ROWAN
“You know, Blackbird, even though I suggested it, I honestly didn’t think I’d enjoy hunting together as much as I would competing against you,” I say as I clean off my butcher knife with a bleached cloth.
Sloane laughs but doesn’t turn around, her focus too taken with the colored sheets of dyed muslin that she attaches to the fishing line with glue. “I’ll take a guess. Is it because your favorite part is not actually the killing, but winding me up?”
“Pretty much.” I grin when she gives me a flash of a teasing glare over her shoulder, and then I drop my gaze to the tiny knicks in the sharpened blade in my hands. I slide my cloth in one more pass over the edge before setting the knife aside with my other tools. A bone saw. Meat slicers. And my favorite, a Damascus steel Ulu knife that Sloane gave to me from Etsy for my birthday. “But I did enjoy it. Very much. I like working with you.”
“I like working with you, too. I think we should catch the Forest Phantom together next year, even though I technically won, because I am the ultimate winner, just in case you forgot. And you probably deserve a runner-up prize anyway since you didn’t even vomit this time,” she says as she reaches up to point to the eyeballs hanging in fishing line over Dr. Stephan Rostis’s head. “Go you.”
“I’m never going to live that down, am I.”
“Probably not, no.”
While Sloane continues to glue her last few sections of pre-cut cloth, I work on my own final preparations. And then I just sit back and watch my Blackbird, no longer wielding her art in monochrome, but in vibrant technicolor.
When she’s done, she stands back and surveys her canvas behind the body. The three layers of her web are mixed with bursts of color. Hues of jeweled greens in one layer. Blues in another. Reds and purples in the last, each one meticulously dyed by her own hand. It’s a stunning installation that radiates like panes of stained glass from the suspended body, his arms and legs outstretched. Rigging him up from the walls and ceiling has been my biggest contribution, aside from slicing off a few choice pieces of flesh for Sloane’s skin ornaments that she’s sewn within the layers of filament and muslin. But the art? That’s all her.
“Beautiful, Sloane,” I say.
“Thanks,” she replies warmly, but she doesn’t turn around, or she would see that I’m not staring at her canvas, but at her.
As her gaze remains fixed to the layers of color, I change playlists on my phone. “The FBI is going to be so fucking confused. You’re evolving, not devolving. And I’m not sure they’re going to finally figure out that the webs are maps now that there’s color involved.”
“You’d think it would help,” she says on the heels of a little laugh, then shakes her head and shrugs.
“One thing has stayed pretty consistent though…”
“What’s that?”
I jerk a nod toward the body when Sloane turns to face me. The question in her eyes rapidly dissolves into suspicion. When she folds her arms across her chest, I raise my hands in apology, though I’m not sorry at all for what I’m about to say. And she knows it.
“What,” she says flatly.
I point to the not-so-good doctor, whose blood trickles down his face in drying streaks. “Left eye hole. Always a little gouge-y.”
Sloane guffaws a laugh, but it wanes when I shrug. A sliver of doubt etches a crease between her brows. “It is not.”
“I’m sorry to say, it is.”
“You’re so full of shit.”
I drag my step ladder in front of the body and gesture toward it. “See for yourself.”
Sloane’s lips part, her cheeks flushed with rising frustration. Fucking adorable. Flustered Sloane with her feathers ruffled and her talons ready? That’s always my favorite version. And I savor every moment, from her fierce glare to her determined steps as she stomps to the ladder to get a closer look.
“Rowan Kane, you fucking weirdo with this left eye hole shit, I-do-not-gouge-I-plu—”
Her irate tangent stops dead as she takes in the bloody hole, then looks down to me, then back again. Though I manage to bite down on a laugh, there’s no hiding the amusement in my eyes, not from her.
“What the fuck is that?” she asks, pointing to the dead doctor’s face.
“I dunno, Blackbird. Maybe you should check it out. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“You’re not squeamish, are you?”
At this, her laugh breaks free, though it’s short and unsure. “How’s the ice cream looking these days, Butcher? Managed to crack into some cookies and cream yet?”
“Ouch, Blackbird,” I say with a hand over my heart. It thunders beneath my palm. “Wounded, yet again.”
Sloane grins, her dimple popping out next to her lip, and then she focuses on the lifeless face before her, the eyes rimmed with blood and the features slack. She reaches her gloved fingers to the left eye socket and pulls out a small, round packet wrapped in tape.
“See?” she says as she balances the mystery on her palm and descends the ladder. “Plucked. I plucked it right outta there.”
“You did. Almost like you’ve done this before. Elite-level plucking.”
She stops in front of me, her eyes glittering with amusement as they bound between mine. “What is this?”
“I think the trick with a present is usually to open it,” I say as I press a kiss to her forehead in reply to her eye roll. She takes the tissue I offer and begins wiping the blood from the tape. “Make sure to clean it all off, though. Important documents inside.”
Sloane’s face crinkles, her pretty hazel eyes narrowing as she tries to reconcile my words with the small size of the package. “Documents…?”
“Life-changing documents, actually. So, yes. Be careful.”
