The maids were busy with breakfast when Rosalía returned to her ancestral home, one hundred and eighty-four years after she left, known by no one. The house she found was not the house of her memories: the original building was demolished and rebuilt in fashionable Italianate style, three stories tall, with narrow windows, quoin, a cupola. Even the climbing vines had changed. The canary ivy she loved was now a thick curtain of sharp English ivy that hid most of the bricks of the facade, flowerless and plain.
It was no longer the site of her childhood; it could have belonged to anybody else in the entire world.
Two centuries ago, when she left, Rosalía had looked seven or six. Eight at most. Fishhook didn’t remember her that well, only the ghost of a small and playful child coming in and out of every crevice of the house. He had been fond of her parents; they were dead now. He had respected her grandmother; she died soon after they left. He had even enjoyed conversations with her older brother; he left in the same ship she came, never to come back. All that was left of their shared past was the beautiful Rosalía, the plot of land in which they were, and Fishhook himself.
“Godfather,” said Rosalía with a curtsy, her curls bobbing. She climbed the steps that led to the portico with two suitcases in hand and dropped them on the floor with a thud. “I think you have something that belongs to me.”
Indeed, the house had never been his. It belonged to Rosalía and her family, and Fishhook was nothing but its keeper, doing what their people always did: changing as the times changed, disappearing into obscurity when others noticed they were not aging, resurfacing again decades later. Even Rosalía had changed: she was Virgínia when she looked sixteen to nineteen, Jamila from twelve to fifteen, Rita during most of her childhood, Isabel around the time of her birth.
Fishhook was used to change.
The maids and butlers exchanged whispers. Who was this young woman, and why would their quiet master give away everything he had, including their services? No one had ever heard of her, but how could they? When Rosalía’s father sailed away to his last voyage, their great-grandmothers were yet to be born. They could not imagine the kind of history that tied them together.
“I detest that shade of green,” the new mistress announced as she walked past the wallpaper. “And those hideous curtains; we’ll have to change them soon. And please, what’s with this kitchen? I dread the smell of honey, of baked bread, of scrambled eggs . . . ” She grasped one of the kitchen girls by the strap of her white apron, and warned in a very low voice: “You are not to cook anything that I don’t approve of ever again. Actually, I don’t have any use for a cook. Gather your things and leave.”
Fishhook remained in silence as she took over the house. He watched her from below as she climbed the stairs, her hoop skirt bouncing at every step. After a couple of hours, Rosalía decided that the master bedroom of the last floor, the one under the cupola, was now hers. Most of the kitchen girls were fired; the butlers were gone too; only the gardener and a few maids remained.
“You can keep one of the rooms of the second floor, godfather,” said Rosalía at night, when they were finally alone in the house. She took one of his black coats from his former bedroom and threw it at his feet. “Just don’t test my patience.”
Soon, the house closed itself to the world. Dark curtains hung from every window to keep the light from coming in, and the employees were to leave the estate at six o’clock, no exceptions. The ground floor was crammed with rococo furniture, and Rosalía covered everything with white blankets, like the house was to be sold. Fishhook was allowed to stay, since he had never been a servant of the family; he was a friend. More than a friend, he was an associate in a business transaction that ensured all of them got to eat. Eat, eat, eat, Fishhook muttered to himself, wandering the only parts of the house he could be in from now on. Eating was all they did. It was what they lived for, wasn’t it?
Two centuries ago, Fishhook had made a vow. You are to be her godfather, her mother had said, hands on his chest. I cannot trust anyone else to take care of her. Fishhook had no fondness for children, but he accepted the task. What for? For Rosalía to call him in the middle of the night like he was no more than a servant, hours after the remaining staff left:
“Fishhook!” Her melodious voice echoed between empty walls, rebounding on the paintings and the covered furniture like they were in a vivacious party and this charming host had the most audacious joke to make. “Fishhook, come here!”
