Chapter Text
It takes being alone in a motel bathroom, with black grout and pink tiles and a window too small to climb out of, for Greta to break. She feels it like some kind of crack in porcelain, but- no, not that, never that. She feels herself break, like- she feels her body crumple like-
Greta swipes out at whatever’s nearest, and the toppling of her gas station toiletry bag hits the ground with an unsatisfying smack.
She’d had a smile on her face, a smile, driving away from the Heelshire house. And it was a weak and shaky thing that didn’t belong, not with the dust and blood drying cracked on her skin, but it had stayed anyway. Looking wrong, like someone smiling at a funeral, looking like it knew something she didn’t know, like it had a joke waiting for her.
Greta refuses to glance up at the mirror in front of her. She doesn’t want to know if the smile is still there, even now when it’s just her and no one else. She doesn’t want to see how crazy she looks. Is she crazy? Is she crazy? Greta mutters this, repeats it until the words start blurring together.
People who weren’t crazy didn’t often lean over a motel sink and puke and cry and moan like she was doing. They didn’t shake, and shake, until they fell to the floor and held their arms and realized that their arms hurt, their arms ached , and the pain of it was familiar and nostalgic in the way that terrible things often are.
Greta looks, and the tremors in her arms don’t stop her from seeing the marks on her skin.
There’s one on her wrist, and another curving from her bicep to her shoulder, with a matching one on her other arm, a little lower and a little darker. Some of her nail beds are purpling too, small and jagged scratches surrounding the skin around them - She presses her lips together, chin wobbling, and remembers the wedged door she’d had to rip open. She hadn't even known that it'd been cutting her, hadn't felt it at the time.
Greta wraps her hand over the bruising on her wrist, though it’s not enough to cover it. Her fingers are too short and too thin to mimic it, and the mottled red peeks through anyway.
The bruises are wide, and overlapping. And big.
Even with his hunched shoulders, he’d still towered over her, large and imposing and so big in the threatening body of a lie. When she’d been close enough to see his eyes, she had had to tilt her head to meet them, regardless of his own head being tipped down so close to hers.
She thinks, unbidden, that despite how big he was, she still managed to kill him. Still managed to gut him .
The thought isn’t wanted, and Greta recoils immediately, as if she can blanch enough that it won’t stick and stay inside of her. It makes her chest turn and roil, because there’s nothing left in her stomach to turn and roil, and she’s crying new tears now, big fat ones that roll down her cheeks and collect under her chin.
She didn’t mean to- she didn’t want to. She had to do it. She had to do it. She had to-
Greta’s already pulling herself to the toilet, dry heaving up breath that tastes like metal and bile.
Oddly, neither Greta or Malcolm do what they should've done, in a situation as unique as this.
Greta had driven aimlessly for miles once they’d left the Heelshire house, and Malcolm had sat silently, staring forward. They hadn't talked about going to a hospital, they hadn't talked about going to the police. They hadn't talked about anything.
She thinks it was because the two of them forgot they even could, or maybe they’d just decided that they wouldn’t. Not at that moment.
Greta had spent the ride nervously checking the rear view mirror, and she was sure that Malcolm’s eyes darted to his side view mirror every so often, as if the both of them were expecting Brahms to be running on foot after them. But he hadn’t, check after check of the mirrors, he hadn’t been after them.
Because he was dead.
Greta blinks, and then blinks harder. The book in front of her, one she’d found sitting forgotten in one of the bedside tables, is open to pages she hasn’t read. She turns another page, despite it.
Brahms is dead.
They’d left the house with two bodies inside, and it was still that way almost three days later. She looks to the blinking alarm clock between the two single beds. In an hour, it’ll have been three days. Unless someone’s found him. Them.
But the world has kept quiet, the local news page she refreshes every couple of hours only reporting on weather and politics, and she doesn't know if she feels disappointment or relief that they haven’t been found.
She doesn't know if she should feel anything about it at all really, but there’s something there, inside of her, and if there were any word that could fit it Greta thinks that it’d be - Festering.
Greta’s not sleeping.
Or, she is, but it’s short and fitful, and filled with nightmares that she can’t reassure herself aren’t real. She’ll jerk awake, in sweat wettened sheets that are cold and uncomfortable, and her loud breaths don’t wake Malcolm up because he’s already awake. He always seems to be. Greta will turn to look, and find that he’s looking right back at her with soft pity, as if he'd watched her nightmares right alongside her.
