“Aaron is dead, you moron,” she scoffs, each word like gravel as it slithers past her snake-like lips. “You really think I’d keep him around?” Kali uses a tree to get to her feet, still gasping and wheezing in such an awful way that I wish I’d just killed her when I had the chance. “A big-dicked pet? I raped him once and finished him—which is more than Neil ever did for Penelope, huh?”

Red flashes across my eyes, and I know that she’s just done it, pushed a button that can’t be undone. I’m going to kill her, and this time, I’m not going to stop. I go for Kali, but when she turns, she has a tube of lipstick that doesn’t look quite right.

Fuck my life, it’s a stun gun, isn’t it? They make those, you know, for women’s self-defense. They hurt, sure, but they’re not nearly as powerful as say, a TASER. I should be fine. Should, being the key word.

The air crackles with electricity as Kali shoves that gold tube into the stab wound on my side as hard as she can. My body revolts, my fingers tightening around the knife blades and then releasing. I end up on my back on the forest floor, biting my own tongue and convulsing.

The price for my pity.

Like I said, the universe doesn’t play fair deals. Villains are not killed with kindness.

And even a cheap stun gun hurts when it’s pressed into raw, bloody flesh.

“You stupid goddamn bitch,” Kali laughs, choking again as she stumbles over to me, looking down on her handiwork with an awful smile. It doesn’t quite fit her face, like it was designed for somebody else and plastered there against her will. She kneels down beside me as I struggle to pull myself together enough to stand up.

Jesus Christ, where the fuck was she hiding that?! Not in her teeny, tiny panties, that’s for fucking sure.

“Since this is the last time we’ll ever talk, I just want you to know that I didn’t hate you at first. You drove me to it. Bernadette, I loved you like a sister in the beginning.” Kali scoots a little closer to me, reaching out to brush some hair from my forehead. I try to slap her away, but my hands and arms are too twitchy, and I can’t seem to make my body do what I want it to.

Plus, I’m still bleeding. Bleeding and bleeding and bleeding.

Maybe I’ll always be bleeding, both physically and metaphorically. Maybe that’s the price of my fate.

“You think you’re so high and mighty, Bernie. I used to look up to you, but then I realized that you’re too deep inside your head to care about anyone but yourself.” Kali grabs my hair and jerks my head up, putting one of the abandoned knives to my throat. “And there’s only room for one queen in this city. Listen to me good, Bernie: it isn’t going to be you.”

My fingers dig into the dirt, and I manage to get myself together enough to fling it into Kali’s eyes. She cries out as I roll away, but I’m still stumbling and struggling to make my body work the way it’s supposed to.

So I do what I can, crawling into the blackberry bushes as Kali struggles to clear her eyes and locate me in the dark. It isn’t so easy to see out here. City assholes always gripe about the dark, but you haven’t seen shit until you’ve been out on a country night.

“Bernadette,” Kali calls sweetly, like we’re playing hide and seek, like she’s truly Neil Pence’s awful, little soul mate. “I always knew you didn’t have the ovaries to actually do it, to hurt me like that. You’re pathetic.” Kali moves away, back in the direction of the playground. Or … what I think is the playground. “Think about it,” she calls out, voice ringing in the dark. “You called Havoc for nothing. You’re out here bleeding alone in the dark.”

She laughs at me as I struggle to get my bearings. To be honest, I have no idea where we are anymore. Somehow, during the fight, we’ve moved.

I keep crawling, slow and quiet, still twitching, my heart racing like crazy. The next time Kali speaks, calling out my name like a summoning spell spilling from the mouth of a witch, I unstrap the blade from my thigh and clutch it as tightly as I can with spasming fingers.

As soon as I hit the edge of the bushes, I shove up to my feet and start to run. A gunshot hits the tree to my right as I make a sudden left and sprint toward the edge of the cemetery. Fuck, shit, son of a bitch. She found her gun.

Of course this is where it would end—just as it did for Neil—in the darkness of a moonlit graveyard.

The graves here are old and utilitarian, nothing like they were at Our Lady of Mercy. There’s not much to hide behind. So I don’t bother. I just turn and watch Kali stalking across the grass toward me, gun in hand.

“Look,” I say, dropping the knife and holding my hands up in mock surrender. She keeps coming, so I fall to my knees, knowing that she’ll enjoy that, the exchange of power. “If you’re really carrying Neil’s baby …”

“Of course I am,” she says, pausing about six feet away from me. Close enough to get a shot, but far enough away that she doesn’t think I can surprise her. My fingers dig into the grass as I drop them to my sides. There’s a piece of broken headstone that I cling to, careful to keep my movements quiet. The knife I just dropped is too obvious, shining silver about a foot in front of my knees; this is better. “Neil loved me, Bernadette. He loved me.” She pauses and adjusts her grip on the weapon, two-handed and very steady.

You very well could die here, you idiot. Because you’re still clinging to morals you have no right to.

“Do you want to know where he is?” I ask quietly, keeping my eyes averted. If I look her dead in the face, she’ll know I hate her too much to ever let this go and she’ll have to kill me right here and now. But Kali wants to talk because she’s always loved an audience. There’s no point to my dying without anyone around to see it.

“You killed him,” Kali says, but she doesn’t seem quite so sure of herself which I like.

“He left,” I whisper, finally daring to look up at her. She’s standing against the moon, so I can’t see anything about her other than her silhouette. Since I’m bathed in silver moonlight, I bet she can see everything, right down to the finely painted bones on my skeleton mask. “When the boys and I confronted him. We couldn’t very well kill a cop and he knew it, so we gave him a choice …”

“You’re a liar!” Kali screams, stepping forward. Her hands are shaking now, not so sure of herself as she thinks. “He wouldn’t leave me here like that. We had something different; we understood each other. No, no, you killed him. You and those dirty, rotten Havoc boys.”

I smile at her, aware that in the next thirty seconds, one of us is going to die. I’m going to make sure of that.

“He ran away because he didn’t care about you, Kali. Nobody does.” I pause and shake my head, slurring my words a bit. Guess that’s what an electric shock will do to you. “Nobody but me. I loved you like a sister, too, like an equal to Penelope. But you fucked me over. And for what? A chance at a pageant you didn’t win? A jealousy that was unfounded because Aaron could never love you when he was made for me?” I pause and grasp fully onto the bit of stone. If I time this right, I can hit her with it. It’s hard to take a shot at someone when a brick of cement is being lobbed at your face. “You threw away my love for something cheap and replaceable. I hope that, wherever you go after this, you remember that.”