Razors & Ruin (Rare Horrors #1)

Chapter 32

32

Nellie

N o sooner is the service concluded than Sweeney is away from my side, his focus on the Beadle. My instinct is to follow him, but something keeps me from doing so.

His words trouble me, tapping incessantly like hailstones, a corresponding tattoo beating in my temple as Sweeney’s greeting is met by the Beadle’s cordial but guarded smile.

A threat . Sweeney asked if I was threatening him, but he didn’t demand an answer.

The walk over here was not the loved-up promenade I’d hoped for; although he ambled beside me, he was musing, his quicksilver thoughts locked away in his head.

I waited over ten years, dreaming he’d return to me, yet I never truly believed it would happen.

Then the Earth turned, the stars spoke in whispers, and the man to whom I’d lost my heart was at my door, ready to claim all I was and will ever be.

Does he really think I’d rat him out now, after everything?

As I watch him talk to the despised Beadle, I’m struck by how vital my man looks, how vibrantly alive.

He’s beautiful in his good morning coat and topper, beard shaved artfully as only he can do, and even at church, the heat creeps over the faces of the women as they mill around near him.

Sweeney is too much in many ways—so vehemently sexual, singularly depraved, and utterly magnetic.

Such thoughts I have when I look at him; it’s embarrassing at times. I’m glad he can’t hear my chattering schoolgirl brain.

But God in heaven help him; he can’t leave well enough alone. I’m sure he’s trying to strongarm the Beadle into a second visit to his parlor.

Still, I cannot ignore the possibility that he has suspicions about Johanna—about me — and is deliberately shutting me out.

I should never have written that fucking letter. I hadn’t meant for him to see it when we got back from the party, not least because I didn’t expect him to be with me when I returned, but before he split the envelope, I knew I’d gone too far.

When he burned it, I was so relieved that I almost burst into tears; what a naive fool.

Just because it no longer exists does not mean I can take it back.

Sweeney may be mine, but I forgot an important detail: the dead are perfect. There are no pricks in the graveyard, as they say. Veronica and Johanna remain, crystallized as a vision of a perfect love that I cannot hope to emulate.

It has to be said, though—with every day that passes, Sweeney loses more and more of Currer Brook.

There’s so much he does not remember about Veronica; her likes and dislikes, her interests, who she was as a person. There are gaps, and in those spaces between memory and reality, he crams things he believes are true.

That he and Veronica should have been together. That she loved him.

That he never once hurt her.

I think about fate again. Maybe the tortured past refuses to stay there because I have not committed to a path. Is it Sweeney’s heart I seek to protect or my own?

He’s going through the motions, day by day. I feel his ambivalence toward me—love, but too much. Dependence, too, is a neediness that grows in his heart like weeds.

Yet today, he revealed a truth that has rocked me to my core—he doesn’t trust me. Or he wants me to believe he doesn’t, which is, arguably, worse.

I go to where the devotions are made and put a coin in the dish in return for a tiny candle. I light it on the already-burning one beside it and wonder who to devote myself to.

Easy . I choose him .

I will not resist the unspooling of my fate; if my love demands the truth, I will not impede it, even if it costs me my life.

I bow my head.

“Lord, direct Mr. T on this day,” I mumble. “Keep his mind light and unburdened, that he might be spared truths that can only hurt him. Steer him away from pain. Move me as you must also, in Jesus’s name, He who consorted with the sinners even as the righteous bore down. Amen.”

Sweeney appears at my side. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get out of here while we’re ahead. I can’t speak for God, but the Fates still have a few tricks left up their sleeves for us.”

“How so?”

He grips my hand tightly. “Beadle Higgins is coming for dinner and a shave. About fucking time.”

He lowers his voice. “I take it you’ll serve him, if you catch my drift? Only fair your hungry patrons should finally get their fill of our good friend.”

“You can’t kill him!” I hiss. “Someone will find out! And why now , when you said you want to get alongside the fat cats again?”

He furrows his brow. “Did you really think I would calm down? Did you envisage me at the opera with our upper-class friends, meek as a rabbit in the company of people I despise?”

Oh shit . I should have known.

This is the problem when your most fanciful dream comes true; you have little use thereafter for restraint, even in imagination.

Sweeney’s body hums with the you’re-getting-fucked-hard energy I’ve come to recognize, and despite my trepidation, I’m shaking with a feverish thrill of my own, too caught up in him even now to save myself.

He will murder the Beadle.

It doesn’t matter why, not anymore, but the twat will end the day in my oven, and Mr. Sweeney Todd will have the only satisfaction left to him.

But my man likes his little chats with his quarry. After the disappointment of losing the opportunity to slit the throat of Lord Wetherby, I have to wonder whether he will continue to wheedle and tease, trying to undo his child’s so-called death and rekindle his vengeance.

If the Beadle remembers Johanna, Sweeney will know the letter was a lie. And the paranoia I feel in him—tempered only by his belief that I love him too much to deceive him so catastrophically—will be laid bare.

The oppressive weight of my deceit is pulling me apart. I thought I could carry it forever, but Sweeney is right; I do love him too much.

But only if Johanna really is lost to him. Without her, without the tiny spark of goodness that simply refuses to be snuffed out, he will have nothing but me for all eternity.

As it should be.

I am on this ride with him, careening out of control. I bought my ticket willingly, but it remains to be seen who punches it; fate, the law, or the man I love.

Sweeney’s voice is hot and savage in my ear. It’s the familiar sound of the base, elemental thing he is inside, and my knees weaken, knowing that so many have gone home to Jesus with him echoing in their dying minds.

“The flabby middle is not enough for me, my pet, and you know it,” he murmurs. “I want to get my teeth into the choice cuts. The thoroughbred stock at the top of the food chain. I will cozy up to the flock to lead them to my abattoir, but don’t worry—you and I will get exactly what is coming to us in the end.”