Fishhook, who rarely slept, lifted his head. Rosalía called him again, and he dragged the dark brown leather of his shoes upstairs. First to the second floor, past the gleaming sconces, then to the third, where Rosalía awaited in front of the closed door of her bedroom, arms behind her back. Wax dripped from the candles, and the fire cast shadows on her face, extending her long eyelashes to her chin like black needles. Fishhook stopped meters away from her, noticing red stains on her white dress.
“What are you waiting for?” asked Rosalía. Behind her, the door opened with a creak. Fishhook saw the glimpse of an arm, white except for a bone-deep wound that severed muscle and exposed bone. There were teeth lines puncturing the skin, eight of them after the canines. “Aren’t you going to finish my meal for me?”
Fishhook dropped his frock coat on the floor. He kicked the boots away, pulled out the socks, and walked slowly, following the runner rug. The smell of carnage activated his senses, bringing every dead nerve of his body back to life. Inside the bedroom was only darkness, but he could count one, two, three, four corpses—the professed cook and the kitchen maids. He stepped on a pool of blood.
Warm, slick blood.
“Give me some minutes,” Fishhook said, his voice a hiss, his lips curling in a hungry snarl. Yes, he had been hungry. He stopped eating regularly since Rosalía’s family left, and all he had were scraps of the dead. Fishhook eyed Rosalía again before closing the door behind him.
Tonight, he would feast.
Once, Fishhook had other names. The first had been chosen by those who raised him, during an unreal girlhood that now felt like a fever dream, a memory that belonged to somebody else. Later, he had perfunctory names he chose not for affinity but out of necessity. He forgot those too. Names were meaningless to him and his kind, they were clothes to be worn for a period of time.
Rosalía only knew him as Fishhook, a sobriquet given by her father and adopted by the entire family after a while. She remembered thinking it sounded awfully stupid, even for him. Fishhook was weak, the lowest of the low, he could not even hunt alone. A vulture—that’s how they called men like him. But a “fish hook”? He’s not like you and me, sweetling, her father had told her child self, pulling her to sit on his lap. Fishhook never kills.
That’s what made him so curious. According to the stories, her family met Fishhook in the New World, when the first colonies had not yet grown into powerful extensions of old empires. Her father and uncle had gone along with a group of Jesuits, not out of faith, but out of hunger, following the scent of blood all the way down to South America. Fishhook had been hired as a translator by the Company of Jesus, and he led the Agustinian misioneros up the Andean Mountains. The men of faith were marveled by the quantity of languages their gaunt Aymara guide spoke, but behind his back they whispered words of caution.
Rosalía’s family could see what he was.
If you come with us, they told him, you can eat the remains of everything we hunt. Fishhook agreed, and they ate the Jesuits and the misioneros one by one. But he never killed, never, only once. Something had happened that took Fishhook out of his usual, eerie calm. Something her uncle had said. Everyone had been present when Fishhook heard whatever he had to hear in silence, and everyone saw the moment he took the hook from a rod adorning the walls, broke it from the line and stabbed her uncle’s face with the barbed end hundreds of times.
Father swore he never saw anything like it in his life. Nor did Fishhook, who continued stabbing the other man long after he was dead, hand and hook slick with her uncle’s blood and flesh. Drops of sweat fell from his chin as the body underneath him stopped struggling, one hand squeezing the corpse’s neck, the other bringing the hook up and down. He pierced eyes, cheek, mouth, jugular, chest. Everyone had been shocked as their son, brother, husband and father gurgled on blood with holes the size of a thumb disfiguring his features as Fishhook panted over the corpse.
Rosalía didn’t know, but Fishhook had been ready for the end. They were many and he was one, and he had been sure they would want revenge for their fallen kin. Instead, he was hailed as a hero, finally graduating from a vulture to a proper predator. A member of the pack. Fishhook had never killed again since. He never planned to make a habit out of it.
“How did you survive alone for such a long time?” Rosalía looked at him from the mirror of her vanity, her reflection slightly reflected by the candlelight. “What did you eat, carcasses?”
