Page 51 of Psychotic Faith
"Not determined. Just accurate. You're going to try to save me now." The words burn my throat. "Add me to your project list. Trent Neumann's destruction and Luca Rosetti's redemption."
Her silence confirms it. Fuck. She thinks I'm salvageable because I don't let children drown in trauma. She doesn't understand that I'm not pulling them out of the water. I'm teaching them to breathe while drowning.
"The children trust you," she says.
"Children make poor character witnesses."
My phone buzzes. Marco again.
"Warehouse. Thirty minutes. Bring your tools."
I look at Faith, still seeing salvation in my eyes.
"I have to go kill someone now," I tell her. "Still want to save me?"
She doesn't answer with words. Instead, she steps closer, her hand sliding up my chest to rest over my heart. The touch burns through my shirt, and my pulse hammers against her palm. Exhausted, desperate, wanting.
"You're not as lost as you think," she whispers.
Before I can argue, before I can explain why she's wrong, she rises on her toes and presses her mouth to mine.
The kiss destroys me. Not rough like in the coat room, not desperate like last night. This is gentle, accepting, seeing all my darkness and choosing it anyway. Her lips are soft, her tongue sliding against mine with a tenderness that makes my chest crack open.
My hands find her waist, pulling her against me despite where we are, despite the children thirty feet away, despite everything. She tastes like coffee and possibility, like redemption I don't deserve but suddenly crave more than sleep.
When she pulls back, we're both breathing hard. My cock throbs against my zipper, and I know she can feel it pressed against her stomach. Her pupils are blown wide, lips swollen from my mouth.
Her fingers trace the bruises on her hips before finding the matching ones on my own, hidden beneath our clothing—purple-black fingerprints where she gripped me while riding me, taking control, making me beg.
"We're even," she says, pressing on my bruises the same way I press on hers.
She thinks I'm marking her as mine, but she doesn't realize—every scratch she leaves, every bite, every bruise, is her claiming me right back. I've never let anyone mark me before. Neverwanted the evidence. But with Faith, I catalog each wound like a love letter written in violence.
"Tonight," I say, the words ripping from my throat without permission. "Use the key card. Wear the dress."
Not a question. A promise. A need.
She nods, fingers still pressed to my chest, feeling my heart race. "Yes."
"Faith…"
"Tonight," she interrupts, backing away. "Don't make me wait too long."
She walks away, and I watch her go, my body screaming to follow. To skip the warehouse, skip the killing, skip everything except burying myself inside her until neither of us can think.
But I have work to do. Blood to spill. Someone to make scream.
And after, when I'm covered in evidence of what I am, I'll go to her. See if she still wants to save me when I smell like someone else's death. See if she kisses me the same way with blood under my fingernails.
The thought makes my cock impossibly harder.
Tonight can't come fast enough.
20 - Faith
As the elevator doors shut just before the close of business, my mind is still reeling from following Luca to the community center. I had planned to wean myself off him completely by discovering some nasty secret, showing the depths of his depravity, only to find him… helping. Teaching kids how to defend themselves. Giving back to people who have nothing. I walked in to find him kneeling beside a traumatized eight-year-old girl. Those same hands that left fingerprints on my thighs counting mats with her, voice impossibly gentle: “One, two, three… you’re safe now, you’re at the center.” Teaching broken children to escape the very violence he creates.
The contradiction makes my chest tight, makes me press against a bruise just to ground myself in something real.
