his beauty, his beast

chapter 12

Chapter 12 – The Girl with the Stained Hands

Valentina Cruz

Blood has a smell.

It’s metallic, thick, and clings to your nose like smoke from a kitchen fire.

Even after I showered three times and scrubbed until my skin burned, I could still feel it under my fingernails.

It didn’t wash off.

And I wasn’t sure I wanted it to.

⸻

Rafael sat on the couch, his arm stitched up, shirtless, calm — like he hadn’t just survived a literal gunfight.

He looked at me like he was waiting for something.

Me to cry.

Me to collapse.

Me to fall back into the soft little cage I came from.

But I didn’t.

I walked into the room wearing one of his black shirts, oversized and loose, hair wet, face clean.

And I said the one thing I hadn’t said since it happened.

“I killed someone.”

He nodded. “You did.”

“No ‘it was self-defense’? No ‘you had no choice’?”

He tilted his head. “Would you believe it if I said those things?”

I sat across from him and tucked my knees up under my chin.

“I thought I’d be scared,” I said. “Or sick.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

There was silence.

Then I whispered, “Does that make me a bad person?”

“No,” he said. “It makes you honest.”

⸻

Rafael poured whiskey into two glasses and slid one across the table.

I stared at it.

“I thought you didn’t drink,” I said.

“I don’t.”

“So why—?”

“For moments like this,” he said. “You don’t forget your first kill. Might as well toast to it.”

I stared at him.

Then downed the shot in one gulp.

It burned.

So did everything else.

⸻

“You were supposed to hate this life,” he said quietly. “You were supposed to fight against it.”

I looked him dead in the eyes.

“Maybe I still will.”

That surprised him.

But not as much as what I said next.

“But right now? I want to know everything. I want to know who tried to kill us. I want to know how many more there are. And I want to know what I have to become so no one ever sees me as weak again.”

He stared at me like I was an earthquake happening right in front of him.

“Valentina…”

“I’m not the same girl you kidnapped, Rafael.”

“No,” he said. “You’re not.”

I didn’t smile.

He didn’t either.

But something passed between us in that moment — not love, not lust… something darker.

A recognition.

I was no longer just in his world.

I was beginning to belong to it.

⸻

That night, I lay in bed beside him, eyes wide open in the dark.

He was asleep.

I wasn’t.

I thought of the man I killed.

His eyes. His hand reaching out. The shock when I drove the blade into his gut.

I didn’t even know his name.

But he knew mine.

He had whispered it right before he died.

“Cruz…”

Like a warning.

Or a curse.