Razors & Ruin (Rare Horrors #1)

Chapter 19

19

Nellie

I lean my weight into Sweeney, but he holds me aloft, enjoying the tension in my neck. A choked sound escapes me, and he removes the hand gripping my face and slides it around my waist.

It’s a perverse waltz; we need no tune to accompany it save the gentle pattering splashes of the warm blood at our feet. The flow is slowing down, thickening, and the former guttersnipe is a lifeless mannequin, lying on his side like a gutter drunk.

Sweeney slides his hand into the small on my back and dips me, my hair trailing in the blood. As he pulls me upright, it whips the wall with a fresh arc of vermillion to add to the drying slashes that scream on the dirty magnolia wallpaper.

He walks me backward until my calves smash into the metal step of the barber’s chair. Then all there is is him, looming over me, blood crisscrossing his shirt in vibrant arcs as though he’s been lashed.

Sweeney’s smile is one I’ve never seen before, at least not on him. It’s almost tender, and my chest flares at the thought of him looking at Veronica or his daughter that way.

“Mr. T.” I throw my head back and gaze at him from beneath my heavy lids. “There’s nothin’ I wouldn’t do for you. Nowhere I wouldn’t go, no bad thing that’d be sin enough to leave you behind. Can anyone else say that?”

He knows I mean Johanna. Sainted, blessed, God-I-hope-she’s-dead Johanna, who, even if she lived, couldn’t be the one to save him now. That’s for me and me alone.

He walks behind the chair and, without warning, stomps on the ratchet mechanism. The chair flies back with a squeal of gears, and I scream, afraid I’ll hit the floor, but I find myself slightly inverted, the blood rushing to my head.

Sweeney’s hands are a blur as he unbuttons his fly, his cock surging toward my face.

“Nellie.” He weaves his hands through my hair, shifting my head so I’m almost upside-down, my jaw flexing. “I’m gonna fuck your face, my pretty. All you have to do is take what I’m giving you.”

I gasp as his heat crowds my mouth. His cockhead is smooth and hot, already juicy as it slides along my soft palate and into my throat, and the salty taste is strong. My muscles pump, closing on his shaft, and I fight for control, my eyes streaming.

“You’re a wonder, my girl, a proper wonder.” He frees a hand from the tangle of my hair so he can slide it over my sweat-slick neck, squeezing so he can feel his cock inside my tortured trachea.

“That’s some fucking hot shit. How do you like me, treacle? You like it when I stick a cunt? I’ll fuck yours for every soul I bleed. All this shit,” he stomps his foot, thrusting savagely deep and sending a splash of blood into the air, “is for you.”

For me. Let it be true . I allow myself a moment and imagine attending the ball tonight, proudly displayed upon his arm. I have one good dress; I kept it boxed up just in case?—

I cough as Sweeney pulls free. He releases my trembling body and pauses, his breathing ragged and harsh, and his cock thrums with energy, inches from my lips.

He clutches it, pumping his fist over the length. “I could—no.” He slips his hand beneath my neckline, his pall hot on my cold breast. “What does my slutty little Nellie want?”

As I check in with myself, I realize my pussy is acting out, twitching and gushing with an unseemly amount of juice. My clit is too fat, too rude in my underwear, needing attention.

“Will you eat me?” I ask.

Sweeney repositions himself between my thighs, adjusting the chair flat so I’m less liable to slide off. “Eat you?” he says. “I’d be delighted. Unaccompanied? Or do you, Mrs. Lovett, offer any condiments for my delectation?”

“There’s a lot of sauce just lying around, sir,” I venture, sitting on my elbows so I can see his face. “You know. To add flavor.”

Sweeney’s eyes are dark and mirthful between my milky thighs. With a rummage and a tuck, my skirts are out of the way, and my knickers turn to rags with a nick of the cutthroat razor. The damn thing seems to emerge from his hand like another finger, an extension of his hand.

He rolls the flat of the razor over my mound, the cold making my skin pucker. The sensation travels as he draws it down, cresting my labia and pressing the relentless hardness to my turgid little button. I’m breathing through the exquisite pressure when I feel a wet hand on my thigh.

Sweeney has reached beneath him and gathered a good handful of blood, and I watch in sickened arousal as he spreads it methodically over my skin.

What was pale and dry becomes a claret-colored canvas of death, and he nudges me with the razor, never stopping the smooth motions of his other hand.

Dip and paint, dip and paint, like an artist, until everything from breasts to knees is vermillion.

The blood is still warm, but chills fast, giving me a creeping feeling of weakness. It’s as though it’s my blood, coming up from within like a ground spring and oozing from every pore. Sweeney sits back and surveys his work with a look of satisfaction.

“Beautiful,” he says, more to himself than me. Then his face disappears between my legs, and his mouth is hot on my needy pussy lips, his tongue replacing the cold steel on my clit.

“Ohh fuck!” I cry, arching my back, but he drops a heavy hand in my stomach and holds me down. “That’s so good. Do it more!”

“Needy little whore you are, Nellie,” he murmurs against my wetness. “Whatever you say. You like my mouth on your cunt?”

I nod frantically, and he lashes my clit firmly, replacing it instantly with the flat side of the razor. I still my movements, afraid to be cut, and he laughs deep in his throat as he slips two thick fingers into my steaming hole.

“You look like meat, Nellie,” he says, his voice warm with amusement. “It’s fucking sexy. You want me to lean you out?” He slips the razor along my folds, just too lightly to cut, and I shudder. “Take down a few trimmings?”

“Don’t tease me,” I sigh. “You’re insane, and I don’t care. Make me come. I deserve it, don’t I?”