“Indigents,” Fishhook answered. “Dissected bodies from the morgue.”
Rosalía snorted. The sound did not match her pink lips, and she continued sitting on her bed, her petticoat covering her bare legs.
“Of course you did.”
Fishhook glanced at her feet dangling in the air. Her nails were caked with dry blood, and her ankles were sprinkled with reddish brown dots.
Rosalía had been locked inside the house since her arrival. She did not frequent tea parties, she did not go to the opera, she did not visit the modiste or had leisure walks around the nearest park, protected by her frilly umbrella. Fishhook never asked why, no matter how much Rosalía wished that he did. Because there’s nothing left for me here, she would have told him, because you changed everything without my approval, you stripped me from the sanctuary of my childhood home, you demolished the bedroom I used to sleep in.
But he didn’t ask, and she didn’t explain.
Sometimes, Rosalía left notes asking him to lure someone into the house. It is time, she would write, my stomach craves flesh, I need to have a human heart. Fishhook did as she said. She imagined that he must have been grateful to have the company of someone of her strength, and that was a good thing, since she wanted an obedient godfather, not one who would take care of her. That was the agreement: she would kill and eat most of the bodies, and he would drain what was left.
The strong deserved the largest share of the cake.
Be quick, said her last letter. And bring young women or men this time; I much prefer the taste of them.
Fishhook left at night in search of new victims, and Rosalía stayed inside her rose-tinted cage. If she had asked, Fishhook would tell her that the house was just a house, that a name was just a name. Names and houses must serve their masters, and they existed to be eventually thrown away. To Fishhook, his new name fit him well: it identified him as an ordinary, faceless man. He liked to blend in with the shadows. To Rosalía, her new house should be pretty, pleasurable and convenient, but not a cage. Never a cage.
That evening, he brought her two young men, whom he lured with money and the promise of a wealthy beauty whose wicked tastes made her seek pleasure anytime, anywhere. She’s not related to you, is she? asked one of the gentlemen. Fishhook stared at them. The copper of his skin was uncommon in this country, as was the shape of his long nose, his close-set eyes, his stern lips, his dark hair. Far from his homeland, he had grown paler, but they still found a way to single him out, no matter where he went. No, gentlemen. We’re not related in any way.
So the gentlemen followed this stranger who looked more like a corpse than a man, gaunt and stooping, his hands hidden in the pockets of the large overcoat fluttering behind his steps. They were young, like Rosalía wanted, and drunk, so drunk. Like that, they would not see a barbed hook hanging from his long neck, clinking at times against the buttons of his shirt.
Fishhook led them to a magnificent house covered by English ivy. The orange bricks of the facade looked darker at night, and all the tall windows were shielded by black velvet curtains, protecting the interior from curious eyes. One of the men stumbled and fell on the portico, and his friend pulled him back to his feet. Better like this. In their drunken stupor, they did not pay attention to the covered furniture, the missing servants, the molded fruit rotting in baskets that no one ever ate. Come, Fishhook said, and they struggled to follow him. She’s waiting upstairs.
Another one stumbled. Was it the blond man or the redhead? It did not matter. Fishhook grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and led him to the third floor.
“The mistress of the house is very eccentric.” Fishhook ignored the pleading gentleman he was dragging, desensitized to the suffering of others. The second man looked at him like he was Death himself, the reaper about to seize their souls and throw them where they belonged; Fishhook smiled at that. “Third door to your right.”
Fishhook pushed them toward her bedroom, and waited. It was a quick affair. Their screams could be heard through the walls, disgusting, deep and primal like pigs in a farm. He much favored women’s high-pitched shrieks, their pleas, their gasps. Their soft flesh made for the sinking of teeth. But men? He had no interest in eating men.
The door creaked open.
“They’re still alive,” said Rosalía. Her light brown hair had been pulled into a braided bun on the back of her head, with two isolated curls and a few wild strands fell from it, glued to her exposed neck with sweat. “I think it won’t be difficult, even for someone as weak as you are.”
