Edward imagines Terence’s rage: white-hot, immune to reason, blinding.
Terence bites, claws, and shreds with a terrifying fury.
She has never made a sound. She has never moved.
At last, Terence looks up at the silver light from the moon hidden behind clouds and sends a howl of triumph into the air. The bitch is at last done, dispatched with deadly efficiency.
He wants a trophy. He plunges both hands into the shell of her, tearing and cutting through muscle and bone until he wraps his hands around her heart.
He rips it out, offering it up to the moon.
But the heart is cold, the wounds bloodless, dry.
Something inside Terence closes, like a fist, tight and protective. He drops the cold heart to the ground.
Edward sobs behind him.
Terence turns and sees Edward incapacitated by grief. He knows what’s wrong even as he turns back to the still figure beneath him. Her head has turned as he ripped her apart like a lion attacking a gazelle.
He will never forget her face. That face that remains intact, so still and so beautiful.
Maria.
Dead at last.
This time, when he sends a strangled cry into the night sky, it is not one of triumph, but of anguish.
*
Elise ignores the stitch, ignores the fact there is no more air left in her lungs. She runs on adrenaline alone. Gray light spills over the housing project looming over her, illuminating the broken and boarded-up windows, the gang graffiti, and the rusting guardrails of balconies no one dares to use, except for suicide.
Yet never has a place looked more welcoming. Elise continues to sprint toward it, heart pounding. The first fingers of dawn, magenta-tinted, are creeping over the lake behind her, as the city comes to life.
Elise looks behind her. She will always be looking behind her.
The End