“Oh, treacle, let’s not get started on what you deserve.” He surprises me by leaning over my body and kissing me passionately, his lips hot and tasting of copper and sex. “You want me inside you?”

“God, yes!”

“God won’t give you what you need, my love. Beg me .”

“Give it to me, please.” I tilt my hips, grazing the base of his cock with my slit, and he snarls. “I’m begging. You like it? You like to make little Nellie whine and mewl for your fucking?”

Sweeney needs no further encouragement, and he crawls over me, pushing my legs up as he moves. I slump back onto the chair as he bottoms out hard, the freezing steel of his blade still jammed up against my clit.

“Let’s not cut you down there,” he breathes into my ear. “Not today.” He stills his body and draws the razor up between us, the sharp edge nicking and fraying my blouse, the buttons popping loose. “What about here?”

He swipes at my nipple, catching it just underneath, and I grit my teeth as a teardrop of blood swells at the site of the delicate puncture, no bigger than a needle prick. It feels like molten lava as it runs down the swell of my tit, mixing with the drying blood of our unfortunate friend on the floor.

“You’re a sacrifice,” Sweeney whispers, pulling back his hips. The corded muscles of his back flex beneath my palms. “Aren’t you treacle? It’s just like you said—there’s nothing you won’t do.”

He lowers his lips to my bleeding peak, and I groan, the agony giving way to an insistent tug of relief, my nerve endings seized and misfiring as they meander from pleasure to pain.

My pussy is stretched to beyond what I thought possible—where my man found more girth, I’ll never know—and yet more blood seems to swell forth, engorging him further as he moves in and out of my spasming cunt.

“Perfection,” Sweeney says, rolling his body as he tries to find more space, “You've got me so hard. I may never get out of your pussy alive, my pet, but there are worse ways to go.”

He withdraws almost entirely before plunging back inside, and I yelp, my clit pounding against his shaft as he grinds.

I’m going to come. I’m pasted head-to-toe in the blood of a stranger, with Sweeney so relentlessly hard and alive as he ravages my softness. It’s more than I can take.

He’s sick. I’m sick. We can be exactly as cursed as we are, always, forever, and I’ll be delighted. Saint Peter can stick his redemption up his big pearly gate as long as I’ve got my Mr. T.

And no one else can make him feel like I can. No way .

Sweeney feels me clamping down on his cock and grips my throat again. “Eyes on mine, Nellie,” he hisses. “Right now, love. Look at me while you come, there's my good little slut.”

I cry out into his mouth as he crushes me with a kiss. He gives an almost death-like moan of anguished release as he unloads into me, his weight forcing the air from my lungs as he collapses onto my quivering body.

He killed a man, then fucked me like something genuinely feral. It was an exchange, a deal; he had to complete the circuit. To slash a throat is freedom, a joyous release. A masturbatory act, almost, and as such, not enough.

To Sweeney Todd, the base desires to kill and fuck walk hand-in-hand, and I’m the only one—the only fucking person—who understands and accepts that.

His head rests on my chest, and I run my hand through his hair.

“You’re a lucky man,” I whisper.

“Of course,” he replies, lifting his head to look at me. “A lady after my own heart, Mrs. L, and a perfect fit all around.”

There’s not much to do to improve our appearance. We’re both drenched in blood from head to toe, the room looks as bad as it smells, and the dead fucker on the floor is starting to stiffen up.

“We need to move him,” I say.

“There might be more.” Sweeney rearranges his clothes and regards the corpse ruefully. “Scumbags I have to despatch, that is.”

“So they’ll be stacking up like sides of fucking beef? Whatever happened to courting the discerning wealthy?”

Sweeney picks up his razor and wipes it on a towel, polishing it to a sheen before putting it in its wallet. “I’m not fussy. Not everyone who comes through here can be the upper crust.”

I’m staring at the heap of dead man when the penny drops.

Don’t worry what goes in ‘em, sweetpea.

It don’t matter what fills the crust as long as someone’ll pay to swallow it.

You think I don’t want to eat the rich? Fucking think again.

The upper crust.

I go to Sweeney’s side and tug his blood-drenched sleeve. “Now, hear me out, but I have…a notion.”

He arches a brow. “Indulge me, treacle.”

“It seems to me—well, as you said. Eat the rich. Or the poor. I can’t get my hands on good pie filling to save my life, not even for cash, and does it really matter once they’re dead anyway? Cleaner than bloody rat, or most of ‘em should be.”

I pace the floor. “I’ll need better herbs and probably some new tools, but it’ll be far less work and outlay. No reason for anyone to catch on.”

I glance up to see Sweeney staring at me with open admiration in his eyes, and I bask in it, triumphant.

“To be clear, pet,” he says, a slow smile creeping over his handsome face, “you are talking about grinding up the various human-ish animals of this city—high and low, rich and poor—and whacking their seasoned mince under a pastry lid. Then serving said fare to customers who will trough away, blissfully unaware they’re digesting their fellow men, betters and worsts alike?”

I nod, and he begins to laugh.

Of course this is a good idea. It’s the greatest idea ever.

Not just because it appeals to Mr. T’s sense of justice, if he has one, but because he will be inexorably bound to me by a shared secret so depraved, so delicious, that he will never be able to leave.

All he has to do is agree, and he’s mine. Johanna and all she represents will fly apart like dead leaves in his mind, replaced by Death's own playground. Just for us .

“Why, Nellie.” Sweeney’s voice is as soft as a summer breeze as he takes my hands in his. “You’re as practical as you are charming. I am a lucky man.”