Til Death (As Promised)

On Valentine’s Day, the city dressed itself in red.

Not aggressively. Not gaudy. Just subtle enough to feel intentional. Storefront windows glowed in soft blush tones. Restaurants pretended to be intimate. Even the February air felt warmer than it should have, as if it understood the assignment.

Emma loved days like this.

Not because she needed grand gestures — she didn’t. She liked the quiet rituals. The grocery-store bouquet. The cheap champagne. The way Daniel always burned the first thing he tried to cook and blamed the stove like it had personally betrayed him.

They’d been together six years.

Long enough that friends stopped asking when the wedding would be. Long enough that comfort had replaced performance. Long enough that love felt less like fireworks and more like gravity — constant, unseen, pulling them toward each other no matter what.

Daniel was already home when she walked in that evening.

Candles. Music. A pan smoking gently on the stove.

She smiled.

“Is that… chicken?”

“It was,” he said. “Now it’s carbon.”

She laughed, dropped her bag, and walked into his arms.

He smelled like citrus soap and heat.

He kissed her temple.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” he murmured.

And for a moment, it felt like every love story she’d ever rolled her eyes at. The safe kind. The predictable kind. The kind where nothing bad ever really happens.

Dinner was edible.

The champagne was not.

They drank it anyway.

By ten, the city outside had gone quiet. Emma curled into the corner of the couch, legs draped across Daniel’s lap. A movie played — something romantic and forgettable.

She studied him in profile.

He was beautiful in the unpolished way. Slight scar along his jaw from a childhood accident. Hands too large for the wine glass he held. A man who always seemed solid. Reliable.

“You ever think about it?” she asked softly.

“About what?”

“Forever.”

He didn’t hesitate.

“Every day.”

She smiled.

He turned to look at her fully then. Something unreadable flickered across his face — too quick to name.

“If I asked,” he said carefully, “you’d say yes.”

It wasn’t a question.

She laughed. “Of course I would.”

His eyes lingered on her a second too long.

The movie credits rolled.

The candles burned low.

And somewhere between one breath and the next, something shifted.

Emma woke up cold.

That was her first clear thought.

Cold.

The room was wrong. Too dim. Too still.

She tried to move and couldn’t.

Her wrists were restrained — not painfully, but firmly. Secured to something metal.

Her head pounded.

There was a smell she didn’t recognize. Antiseptic. Iron.

“Daniel?”

Silence.

Her heart began to race.

“Daniel.”

A door opened.

But it wasn’t their apartment.

White tile. Fluorescent light. A narrow hallway.

Daniel stepped into view.

He wasn’t panicked.

He wasn’t confused.

He was calm.

“Hey,” he said gently, like she’d woken from a nap. “You’re up.”

Her throat tightened. “What is this?”

“You know how you asked about forever?” he said.

His voice was still soft. Still affectionate.

“That’s what this is.”

The restraints tightened when she pulled.

Her pulse thundered in her ears.

“You’re scaring me.”

“I would never hurt you,” he said immediately.

And he meant it.

That was the worst part.

He stepped closer. His expression almost apologetic.

“You’re the only one who makes sense,” he whispered. “The only one who stays.”

“What are you talking about?”

He reached into his pocket.

A syringe.

Clear liquid.

Her breath stuttered.

“Daniel—”

“It’ll be quick,” he promised.

“I love you.”

The needle entered her arm.

Cold flooded her veins.

Her vision blurred.

And the last thing she saw was his face leaning over hers, tender as a husband at a hospital bedside.

Daniel reported her missing the next morning.

Crying. Shaking. Devastated.

He told police she’d gone out early for coffee and never returned.

He handed over her phone. Her laptop. Security footage from their building.

He answered every question.

He attended the candlelight vigil.

He spoke about her in past tense with heartbreaking restraint.

For three weeks, he was the picture of grief.

Until they found her.

Buried beneath a storage unit leased under a different name.

A name that wasn’t his.

But linked to his bank account.

The evidence unraveled slowly.

Purchases. Chemicals. A rented van.

And then they found the others.

Three women.

All brunette. All similar height. All disappeared on dates that meant something.

Anniversaries.

Holidays.

Birthdays.

Each one found in a place Daniel had once described to Emma as “private.”

Police arrested him without incident.

He did not resist.

He did not cry.

He asked one question.

“Did she suffer?”

No one answered.

The courtroom was too bright.

Daniel wore a suit Emma had bought him for a wedding they’d never attended.

He looked smaller somehow. Contained.

The prosecution laid it out cleanly.

Premeditation. Pattern. Obsession.

They called it ritualistic.

They called it possessive pathology.

They called it escalation.

He listened without reaction.

When it was his turn, he stood.

His attorney argued mental instability. Trauma. Abandonment issues. Dissociation.

Daniel corrected him.

“I knew what I was doing,” he said calmly.

The courtroom shifted.

“You’re confessing?” the prosecutor asked.

He nodded once.

“I loved them.”

A murmur rippled through the gallery.

“You loved them?” the prosecutor repeated.

“Yes.”

“And killing them was part of that?”

Daniel’s gaze remained steady.

“Keeping them was.”

Flashbulbs popped outside the courthouse like distant fireworks — bright, celebratory, grotesquely misplaced. Reporters whispered about monsters. Commentators used words like evil and deviant and broken.

Daniel disliked those words.

They suggested chaos.

He had never been chaotic.

He had planned anniversaries. He had lit candles. He had chosen music carefully. He had whispered promises in the dark and meant every one of them.

Forever wasn’t metaphorical.

It was logistical.

The clerk approached with a Bible.

“Please raise your right hand.”

Daniel did.

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

Daniel smiled — small, intimate, almost private.

And said,

“I do.”