Page 56 of Psychotic Faith
Marco sends three texts while we work. I delete them unread. Nothing matters beyond Faith's closed door, beyond the growing distance between us.
I last nine hours. Nine hours of pacing my surveillance room, watching her apartment through screens, seeing her bedroom light burn like an accusation. She doesn't sleep either. Her shadow moves past the window again and again, pacing like a caged animal.
The bruises I left might fade, but I'm carved into her DNA now. She can run, but her body will always remember who owns it.
At 3 a.m., I turn my key in her lock. The key slips in my fumbling fingers. My hands won't stop shaking. When did locks become difficult? When did my hands forget their precision?
Her apartment smells like burnt sugar. She's been baking again. She's waiting in the living room. Not surprised. Not sleeping. Just sitting in darkness, silhouette backlit by streetlight.
"I knew you'd come," she says, voice flat as a flatline. Dead. Like Sofia's voice after the massacre, after finding out what I'd done to Mikhail.
"Faith…"
"Get out." Two words that hit harder than bullets.
"I need to explain…"
"There's nothing to explain. You killed all those people."
"You always knew what I was."
"I knew, but seeing it… Get out."
"I did it for you, little faith."
"No." She stands, and even in darkness I can see her hands clenched into fists. "For you. Because you're sick."
The words start pouring out of me wrong, too fast, uncontrolled like arterial spray: "I don't know how else to protect you. When I was seventeen, I couldn't protect anyone. My father died, and I could only watch his blood spread across marble while they kept coming. Now I can prevent that. Have to prevent that."
My voice cracks, and I realize I’m crying. When did that start? Tears running down my face like a child's, like that boy staring across the room at his father's corpse. My mouth tastes like old blood.
"You don't understand," I continue, unable to stop the flood. "Every man who looks at you could be the one. Could be the threat I don't see coming. I can't let that happen. Can't fail again."
I step toward her. She steps back. We dance this horrible choreography around her coffee table, me advancing, her retreating, neither of us winning.
Faith watches me fall apart with no sympathy in her expression. Her hazel eyes are stone, that warmth I've grown addicted to completely absent.
"You need professional help, Luca." She says it like a diagnosis. Clinical. Detached.
"I need you." I hate how young I sound. How broken.
"That's the problem."
She turns on the lamp, and the sudden light makes me flinch. I must look pathetic: tears on my face, hands still shaking, covered in other men's blood.
"You made me feel alive, Luca. But you also made me feel complicit in murder. I choose neither."
The admission cuts deeper than rejection alone. She felt it too, that electric connection, and she's choosing to sever it anyway.
"Leave," she says, each word precisely placed. "Don't come back. Don't watch me. Don't follow me. We're done."
My chest cracks, actual sound, actual sensation. Like ribs breaking from inside out.
"You don't mean that."
"I do. You're sick, and I can't fix you. And I won't enable you."
She's using therapy language, treating me like a problem to be solved rather than the man whose name she screamed two nights ago, whose fingers knew every secret her body kept.