“Bad dreams?” He whispers this time, and he’s sitting up in his own bed, sheets mussed between his legs and pooled around his waist like he’d been tossing and turning for hours.
It takes a moment for Greta’s breathing to settle, but Malcolm waits patiently.
“I don’t know,” she says, and it’s nonsensical because she does know. The bad dream is still happening in her head, of Brahms, grunting and whining from the screwdriver she’s twisting into his stomach, replaying as if she’d not gotten enough of it before she startled awake.
She says it again. “I don’t know.”
It’s silent, this early in the morning, a veil on everything except for the clock between them, faintly buzzing with its green numbers - She glances towards it. Three days, and now a couple of hours.
Greta feels the ticking of the minutes pass like the weight of hands around her neck, and she wonders how long it’ll take for the life outside the house to seep in, without her there to catch and kill them. How long it'll be until the rats find their bodies.
“What do we do?” She asks, quietly. Quietly, because she hadn’t meant to ask it at all, that question they’d both been avoiding. She’d been doing a fine job keeping it in her head, echoing behind each thought, a constant what do we do, what do we do, what do we do.
But Malcolm answers without hesitation, like it’d been kept in his head too. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
He turns his head to her, and there’s still something soft in his eyes, though she doesn’t think it’s pity anymore. “Greta, I-” Malcolm stops, and she can see him thinking.
“What?”
“I can’t be involved in this.” The hand that’d been resting on his knee moves to rub his brow.
“I don’t… What do you mean?”
“My mum. She's sick, Greta- she's really sick. I’m all she has, and if something happens to me, she’d be-”
“Malcolm. No. No, it can’t just be me. If I go to police- if they don’t believe me -”
“They won’t,” he says, and it’s gentle, like he’s trying to comfort her despite what he’s saying. Despite what it means. “They won’t believe you.”
The panic she has in her chest flares, and she wants to hiss and shout at him, ask him why he’s turning his back on her- why he’s leaving her to do this by herself-
Greta swallows it down, and twists the bed sheets between her hands. “No. They won’t, will they.”
She’d reported Cole, once. Years ago, before the baby, before he’d gotten his nails dug into her and convinced her that he’d change, before she’d known anything but the Cole he’d been hiding as. Kind, and sweet, and caring. And then he’d almost broken her jaw.
And now, he was lying in a house with some porcelain stabbed into his neck.
The police wouldn’t do anything but look to her, blame her, and with that the echoing in her head stops and changes. The monotonous what do we do, what do we do, what do we do turns into something else. “What do I do, then?”
“You could go back. To Montana, you could just- you could leave, or go somewhere that’s not here. Start again, somewhere else.”
She doesn’t think about the promise she’d made to a doll, and unwittingly to a man. She doesn’t think about it at all. “And, what? You’ll stay here?”
Malcolm shakes his head. “My mum has some family in Stafford,” he says, eyes shining. “I think she’d like to see them. I think it’d be good for her.” The and for him goes unsaid.
Greta smiles, and she means to mean it, but it’s small and quick to drop. “When do you think you’ll go?”
“As soon as we can, really. She’ll be-” he hesitates. “She’ll be out of the hospital tomorrow, so, maybe… Maybe tomorrow, or the day after.”
She wonders if he was going to tell her at all, if she hadn’t asked. If he was just going to say goodbye in the morning, or leave without saying anything at all. That wouldn’t have been like him, but she could understand the change in him if it had happened. Greta doesn’t think she’s much the same anymore, either.
“Do you need me to drive you anywhere? Before I go?” The kindness in his voice passes over her.
“No.” Greta murmurs, lying back down in the cold sheets. “No, that’s okay, Malcolm. I’ll get a cab.”
She doesn’t tell him where she’ll be heading, even when he asks.
Greta’s not sure what she’s expecting, or what she’s hoping to do when she gets there, but as the black cab pulls up to the Heelshire house it takes all she can do to not ask the driver to turn around.
The house looks normal. Unbearably normal. And for something that seems so harmless, Greta feels shaken to her core. She wants the outside of the house to match the inside, the horror and the grimness that oozes from inside the walls. But the day is almost bright, sun trickling through the clouds along with light rain, and the house looks as normal as it does beautiful.
She gets out of the cab too quickly, and walks up the stairs faster than she wants. What is she doing?
She stands at the doors that she doesn’t remember shutting when they’d ran, and thinks frantically, and loudly. What is she even doing here?