Fishhook observed her for a moment. Her paper white skin was flushed by effort, the same red as her pretty lips. One of the unlucky victims had tried to regain his footing by holding onto the low neckline of her dress, but fell again, leaving behind three long scratches on her chest, cat-like, almost exposing her breasts.
Rosalía looked back. She shared the opinion that Fishhook looked like he had escaped from a nailed coffin and now roamed the land, his unreadable face making her think of the undead, not of a living man. He ignored her contempt, entering the bedroom and kneeling near the soon-to-be-dead. Rosalía dropped on the settee with a loud sigh. She watched as he grasped the man by the face, pupils dilating, and slashed his wrist with the hook. A gush of blood squirted from it, and he took the man’s arm to his mouth, baring rows of fangs to further break the veins.
His fingers played with the open wound, expanding it; his teeth kept the prey in place, sucking from the slit like he was made of nothing but thirst. When he stopped to catch his breath, there was another spurt of blood that sprayed his face red, but his tongue captured the liquid as urgently as a baby sucking on his mother’s tits. Rosalía watched in silence, repulsed, furious, dazed. Did she look like this when she ate? All this time, did she look like this?
Fishhook stopped draining the man’s blood and turned to meet her gaze. Rosalía flinched out of instinct, like he was invading a private moment, like he could read her mind.
“He’s still breathing,” said Fishhook. “Let me know when you need me again.”
People like them never stayed too long in the same place. No more than twenty or thirty years, which felt like mere days. Rosalía’s family came from Spain, in what was once known as Hispania, Al-Andalus, Castile, and they spent a long time away from their ancestral land. This house was one among many, but it was the one she remembered most fondly in her childhood memories. Rosalía liked to see the roof covered by a blanket of snow in the winter, the muted color of the house almost blending with the whiteness outside. The new building was sophisticated and modern, but it was not her house, just like the town was no longer her town.
Sometimes, Fishhook saw her roaming the corridors of the second floor, her pretty dresses making her look like the specter of a girl who has not yet realized she is dead. He wondered what she did, locked away the entire day, hiding from the sun as much as she hid from new faces. She only came back to life when he brought her new prey, the color returning to her face as her mouth filled with saliva, a dog in front of a slab of meat.
Rosalía herself did not know what she did day after day. She wanted to attend parties like she used to, she wanted to flirt with charming and affluent gentlemen who knew how to caress her ego, she wanted to live in a beautiful, proper place. She wanted many things, but she had very little. Instead of the comforts of wealth and the entertainment of society, Rosalía only had that awful godfather of hers to see, with his intent eyes that followed her everywhere.
“I want you to look,” Rosalía told him one night, taking Fishhook by the hand. She guided him toward her bedroom, her little manicured fingers entwined to his. Inside, a young maid squirmed on the carpet. What Rosalía meant to say I dare you to look, I dare you, you foul, pathetic doormat, but she held back the words. One day, one day. “It’s no fun for you to wait outside every time, is it?”
Fishhook said nothing. The captured girl had been hog-tied over her plain gray dress, the rope crisscrossing her body, circling her upper chest and right under it, keeping her arms together, wrists connected to ankles behind her back. Blonde hair escaped from her bonnet, and one of her shoes had rolled across the room as she struggled.
“It’s of poor taste to torture them.” Fishhook took a good look at the girl’s face; he had hired her himself. “It’s not our way.”
“It’s not the way of the weak, surely,” sang Rosalía, her nightingale voice as sweet as the smile displayed on her face. Many had told her what a pity it was that she would never get to perform for an audience, for she could have been an opera singer that drew multitudes, just like Jenny Lind. But Rosalía knew nothing would come from this—people like them were not meant to be seen. Her talent would go to waste; it is how it is. “Come, really, godfather! The girl stole from us. She took a necklace from my mother’s jewelry box.”
