Chapter Seven: Blood in the Water
1121 Words
‐Ciaran POV
The corpse was missing a face.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
It lay slumped against a concrete pillar near the Thames, half-covered in bin liners, the neck bent at an angle that made my own ache in sympathy. Whoever did it carved off the skin like parchment — clean, practiced, personal.
Not random. This was art.
The body was still warm.
“Third one this month,” Reid muttered, lighting a cigarette like the stink of blood and piss wasn’t curling through the fog. “You’d think people’d stop dying just to keep us bored.”
He offered me one.
I declined.
If I needed a vice, I had better options.
"Where’s her face?” I asked instead.
“Gone. Peeled and pocketed, I assume.” He exhaled smoke and stared out at the river like it would give him answers. “Can’t ID her. No phone, no wallet, no eyes.”
“Lovely.”
I crouched beside the body. Female. Late twenties, maybe. Neck torn in a way that didn’t match the rest. Animalistic. Sloppy.
The killer had taken his time with the face. But the throat?
That was rage.
“Same symbols on the walls?” I asked.
Reid nodded. “Etched into the concrete. Behind the bins.”
I walked over.
There it was. Carved deep. Same as the last one — a broken circle, lines like teeth, blood smeared into the grooves. Not random. Ritualistic. Ancient.
Something stirred in my chest.
Recognition.
It hissed through my ribs like a cigarette burn.
Not again.
Not this soon.
“She yours?” Reid asked, tone light but loaded. He always asked that. And I always said—
“No.”
A lie.
She wasn’t one of mine, not directly. But the blood told me she was tied to something older. Something that always came back for me.
Fucking curse.
“Don’t suppose this is connected to your girl?” Reid added. “The artist. Amara.”
I turned slowly. “What?”
“You told me she painted you before she met you, yeah? Creepy s**t. Maybe she paints murders too.”
I didn’t respond.
He didn’t need to know how much I’d already considered that.
Or how much she haunted me.
I hadn’t slept since I left her studio. I’d tried to f**k someone else — some actress whose name I didn’t remember and moaned like a fake orgasm was a party trick — but halfway through, I saw Amara’s mouth. Heard her voice.
I came and felt nothing.
Just shame and the taste of ash in my mouth.
It hadn’t helped.
And now?
Another girl dead. Same marks. Same pattern. Same feeling in my gut like something was slithering its way up from the grave.
So I texted her.
Just an address.
Come see this.
I didn’t know if it was to prove something or punish her. Maybe both.
The fog was thick when she arrived.
I heard her heels before I saw her — that sharp click-click on wet stone, like punctuation in a conversation I didn’t want to finish.
When she stepped into the light, I felt it again.
That tug.
That cosmic, nuclear, f**k-you pull.
She wore a black coat over loose jeans and a shirt that looked like it had been slept in — or peeled off mid-breakdown. Her hair was tied back, messy. No makeup. Face pale.
She looked like hell.
And I’d never wanted to put my mouth on someone more.
“Morning, love,” I said, because sarcasm kept the wolves from the door. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I have,” she said softly. “Yours.”
That made me pause.
Not visibly. Not externally. But inside? My chest clenched like a fist.
“You dreamt again?” I asked.
She nodded.
Then she saw the body.
She froze.
Her breath went shallow.
And then her hands — those delicate, cursed hands — started to shake.
“Don’t,” I said quickly, stepping in front of her. “Don’t look if—”
“I have to.” Her voice was steady, even if her body wasn’t. “I need to know if it’s her.”
“Her?”
Amara swallowed. “The girl from the first dream. The one they killed to get to you.”
I stared at her.
She didn’t flinch.
That should’ve scared me.
It did.
But not in the way it should’ve.
“She’s not the same woman,” I said. “Different time. Different place.”
“But the eyes,” she whispered, stepping around me.
“What about them?”
“She had my eyes.”
The fog swallowed her words, but I heard them anyway. Felt them like a punch to the ribs.
I didn’t want to care.
But I did.
I wanted to drag her away from the scene, from the blood, from whatever ancient horror was pulling her into this with me.
Instead, I stood there and watched her kneel by the corpse like she belonged there. Like death was a memory instead of a fear.
She was too quiet for too long.
Then she said, “There’ll be another one.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
I believed her.
God help me.
Reid wandered over with a raised eyebrow. “Friend of yours?”
I ignored him.
Amara stood slowly, wiping her hands on her coat like she’d touched the body even though she hadn’t.
“I saw it in a dream,” she whispered. “He took the next one in daylight.”
“Where?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know yet.”
Yet.
Like it was inevitable.
Like we were just waiting for the next corpse to drop.
“You’re not going back to that flat,” I said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“And where the hell am I supposed to go, Vale?”
I stepped closer.
Too close.
“You think I’m letting you waltz back into that haunted little bedsit while a faceless f**k collects girls with matching souls?”
“You don’t get to control me.”
“No,” I agreed. “But I will keep you alive.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
“Stay with me,” I said.
It wasn’t a request.
Her throat bobbed.
“For how long?”
“For as long as it takes to stop this thing. Whatever the f**k it is.”
She looked away.
“Fine,” she muttered.
But we both knew what fine meant in this story.
It meant doomed.
It meant chained.
It meant — come closer.
- Writer