There are plans floating in her head, all as lacking and weak as the next, and she's not decided on which sounds the most plausible for returning to what's essentially a crime scene; She’s just here to get her clothes and go, or, she’s here for closure, to see the dead bodies and know she won’t be hurt again.
Greta’s hand hovers over the handle, and she thinks - She’ll go in, remove any trace of herself that she's left behind, and then she’ll never come back.
Greta’s hand sits on the handle, slowly pushing it down without much effort, and she thinks - Although, maybe seeing Cole’s body would help her, in a sense. Closure is good. It’s meant to be had.
But Brahms? What would seeing Brahms’ dead body do? She was the cause of it, so what closure would that give her?
The door unlatches, and it’s now just her palm on the quickly warming metal keeping it from swinging open. She’s not certain if closure even applies to him. To Brahms. Twenty years spent in the walls, sneaking along the bones of the house, and Greta can imagine that a lot of things wouldn’t apply to you anymore.
It takes her a second, but when she finally steps inside the confusion is startling. It doesn’t smell. The air is stale and still, with dust motes floating between snippets of light, but it doesn’t smell. She waits in the doorway, as if at any moment the stench of decay will reach her.
She feels oddly lost when the air stays the same.
Greta takes another step in, softly shutting the door and leaning against it for support. The hallway looms ahead of her, and she can see the struggle that they’d left behind; there’s wood splinters on the rugs, and deep scratches cut into the flooring beneath them, and she can see glass shards, scattered and gleaming intermittently. They lead like breadcrumbs, out from the room where she knows Cole will be.
Her feet are taking her there now, slowly, gradually, just like the numbness sweeping over her. Greta’s felt this before, she had whenever Cole had reached the crest of his anger, when the look in his eyes told her she couldn’t try and calm him down anymore, that she’d just have to bear it.
She stops just shy of the room, stands close enough to the wall that she can’t see what’s waiting for her inside, and recognizes the sense of being watched. It sits underneath her skin, barely there, prickling the back of her neck. She knows, of course, that she’s not being watched. Not the way her gut is telling her she is.
Greta looks around her, and sees the cold eyes of paintings look back. She’s the only one here.
The portraits hung up on the walls look on as she turns into the room, feet crunching the glass under her shoes. And the house is silent and so quiet that when Greta’s heart picks up, it’s the loudest thing she’s heard in her life.
She’s frozen in place, heart banging and banging against her chest like fists on a wall, and then-
The numbness is yanked from her. There’s a sudden and shocking rush in her ears, ringing as the world lurches and brings her with it. Greta stumbles to the side, only catching herself at the last second before she falls to the ground - She can’t hear herself, but her mouth is open and she’s taking in too much air too quickly and it must be loud, she must be breathing so loudly but she can’t hear herself.
Cole isn’t there.
She desperately scans the room, as if she’s just accidentally overlooked the dead body of a full grown man, but it’s empty. It’s empty. It’s fucking empty.
“What? Wh- I don’t… I-” Greta babbles, words falling out and tumbling to the bare floor.
He’s dead. Dead people don’t get up and walk away, they don’t just leave. They stay, they stay in their stains and pools of blood, and Cole should be here in his.
Greta shakily walks closer to where he should be, and stares down at what he left behind. It’s spread out, bigger than she remembers, bigger than she thought it could be, like once Cole started bleeding he never stopped, just kept on going even when it had dried and turned rust brown against the floor.
Her mouth turns sour, and her face becomes cold. There’s- she presses a hand hard against her mouth, willing back whatever’s coming up her throat.
There’s footprints. Greta can see whorls in the floor, heavily stamped into the blood like someone pressed their toes into the puddle and wandered off. She turns her head to follow them, and can see more prints, marked along the floor until they disappear out of the room.
Greta gingerly trails after them into the hallway. They lead to the kitchen, and she begins to walk towards it before pausing - She already knows what’s through there. Already knows why someone would head to the kitchen, with bloody feet and possibly hauling a dead body.
There’s a backdoor, opening to the garden behind the house, to the secluded parts that had been too wild for Greta to trudge through let alone stroll through with a doll in her arms and boots not made for England mud. But she can imagine someone bigger, someone with longer legs, being able to walk through the undergrowth and find a spot to dispose of Cole.
Well. Either that, or the freezer.
Greta slips her phone from her back pocket, and despite already knowing that there’ll be no bars, and no signal, she glances down at it anyway.