The maid tried to scream, but the stocking gagging her muffled every desperate attempt she made. Fishhook thought her pitiful. Why struggle? he thought of asking. Accept your fate. But her eyes still had fight in them, and he knew she would scratch if she could, she would bite, she would pull Rosalía’s hair off her scalp. Both Fishhook and Rosalía knew what they looked like to her. The beasts about to devour the villagers, the devils the church warned her about.
Rosalía scampered toward the maid. The skirt of her dress bounced as her feet danced on the floor, the tips of her toes sustaining the weight of her delicate body like a ballerina before she fell on her knees. Rosalía held the maid’s face, rubbing her tears with her thumb, then announced:
“Bon appétit!”
Fishhook stood there, watching the horrific display, a beam against his shoulder blades. Rosalía, colorful where the maid was muted, despicable where the girl was brave, bared her fangs. With her maw wide open, all pretense of humanity was gone: her lips pulled back to expose her pink gum, four pairs of flat incisors followed by rows of sharp teeth. An animalistic screech reverberated inside the bedroom, and Rosalía clutched the girl to sink her fangs into her throat.
In front of his eyes was the reason why creatures like them did not like to be seen eating. It was grotesque, even for kin, the pulling of meat, the ripping of tendons, the breaking of bones of those puny little beings that were so like themselves. Without her elders to chaperone her, however, Rosalía cared very little about taboos.
That evening, she was wearing a scarlet gown that did not suit her light brown hair, her light green eyes, her light blue veins. The contrast made her look ill, but Fishhook could not stop looking at her and the way she ate. Rosalía held the strings of the girl’s throat, a violin virtuosa tearing cartilage and breaking the hyoid bone. The anatomy opened itself for her. All shades of red appeared in that colossal hole, dark, bright, the purplish color of a raw filet. Her gracious fingers dipped into the flesh, pulling aside the yellow threads of fat like a little girl playing cat’s cradle with the trachea, the esophagus, the vocal folds.
Rosalía was euphoric. She had brought Fishhook with her to taunt him, to make that unwanted godfather of hers go away. Everybody had a breaking point, and she would find his. If he did not leave, she would drive him mad. She would prove to him she was the worst of them.
“I hope you’re not trembling at the sight of me,” Rosalía chirped, fat drops of blood dripping from her chin to her chest. It pooled between her small breasts, slowly disappearing into the bodice of her gown. “If blood is all you want, you’ll have it, like a gluttonous vampire from a folktale. But only when I tell you so. And if that means you’ll have to watch me eat every night, then you will watch me.”
Fishhook looked thin under his loose white shirt, and she remembered a day where her mother, speaking of him, had revealed he had atrocious scars underneath his clothes. For them, scars were a rare thing. A long time ago, she had said like a parent who reads bedtime stories for their children, he ripped his own breasts off, bit by bit. He ate them, it seems. Rosalía had been delighted. Bit by bit! But how did she know? Her mother tapped her own lips. It doesn’t matter how, she had told her, but don’t tell your father that I do.
“Who would tremble because of this?” muttered Fishhook, crouching and moving toward them, palms on the boards around her. “Your turn, then.”
Rosalía lifted her arched eyebrows, a prim monster if there ever was one. Fishhook touched the maid’s leg, searching for a life sign. For the stiffness of fear, for cooling skin. His fingertips went up her dress, pinching her to find the artery of her thighs, pushing the gray wool aside. Rosalía looked at him, obviously disgusted, and he looked back at her, exposing his own inadequate fangs. But his roar thundered too, inhuman, unnatural, and he buried his teeth into the girl’s inner legs.
Blood spurted, and he suckled on it. Fishhook’s bites ripped the skin to draw in the blood, perfect, refined, nectar to a bee. He kept his eyes on Rosalía, on the drying redness between her breasts, on the face of a lioness after a hunt, on her feeble appearance, like that of a bird. When he was finished, he pushed the leftovers aside, retreating to his feet.
