Kiss, Marry, Kill

Get up. Get up. Get up.

The words rang through her head like a cannon. The voice was loud and desperate and sounded nothing like her own. But she knew it was. 

She groaned and rolled to her side. Blood dripped from the side of her forehead, smearing across the cement. 

She scrambled against the ground with her scabbed hands and tried to get back on her feet. She could hear him coming toward her and was surprised by the anger that mauled through her. 

Not panic.

Not fear. 

Red, hot, boiling fury. 

She was going to kill him. 

Kill Him. 

Her wrath seemed to lift her to her feet and before he could come closer, she planted her foot into his stomach. 

He made an audible “Oof,” and fell forwards. 

She lunged at his head, knocking him over with the force of her weight. She began to pull at his hair, ripping out handfuls, and claw at his eyes, leaving bright red streaks across his eyelids. 

He groaned and twisted his arms out from under her legs. 

With his left hand he sank his nails into the flesh of her waist and punched her ribs with his right.

The crunch of his knuckles colliding with her bones was sickening and she gritted her teeth as she fell to the side. 

She crawled away as fast as she could.

A weapon. I need a weapon. 

Something metal and hard came down on her skull that sent a vibrating rattle careening through her mind. Her head was in a thousand places, bouncing over her hands into the walls, rolling and rolling; up and down and in between. 

Her vision was fuzzy and bright, and then black. 

She heard a scream. A scream that did not sound like hers. But she knew it was. 

“Mrs. Clairvo? Mrs. Clairvo? Are you all right in there?” 

Wren gasped, the memory fading like water spilling over a freshly painted portrait. She clutched the edge of the table, her heart racing and skin slick with sweat. 

She glanced at her reflection in the mirror in front of her and cringed. The scar across her face had been well concealed by the make up; a lightning bolt shrouded in clouds.  

“Mrs. Clairvo, please answer. Do you need help?”

“I’m fine!” Wren answered, barely able to hide the break in her voice. She tried to smooth her trembling hand over her dress, the white silk almost blinding. 

What part of her had ever wanted this? 

Maybe when she was a young girl, innocent and starry eyed, flipping through her parent’s wedding album and dancing in her princess dresses. 

But she wasn’t a princess. 

She was a moth trapped in a web. 

An elaborate, suffocating web. 

Her chin trembled and she curled in her lips refusing to cry. 

“Everyone is waiting.”

“I just need a few more minutes!” 

Wren listened to Mrs. Haver’s worried huff and counted the footsteps as they descended down the stairs.  

Her fiancé had wrapped his malicious finger around every single friend, family member, and acquaintance that had ever come into their vicinity. Even their wedding planner, Mrs. Haver, had fallen under his spell.

Just as she once had. She’d been lonely then, struggling to make ends meet with a low-paying consulting job, and sending half her paycheck to her impoverished family, who were newly immigrated and trying desperately to stay afloat as they worked minimum wage jobs. She didn’t know why someone like him had walked into the office that day. But he had. And he’d approached her when she’d gotten up to refill her coffee. 

Months later she would wonder if there was more she could have seen. The hungry glint in his eyes? The smirk that hinted at the dark ego lurking underneath? 

No. She’d only seen his soft smile, the way his eyes lit up when he saw her, and the gentleness with which he touched her, embraced her when their first date became many. 

She’d brought him to family dinners, eager to introduce him to her parents and sisters, even telling her neighbor and an old lady at the grocery store about him. 

She’d been like a frog getting boiled. 

It’d started out small. 

Hauling her away by her arm one night, claiming she’d eaten too much at his colleague’s barbecue. 

 Not letting her watch the shows she wanted. 

Demanding she wear different outfits. 

Taking her phone.

Insisting she let him handle things. 

Requiring she accomplish certain tasks before she could leave the house. 

Cancelling plans with family and friends behind her back, until, slowly, the only contact they had to her was through him. 

By the time she realized she was a bird with her wings clipped and an anxious weariness seemed to creep along the edges of each day; she’d already moved in. 

His heart melting smiles stretched into something more devious. His once soft touches held a raw hunger that seemed to claw into her rather than hold or caress. 

He told her she was being dramatic. She was careless, forgetful, emotional. 

He seized her credit card and all other financial ownership when she was asleep one night and when she went to buy milk in the morning and couldn’t, something in her had snapped. She felt desperate and broken, but most of all- angry. Furious. She yearned to flee, to fly and run and be free, but more than anything she needed to break something. To break something and take back what had been hers. 

And it wasn’t until she tried to fight back that he became violent. 

He paid the housekeeping staff extra, most likely in threats as much as in money, in case they happened to hear Wren’s cries. 

