down, to leave no stone unturned. She would have begged Pansy to be rational, to act with cold reason, and not the rage ripping her heart. It was true that killing her mark's wife had been a risky call to make—she could barely remember planning it.
She had the dagger. She wanted the man—his jet-black hair, the spark in his light green eyes, the uncanny lightning scar on his forehead, the finesse with which he held himself… She couldn't find it in her to kill him. Not yet, anyway.
She had remembered the wife, the bright smile and gorgeous curls, the Friday martinis, the crisp and well-ironed shirts. Jealousy had sneaked up on her, coiling itself tightly around her lungs, uninvited and invasive, begging her to end the woman right there and then.
She had listened.
One could perhaps say it was
sadistic, to track that woman home;
evil, to watch her prepare dinner for her husband;
cruel, to wait until she unwound with a Cosmopolitan;
rude, to walk in unannounced and slash her throat before she could make a sound.
Yet, Pansy could not come to regret her decision. Regret was not a word she had added to her dictionary—it rhymed with past, with resent, with all manners of things she deemed distasteful, quietly demeaning and arguably unfashionable.
She bowed before the altar and dropped a shilling in the donation box. Today, she was lighting a candle in the memory of the woman she had murdered.
The flame danced before her eyes, as if mocking her for thinking she could get away with it. She licked her fingertips and squished it.
She silently mouthed to the sky. "No hard feelings, I hope."