“Good night, Rosalía,” he said. “Call me when I need to get rid of the bones.”
When the sun was out, Rosalía took short naps on the day beds. The velvet méridienne housed many of her dreams, the few ones she had. In some, she was immobile on the floor of the cellar, arms behind her head. The rope was tight around her frog-tied legs, wide open, with only a chemise to cover her shame.
Rosalía remembered the terror she felt. Her loose hair glued to her forehead. Her lungs expanding and shrinking in sharp breaths. And Fishhook, coming forward, eyes on her.
In some dreams, Fishhook ate her whole. He started ripping out her breasts, then devoured head, limbs, hands, feet. In other dreams, the pointy tip of his tongue went down the extension of her thigh to the meeting of leg and hip. When he made his way back, he left a trail of teeth marks, all flowing with blood.
How dare you, she would scream. How dare you touch me, bite me, drink me, eat me. Her chemise was see-through and white, iridescent, and it became scarlet with her spilled blood. How dare you even look at me. Fishhook took the barbed hook from the string around his neck. How dare you think of me, she yelled as much as she could, her voice scratching her throat. He pierced her with the hook, every puncture a source of endless food. How dare you, how dare you, how dare you.
Fishhook, then, would push her chemise up to her neck, exposing her frail stomach, the slight shape of her rib cage, her hand-sized breasts, the shiver that circled each of them. The blood pooled between her legs, disappearing in the middle of her hair.
How dare you, he would say before starting to bite her.
The house was to shelter a magnificent but intimate party. Preparations were made a week ahead so they could have all the seasonal ingredients to produce a banquet neither Fishhook nor Rosalía would ever eat, but the cook had to prepare accordingly. The mistress wanted five guests: two men, two women, and one of Fishhook’s choosing. Surprise me, she said. The maids decorated the three stories with fresh roses, removed the sheets from the furniture, and dusted every corner of the house.
Everything was ready by the evening, but Fishhook had not yet returned with their guests. Hateful godfather, thought Rosalía, stomping the runner rug. Hateful, loathsome, heinous. The night was black and starless outside of the house, and she closed all the heavy curtains so she would not be reminded that a world existed beyond the comfortable walls of that unfamiliar place.
Finally, at ten, the main doors creaked, and joyous laughter replaced the grave-like quietude of before. Three ladies and two gentlemen were welcomed into the candle-lit hall, and Fishhook guided them up the staircase. They were to meet the hostess in the second story, the tongue between the teeth of the upper and lower floor. Maids hurried to serve them the finest food and vintage red wine.
Soon, Rosalía came downstairs, all dressed in white. The lace of her gown was delightful, just like her fine shawl and her glittering slippers. Fishhook excused himself, but waited right outside the closed door, waiting for the right moment to approach. Five people. To someone like him, whose back fangs had only grown in the same place a human would have had two pairs of molars, and whose strength was only more remarkable than one or human men, to take five people at once was unthinkable. Rosalía’s uncle, before Fishhook killed him, had sometimes beaten legions, but fell limp and powerless with the point of a hook deep inside his eye.
But five people, really.
Fishhook played with the cord around his neck. He thought of Rosalía while he heard her crystalline giggle, how he hated her, how he wanted her dead. Dead or all for himself. A pair of maids flinched when they saw him, afraid of the dark circles around his eyes, of the frock coat about him like a shroud. Sir, they cowered, and he opened the doors so they could serve the dessert. After they came out holding two trays full of plates, Fishhook warned them: you are to leave the house now, did you hear me? Right now.
Five people. Two men, three women. Rosalía, built like a doe, alone with them. There would be knives and diversions they could use to escape. There were two windows, but Fishhook made sure to lock them before he left. Five people. The maids scurried out of the house, knowing something evil was brewing inside that place. They kept returning every day for the few hours of work, the generous compensation, the master and mistress they hardly saw.
Ask no questions, the older workers usually said.