Although he’d made sure they were alone the night he pushed her down the stairs and when he slammed her into their marble countertop so hard that she’d cracked three ribs, and snapped her wrist following a tense lunch date, and hit her in the head with a metal bar when, for the third time, she had tried to escape. 

The list went on. 

And it was at night, when she laid in their bed, broken and bleeding, that he threatened to ruin her family, for their hard earned jobs to be lost in the matter of a single conversation. He was a powerful man and her insides curled with disgust when she remembered how proud she’d once been that someone like him had been interested in her. 

She couldn’t believe in her stupidity. But her mistakes only acted as kindling for the fire that burned hotter in her every day.   

Because Wren didn’t just suffer. Her anger molded to something sharp and she learned things, too. Like how he favored using the date of when they met as a passcode for bypassing the locks on his drawers, his computer, car, and what she had long suspected was a piece of the elaborate encryption used to protect the safe in his office. 

Or how his reputation was built upon a tremendously fragile foundation of appearance. 

Or how tax evasion and fraud were only the beginning of his crimes. 

Or how he thought that she was as dumb and helpless as she’d been the day that they met. 

Or how he thought that the inferno smoldering and building within her was nothing more than a knee jerk reaction, an outburst that could be easily snuffed out. 

And it was the night before their wedding that he'd grazed his finger over her jaw and told her what exactly was kept in that safe, and what exactly he would do to her if she didn’t make their marriage a painless one.  

Wren took one last breath, letting her gaze fall over the intricate folds and ornate shine of her dress. It was an impressively stunning selection from the newest Vera Wang collection and nothing like what she would have chosen. 

But she took comfort in how the grandeur of the fabric almost seemed to hide her and as she exited the room, she tried to let the extra weight in the skirt pulling against her waist instill a sense of confidence in her trembling resolve.   

The wedding was supposed to be a quaint outdoor gathering and of course it was anything but. Everyone from her fiancée’s work, which was a cult in and of itself, stared at Wren as she crossed over the rose petal aisle. Vibrant bouquets of pink peonies and shimmering chiffon hung from the oak trees overhead, glowing white lights winding up the thick trunks. 

She could feel her family's presence as she came closer to the elaborately carved wedding arch her fiancée and the pastor were standing under, and she couldn’t dare look at them. Imagining their hopeful smiles alone made her feel as though she would vomit. 

Finally, she came to him. He looked handsome and clean in his dark tuxedo and the look in his eyes could have cut her if she wasn’t already steel. 

Wren breathed through her nose and met his gaze. This was nothing more than a task to be marked off his list, a loose string to be tied. 

She wanted the last thought he had to be of her. She wanted to linger in his thoughts like he lingered in hers. Like the way his presence persisted in her bones and bruises, and her hair tingled with the touches of his fingers, and her heart palpitated with the feeling of his breath on her cheek. 

And so she waited. Through the ‘Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here’ to the ‘in sickness and health,’ until finally the oversized diamond was slid over her finger, and they were pronounced husband and wife. 

“You may kiss the bride!” 

But he did not kiss her. Wren tilted her head in and pressed her lips to his before he could even blink, allowing every flame of hatred and fear to burn across their mouths. 

When she pulled away, surprise spread across his face, she only smiled as she withdrew the pistol from her dress and fired. 

Kate sat back from her computer, satisfied. Completing this scene brought her a sweet and strange sort of relief. As her eyes swept over her last paragraph she grabbed her phone and rang up her editor to tell her the news. 

“Yes!” Stacy exclaimed, the ecstasy evident in her voice. “Like dead, dead?” 

“As a doornail.” 

“Thank the heavens and every star they hold.” Everyone hated Wren’s fiancé, but none so much as Stace. Nothing got her quite riled up like a good old domestic abuse story. If she could have waged a war against toxic patriarchy and eaten the remains for breakfast she would have. Instead she helped Kate draft and corrected her grammar mistakes, and occasionally vocalized death threats against her male antagonists. 

“Is the next draft ready then?” 

“Yeah, I’ll send it over today,” Kate said, adding a missing comma a few sentences back. 

“How’s our girl doing?” Stacy asked, referring to Wren. To Stacy, Wren felt like some kind of literary offspring that she was the joint mother to. And although Kate felt the same way about many of the characters she’d written, Wren felt more like an extension of herself. 

“She’ll be fine,” Kate answered, her hands and forehead tingling with old memories.

 The fire that burned in both of them. 

But a story of poisoning one’s fiancée just didn’t attract as many people as a story of shooting one did. 

“She’ll be fine,” she repeated.