Page 153
Chapter 153 of "Our Pretty Darling Psycho" kicks off with: “My new pet hamster. My pack just got him for me—I found the little surprise... Continue reading!
“My new pet hamster. My pack just got him for me—I found the little surprise waiting on the kitchen island this morning, a new photograph showing his little cage, the sweetest thing. But duty called before I could properly meet him, what with that lovely invitation to attend to.” I wave a dismissive, blood-flecked hand toward the warehouse and its muffled symphony of screams. “Now that it’s handled, we can make him a perfect little home in Monaco. Tell me—do private jets allow hamsters?”
Puddin.
They named him Puddin, the absolute menaces, the only three souls alive who know what that name costs me—who know about the first Puddin, the small soft creature that was the one love of my childhood that never once betrayed me, the loss I carried like a stone in my chest for half my life.
They gave me back the one uncomplicated love the world ever stole, and they wrapped it in a photograph of the four of us so I’d understand, without a single word, that the loneliness is over.
That I have a pack now who will never once make me bury what I love.
I think of the little creature waiting in his cage on the kitchen island, blameless and sweet and entirely mine, and the joy of it sits so enormous in my chest I could weep, here in the salt air, with a dead man’s screams for music.
“Anything you wish, Miss Valentine.”
“Good.”
I turn away from the warehouse and begin to walk toward the waiting car, toward the future of Monaco, and onward where my men, my new name, and the rest of a life I clawed back from the grave one patient move at a time.
Behind me, my ex-husband’s screams rise and fall like the last movement of a song I composed myself, and I tip my face up to the warm and unfamiliar sun, and smile.
Vengeance is my new favorite obsession.
F.I.N.