Queen's Gambit [OneShot]

Drip... Drip... Drip... An almost manic look is fixed on my face , as I stand in the pool of crimson spreading about my feet, droplets of the vitae that had once pumped life through the wretches veins, running in rivulets down the blade of the knife that had slain him. Red mist settles upon my cheeks, standing in stark contrast to how pale my flesh looks in the moonlight. streaming through the window. I'm panting, a mixture of exertion and the most twisted form of pleasure, breath turning to a white fog in the night's chill, otherwise frozen, chest rising, falling, rising, falling. Like a still frame, encapsulated in the frame of my artistry, my murder. My canvas, the squalid hovel this rat resides, nests. And still, as ever. Drip. Drip. Drip.

I can still see the terror in his eyes, a sadistic, wicked grin smearing across my face, distorted, warped, both on the surface, and deep underneath. I have no compunction admitting it. I am, truly, a hellspawned witch of a young woman. Merciless. Violent. Bloodthirsty. A heart so black, light cannot escape once it touches me. The fact that I revel in the sight of his final moments of abject horror as the steel in my hand claimed him forever. The spark of life, snuffed out, consumed, a blackout on his existence. In my eyes, beautiful. Exquisite. A fitting start to my personal conquest...

I'd toyed with him of course. Slipped in unseen, without so much as a single person noticing. More difficult than one might think, with detritus littering the floor of the dilapidated end of the district. My district. Such a place should not exist here, let alone be inhabited by these vermin. But still, I had slunk in, my hooded jacket and combat trousers serving to keep me hidden from view. He'd woken to the scraping of my trademark knife. Scratching against the rusted steel. He was groggy for only a few seconds before I'd begun to call out in a sing song, tapping the blade against the piping, an eerily girlish tone, breathy, full of anticipation and malice.

'Click. Clack. Don't look back. Miss Murder's going to find you...' I'd let out a childish giggle then, vanishing into the shadows of his... Well... I'm loathe to call it a room, but the area he had been sleeping. He'd sat bolt upright, looking about, wild-eyed. My giggle escaped me again, so distinctly against the backdrop of my purpose. 'Who's there? What do you want?' A sadistic chuckle, before that singsong voice again, purely for the purpose of un-nerving him. 'Hush, now. Don't cry out. Your life, draws to, a close, now.' He scrabbled backward from the sound of my voice, whimpering slightly, much to my amusement, another round of tittering falling from my flawless lips...

My attentions turn to the final part of my coming here, my hand dropping down as I kneel, trailing through the mass of still-steaming crimson that now trickles from the corpse at my feet. The grin on my face is almost inhuman, beginning to paint letters upon the wall. Y It's left for one person in particular. Someone who I'd thought was long gone. O Dead and buried in the past. U One of the few rats that I could bear to harbour and respect for. R My hand dips into the pool of blood again, touching up the letters so there is no mistaking the message I write, my mind wandering once more to the memory of those last exquisite moments.

His scrabbling away had done him little good. M Dread took hold of him, freezing him, like ice in his arteries, my footsteps ominously creeping closer to him, a dull thump on ill-fitted boards. O 'Lie. Still. Don't breathe, a word. There's no, more time, for fe-ar.' The singsong voice rings out against the silence once, more, his head shaking a negative while my own remains fixed upon his. V Inexorable. Inescapable. It's too late for this one to do anything about his fate now. A hand snakes out, seizing him by the collar, dragging him to the middle of the room. 'Click.' My knife flicked out with it's distinctive metallic noise. 'Clack.' Clack. 'Behold my blade.' My blade, suspended before his glassy optics, his sanity reaching for any alternative but reality. 'The last thing you shall see...' With no further preamble, I had ended him, with a single swift motion... E.

I step back from my work, a final underscore beneath the two words completing my task, drinking in the heady scent of death that clings to this place now, grinning sadistically at the writing on the wall...

YOUR MOVE.