With a final, suspicious glance in my direction, Sloane shifts her focus to the ball of tape and cleans every ripple in the cellophane until it’s free of blood. Once it’s finished, she peels off the strips of sticky plastic, setting each one aside until she can unfold the outer layer of protective paper.
Inside is a folded paper napkin. And inside that, another taped present.
“Oh my God, Rowan. You kept this…?” she asks with a chuckle of disbelief as she reads my handwriting scrawled below the logo of a melting ice cream cone on the napkin.
Butcher & Blackbird
Annual August Showdown
7 days
Tie-breaker by rock-paper-scissors
Best of five
Winner takes the Forest Phantom
“Hold on a second,” I say when she’s read each line out loud. “It’s missing something. Hand that over for a second while you unwrap the other one.”
“What are you up to, weirdo?”
“Maybe I want to blow my nose on this highly sentimental piece of tissue. Just hand it over, Blackbird.”
Sloane laughs and shakes her head with confusion, but she passes the napkin back to me and I take my pen from next to my tools to write out a new line, all the while sneaking glances at her to keep watch on her progress as she unwraps the other gift. Like it has every moment I’ve been with Sloane, my heart fucking pounds the entire time, like it’s going to carve itself free of its cage of bones.
When she’s about to pull the final piece of tape from the wrapping around the gift, I place my hand over hers, the napkin folded between my fingers. If she can feel a tremor in my flesh, she doesn’t say.
“I fixed it,” I say, my eyes flicking to the napkin. “Read that first.”
She holds my gaze for a moment before she takes the paper and unfolds it, her movement careful and slow. I watch her eyes shift over the words. Her lips press tight. When she reads it out loud, her voice is unsteady.
“Marry Sloane Sutherland and love her forever, if she’ll let you,” she whispers.
Those big hazel eyes are glassed with tears when she looks up at me. I take the little napkin back. She pulls the last piece of tape from the black cloth and unfolds it to reveal the engagement ring, a blue-gray sapphire set in gold with delicate leaves that climb toward the stone.
And I drop down on one knee.
Sloane swallows. A burst of nerves flood my veins and I’m about to launch into all the things I want to tell her when she says, “Did you just propose on a napkin with a ring you stuffed in a guy’s eye hole?”
I blink. My mouth opens. Nothing comes out for a moment that feels about as long as eternity.
“You know, it seemed pretty cute in my head, but in hindsight…maybe it’s too much?”
She shakes her head.
“Not enough?”
She shakes it again, a few tears jostling free of her lashes.
“Just right?”
“It’s fucking perfect,” she sobs.
“Oh thank Christ.” A long breath whooshes from my lungs as I press my palm to my chest. I clasp my hand over hers, the ring clutched in her shaking grip. “I thought for a minute that I had royally fucked it up.”
Sloane makes some kind of strangled squeak. She starts bouncing. First just little bobs, but they get bigger with every second that passes.
“You seem excited, love.”
An unintelligible, garbled sound escapes her lips.
“Shh. Man-guy is trying to propose here.”
“Rowan—”
“Sloane Sutherland, my beautiful Blackbird. From the first moment I met you, you changed the course of my life. I can’t remember anything being fun or exciting or new without you. I can’t remember feeling anything but numb until you burst into my world in your smelly little cage of orzo pastas,” I say, smiling when her laugh breaks free amidst her tears. My grip firms around her trembling hand. “I can’t envision the future without you in it. And I don’t want to, not ever. So marry me, Sloane, and we’ll go on crazy adventures forever, and fuck shit up, and be best friends and do karate in the garage and make love every day and grow old together. Because I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather spend all those moments with than you.”
I pull the ring from her grasp and hold it at the end of her finger.
“What do you say, Blackbird? Will you marry me?”
Tears streak across her freckles as she nods, her voice tight when she says the words I’ve been waiting months, maybe even years, to hear. “Yes, Rowan. Of course I’ll marry you.”
I slide the ring on her finger and she no more than glances at it before she barrels into me, nearly knocking me to the floor as she grasps my face between her palms and peppers my skin with whispered yeses and desperate kisses.
“I love you, Butcher,” Sloane whispers when she pulls away to look into my face. Then she slants her mouth to mine.
She doesn’t have to say it, because I feel it in every touch and weighted glance. It bleeds into the kiss she presses to my lips, as though it lives on her tongue when it sweeps over mine. But those words still sink into my chest, another layer of an unbreakable foundation.
Sloane slows our kiss and when we part, she grasps my hand to tug me to my feet. As soon as I’m up, she drags me toward the darkened corridor that leads to the exit off the kitchen and the doctor’s collection of expensive cars. “Now let’s go do karate in the garage.”
“By ‘karate’ do you mean I’ll bend you over the hood of Doctor Stephan’s Porsche and fuck you blind until you beg me to stop?”
Sloane tosses a wicked grin over her shoulder. Her dimple pops out next to her lip as she gives me a wink and leads me toward the shadows. “Follow me and find out, pretty boy.”
Maybe I was right. We’re not normal people. We are monsters.
But if we’re monsters, we’ll thrive in the dark.
Together.