A high-pitched screech broke through the night. Fishhook almost jumped, startled, grasping the knobs of the double doors. No one is to leave the room before I get my share, Rosalía had warned him, and now she growled, her voice vibrating, no longer a nightingale but a jaguar.
The screams were muffled by the walls. Perhaps the house loved her now, perhaps the Italianate construction had been made for her and only her, not her parents or her brother, but Rosalía herself. Plates shattered, and the cutlery clinked as hands grasped the spread and threw everything on the table to the floor. Fishhook closed his eyes. He had underestimated Rosalía. She was her parents’ daughter, her uncle’s niece. She could take much more than five. She truly was a beast.
Inside, Rosalía stood alone. Her shawl had been ripped by one of the women, and it lay sprawled on the floor, stained by the clenched fingers of the corpse. Her own hands stiffened unnaturally like a claw. The house appraised her. Another hiss came out of her tinted lips, and she walked among the twitching limbs on the floor. Which of them looked more appetizing? The handsome twin brothers, or their three lady friends?
Rosalía touched the wallpaper, leaving behind a crimson line. The ladies, she decided. She would devour them first. Rosalía bared her teeth again, pulling one by the wrist, but a booming sound made her stumble. She could no longer move. Pain, she noticed. It was pain. Smoke. The smell of powder. A bullet lodged on her shoulder, the cartridge on the carpet. One of the twins had scrambled to his feet, and he fired the gun one more time, piercing her throat.
“Fishhook,” mumbled Rosalía. Her knees buckled, and she found herself on the floor. Her skin tissue was sewing itself back together like it was supposed to, but it hurt like hell. She had never felt this kind of pain. The half-dead twin pointed the pistol at her head, and her voice and thoughts came back to her in a deluge. “Godfather!”
The man’s final shot dulled her senses, and Rosalía wondered if that meant she was dead. She no longer saw, she no longer heard. The pistol fell on the coagulated blood, and another body hit the wooden boards.
A second passed.
Then two, three.
Blinking, Rosalía started to hear and see again. A rapid wave of moment made her head spin, and it took her a moment to understand the world around her.
Two people were tangled among the bodies. One was Fishhook, and the other was the surviving twin, spasming with the violence of the blows hitting him from above. The barbed hook went up and down, piercing Fishhook’s hand as he stabbed the other man, like he did once upon a time. Fishhook panted, but he did not stop, not even when there was no more fight in the body under his. When all life besides theirs disappeared from the room, he lifted his head to see her, and Rosalía felt her throat closing to choke the air out of her.
“Why are you trembling?” asked Fishhook, his face soaked in blood, his eyes dark. The string he usually wore around his neck fell to his fingertips, and the barbed hook dangled in the air. “Are you afraid of me?”
Rosalía tried to crawl away from him. Her hands slipped on the wet floor, and her chin slammed the wood, closing her teeth around her tongue. She yelped. Every fiber of her body told her to run, but Fishhook walked calmly toward her, swinging the hook’s cord back and forth.
“Why, Rosalía.” said Fishhook, standing above her. “We’re all we have.”
Rosalía gasped, her white dress ruined, her hair escaping her bun in disheveled braids, her chest heaving and twitching. When she tried to roll to her side, Fishhook pulled her by the neck to face him. He smiled, feeling her jugular pulsing with dread and pain.
Rosalía looked at the blood on his face, at the slender hand holding the hook, at the elegant lines around his nose, at the slight grin playing in his lips. Then, she laughed, throwing her arms around him. Tears ran down her cheeks, washing her blood-caked skin, and her chest tightened painfully. Fishhook embraced her as well, smelling the mix of fear and wild joy coming out of her pores, just for him.
“Yes,” Rosalía murmured against his ear, kissing his cheeks and the corners of his lips. She no longer thought he was weak. “Yes, yes. You’re all I have, and I’m all you have. Yes.”
Fishhook ran the sharp point of the hook around her little neck, scratching it pink. Then, he turned around to close the doors.
Tonight, they would feast again.
