Cherreads

Chapter 12 - 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.

More Chapters