Yep. No bars, and no signal.
This is the moment where she should leave. If Greta ran, she could maybe make it to one of the neighbours before it became completely dark. She isn’t a fast runner but she could do it.
But she doesn’t.
Greta puts her mobile back, and begins heading up the stairs. Her feet are heavy and slow, and she can feel how tightly her knuckles are pushing against her skin from her grip on the railing, though she doesn’t let up. There’s blood on the steps as well, the bottom of her shoes sticking each time she lifts her feet - Greta flicks her eyes down only briefly, and sees the thick drops of red, and the way they’ve smeared into the wood.
She tries to avoid them, and keeps walking, keeps going until she’s in front of Brahms’ room- or, the doll’s. She’d seen Brahms’ room, the one in the depth of the house, and remembers how starkly different it was to the one she’s entering.
Greta stands in the open doorway, and sees that this room is empty as well.
No body.
No Brahms.
Nothing.
Something desperate falls out of her, a frenzied laugh that bubbles and hiccups until it sounds like she’s close to crying - For a second, an insane second, she almost thinks that none of this even happened, and it pushes out more laughter that hurts.
She strays further into the room, until the toe of her shoes are almost touching the mess that’s drowned the carpet, and it’s such an odd sight. Blood, in a child’s room that belongs to a doll. It doesn’t even feel like a place for a child, and she doesn’t know how she ever mistook it for one. It feels cold, and heartless; stiff, like everything had been placed just so, placed to make a pretty picture.
The room as it is now though, destroyed and torn to pieces, feels more fitting. Feels closer to the truth.
Greta’s stopped laughing. Her shoulders are still jumping up and down, but her lips have pressed so tightly together that her teeth are biting into her lips, and she can’t see the blood in front of her anymore. The mocking image of a child’s bedroom blurs until she can’t see anything at all.
A sob catches in her chest, and Greta lets herself crumple to the ground, the strings holding her up finally being cut. She’s so tired. She cries without tears, and she’s so tired.
She stays like that, hunched over a dirty, bloody carpet as if she’s silently weeping for it, long enough that her knees begin to prickle painfully and the muscles in her legs cramp and turn to static. Greta imagines her body turning to stone, becoming one of the statues that litter the estate, and she curls even closer to the blood in front of her.
There’s always blood, wherever Greta goes. It feels like a curse.
The sunlight sitting on the floor moves little by little, until it’s resting against the far wall, until the room grows that bit darker, no longer bright and yellow but warm, and deep. She doesn’t know how long she’s been here, but she can’t feel the prickle in her knees anymore. Greta can’t feel much of anything.
She thinks of the statues outside, again. She thinks of a doll, as frozen as she is now, and wonders if that’s what everything ends up becoming in this house. Trapped, perpetually and forever.
Greta doesn’t register it right away, not when it’s so quietly hiding underneath her hitched breathing, but it’s there; the sound of wood against wood, shifting. Greta closes her eyes, and hears something soft, and faint, like someone gently placing their foot on the floor.
She turns her head to the side, chin nudging against her shoulder, and it might have been enough to see behind her if she’d been looking. “Brahms?” She mumbles.
There’s a loud inhale, whistling and reedy, and she opens her eyes.
It’s him.
It’s Brahms. It’s Brahms. He’s standing, shaking, and there’s an open panel in the wall behind him, and Greta is awash in fear and overwhelming relief as she looks at him, as she stares at him and feels exonerated.
He looks like a mess - There’s red all down his front, spread out and smudged like a violent finger painting, dark and ruddy and soiled, but Greta can see new blood leaking, too. Right in his middle. His hand, that’s blackened and caked with dirt, hovers near it.
“Brahms.” Greta says again, not for any other purpose than just to say it. She didn’t kill him, she thinks. She didn’t kill him!
His breathing picks up, hissing harshly through the jagged crack in his mask, and it looks like he’s played arts and crafts with it, dried glue clinging in globs around the break.
Then Brahms suddenly lurches forward with a grunt, shoulders falling into himself as he takes thudding steps towards her. His hand grips his stomach, and Greta can see thick blood dribble out from his fingers.
Her legs collapse beneath her when she tries to stand, and she falls onto her side with a whump. Greta pulls herself back quickly, dragging herself across the floor away from Brahms, feeling the grime of the carpet stick to her hands and pull at her clothes as she tries to put space between them, but he catches up to her, even with how badly he’s shaking.
“Oh Greta, ” he lilts out, high-pitched and nauseatingly child-like. “You’ve been naughty, Greta. ”
He looms closer, reaching down to grab at her kicking leg, and Greta kicks and kicks, shouting out when his fingers manage to wind around her shin. Brahms yanks, tugging and pulling until he’s completely standing over her.
He lets go of her leg, dropping down quicker than Greta can crawl away. His knees hit the carpet, and bracket her hips tightly.
“Brahms, wait- no, wait! Stop it, stop it! ” Her throat clenches around the words, barely getting them out.
“Naughty Greta, ” he says, eyes staring down at her, wide and unblinking. Brahms’ voice cracks, and lowers into a rasp that makes Greta struggle more. “Naughty Greta,” he repeats.
“No, no, I-” She tries to shimmy out from under him, her shoulders digging painfully into the ground. “You were hurting people, Brahms! I had to- I had to! You hurt me!”
He shakes his head back and forth violently, shoving a hand under her chin and slamming her mouth shut. Her teeth clack and grind against each other as he grips her face, and she watches his tense shoulders, up by his ears, begin to drop and relax.
“You hurt me,” he parrots back to her, poorly mimicking her voice. His eyes squint in mirth, and he looks amused, like he just told a joke. Greta thinks she even hears muffled giggles coming from him.
“You hurt- ” Brahms starts to say again, before cutting himself off with a sudden and deep breath in. His fingers press that much tighter into her face, smearing dirt all over her jaw, and she can see his eyes hurry up and down, as if he’s tracing the way she looks. The breath he’d been holding shudders out of him, forceful and controlled.
“You hurt me. You hurt me, right here.” Brahms pulls his hand away, ignoring Greta’s gasp of air, and points at his stomach. “Right here. It hurts so bad, Greta. You did this.”
Her chin wobbles, and she glances down to his stomach. There’s red, steadily leaking through the thin and dirty fabric of his shirt, and she can see his raw, ragged skin past the rip in it. Greta tries to move away at the sight, her arms struggling to break free from where he’s pinned them against her body, but Brahms presses down heavier into her, his full weight forcing her to still.
He pitches his voice high again, into that of a child, and his eyes turn round behind his mask. “You really, really hurt me, Greta. I cried and I cried, and I cried so much. ”
“I’m sorry, Brahms,” she says, and she can hear how weak it sounds. “I’m so sor-”
Before she can utter the last syllable, Brahms brings his fist back and punches it next to her head, his knuckles cracking with a loud POP as they hit the carpet. Greta jerks against the floor, flinching with a yelp. She strains against his hold, tries to pull away from him as he leans in closer, as he brings both hands up to the collar of her shirt and grips it in his fists, wrenching her roughly up off the ground.
“You’re not sorry! ” He shouts, seething and scratchy and harsh. “You left! You left me! ”
Brahms’ hands and arms tremble, as if he's physically holding himself back from shaking her, and his fingers begin to twist tighter into her shirt, tighter and tighter until the collar of it cuts into the back of her neck, and the twisting brings her in so close that she can see the warped skin around his bloodshot eye, pupils dark and big in both and glued to her.
“Brahms, don’t-”
“You won’t do it again,” he says, and though it sounds like a warning, like a parent slowly counting down from three, it doesn’t feel like a warning at all. It feels like a promise, with one hand unwinding from her collar and creeping up to her neck, coarse and catching on her skin, it feels like he’s promising that she won’t ever do it again. That she won’t ever even get the chance to try.
“Don’t! Don’t! ” Greta thrashes in his grip, dread flooding her body as his fingers stretch and cover her neck, his palm bearing into the front of her throat. His eyes stay on hers.
And it’s as his hand squeezes, with taunting, restrained strength, that Greta’s own hand finally slips out from where it’d been pinned. She rushes, bringing it up and jabbing it into his stomach.
Brahms jolts, wheezing, and Greta wheezes along with him, the air thinning in her throat as he still holds on. She jabs again, and again, tenses her hand into a fist and slams it into him over and over until she can feel warm droplets splashing back onto her.
His fingers quickly loosen and drop from her neck as he squirms away from her, but Greta grabs onto him, follows him and finds that rip in his shirt and digs her thumb into his wound.
He cries out, spasming above her, hands scrabbling over her shoulders and arms before roughly shoving her backwards with a force that has Greta coughing. Her elbows crack against the floor, burning bright and hot and stinging, and she sucks in fast lungfuls of air, gasping until her chest aches with it.
She bears through the pain, and forces herself up and at Brahms. Her bloodied hand blindly reaches for his soaked shirt again, but he swipes it away with a grunt, his thick palms coming up and shoving Greta once more. Her back hits the ground, and he quickly crowds in after her, dropping down and trapping her hand between their chests.
“Stop it- stop it now, stop moving,” he stresses under his fast breath, adjusting and readjusting as Greta begins to drag her hand down to the bloody mess of his stomach. Her knuckles knock along every rib, and she hopes it bruises him, hopes it marks him black and purple from his heart to his stab wound.
The back of her hand becomes slippery, and the smell of metal reaches her, overwhelms her - Greta flips her hand, and buries her nails into his wet skin with a disgusting squelch.
Brahms’ whole body shudders, but he doesn’t back off, even as he starts panting and shivering with each twitch of her fingers. He curls into her instead, wraps his arms underneath her shoulders to pull her even closer, even tighter, and his chest presses so firmly against hers that she can feel his drumming heartbeat. He ducks his head, knocking it into the side of her face and clipping her cheek with the edge of his mask.
“No, no, no, Greta, no, please-” Brahms whimpers, and she can tell he’s trying to pitch it higher, make it sound like the voice he’d lied to her with so many times, but his breaths are coming too quickly for it to sound like anything else but a man in pain.
“Get off of me,” she chokes out. When he doesn’t do anything, she squeezes her fingers deeper into him. “Get off! ”
“You'll leave again, don't- don't leave me. ”
She can feel blood sickeningly drool down her arm, nails still stabbed deep into Brahms, and Greta’s sick of it, of all it, of blood being a staple in her life, a point that keeps on repeating again and again. It’s all too familiar, and she hates it. She hates it with everything inside of her, but despite it, she still can’t seem to pull her hand away.
It feels almost like a reward, a power, to have a man who’s hurt her bleed out into her open and ready hands.
Greta's stomach turns with the thought.
“I won’t leave, Brahms,” she says, reluctantly prying her nails from him.
Brahms immediately slumps into her, a shiver rolling through him and against her. His arms crush around Greta's shoulders, the hard porcelain of his mask sticking to her clammy neck. “Don’t leave me,” he repeats, as if the act of her not hurting him anymore is worse than anything else.
“I won’t, but you have to get off of me. Let me go.”
He’s holding her too tightly, enough that Greta’s old and new bruises throb in agony, and she thinks, panicked and angry and on repeat; let me go, let me go, let me go, let me go.
“Brahms, I won’t leave. I promise.”
“You promise?” He whispers, and his arms squeeze until Greta’s groaning with it. “You promise to be good?”
She nods, and nods again and hisses out a yes, but it’s not enough for him. He turns his head, the grimy white of his mask peering in the corner of her eye. She feels the curved lips of it press against her ear.
“Will you say it, Greta?” Brahms murmurs. “Say you’ll be good?”
“I’ll-” Her voice breaks. “I’ll be good.”
His grip slackens, and she hears him sigh gently, happily, like she’s just gone and given him a present. Brahms begins to pull up off of her, hands sliding to the ground on either side of Greta’s head and shakily pushing himself up, but- he stops. Brahms hovers above her, until all she can see is him.
She notices flecks of dried blood spattered on him, like someone took a paintbrush and ran their finger down the wet bristles. There's some across the cheek of his mask, across his jaw and his chin. Across his neck, and freckled along his Adam's apple.
Greta briefly imagines reaching out and pressing the brunt of her hand against it. How hard would the pressure have to be to hurt? Her own throat throbs, answering her question. Not a lot.
Her eyes follow the curve of his neck down to the notch in his collarbone, where a stray speck of red sits. He has some in his chest hair too, clumping strands together against his skin.
Greta distantly wonders who the blood belongs to; She thinks about Malcolm, about how beaten his face had been when they’d run away, and how she’d dirtied the motel towels pressing them so tightly against his cuts.
She thinks about Cole, but can only manage to picture the stain he’d left downstairs.
“Let me up now.” Greta says to Brahms’ chest. His knees dig a little bit more into her hips in response, and she looks up to find him staring, flicking his gaze from her mouth to her eyes, and back again.
“Brahms.”
“Greta,” he says, in much the same way she’d uttered his own name. It feels mocking.
It feels like a game.