Guilty Men and Biased Women

Natalia watched the blood drip from her fingertips with vague disinterest. Drop. Drop...Drop. Drop. It’s good that he is dead, because he was guilty. Guilty people deserve to die.

She was sprawled across the dead man’s armchair. Posture unbothered, legs lazily uncrossed. His blood smeared across the armrests by her callused hands. She traces the patterns carved into wood with her fingernails.

A pleased smile drifted across her features, sharp teeth and red lips parting dark skin. Natalia gazed across the room, admiring her handiwork, one of my best yet. 

This was her life’s work, her passion, what she lived for: giving people what they deserved. This man deserved to die, but, not before she’d made him paint the word ‘guilty’ across every wall in the house in his own blood. She had told him that if he’d done that, she would let him live. Then, she’d slit his throat, whispering the names of the women he had violated to him as he faded, this was justice. 

The front door of the man’s house had been kicked in. Natalia didn’t do that. She never used the front door, never left a visible clue to how she entered the house. There was someone else in the house. A not so unbiased third party. The other person wasn’t here for the man, she was here for Natalia. 

“I can’t keep protecting you,” the woman said. She was standing behind Natalia, she had a gun in her hand, a Glock 22, specifically.

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land,”

“I’m done. I’m done doing whatever the hell this is.” The woman sounded pained, heartbroken even.

“Don’t criticize what you can’t understand,” anything above a whisper and Natalia’s unmelodic voice would ruin the song, she wasn’t a particularly gifted singer. 

“Are you listening to me?” she demanded. “I’m done with this, done with you! It’s over.”

Natalia sighed, her head dropping forward, “You said you can’t keep protecting me, what you mean is you won’t keep protecting me.”

“Christ, Nat.”

“If you’re done with me then fucking leave already,” Natalia growled.

The other woman’s breath was unsteady, she was going to cry. “You need to stop.”

“If I stop, will that change anything for you?”

“I don’t-”

“Don’t lie to me,” Natalia snapped. 

The woman stalked around the chair and knelt in the blood at Natalia’s feet. She dropped the gun and rested her forehead against Natalia’s knee. Natalia put a bloody hand in the woman’s hair. They both fell quiet as she massaged the woman’s scalp. 

Natalia wrenched her hand from the woman's hair and replaced the lost contact with a vicious grip on her jaw, tipping her head up, forcing their eyes to meet. Natalia leaned forward lifting her other hand to brush across her cheeks, adding blood to the tear tracks that marred the woman’s round face. 

“You love me,” Natalia stated, it was a revelation to neither of them. “You’d think that someone who loves a monster would be used to death.”

“You aren’t a monster Natalia.”

“Oh honey,” Natalia crooned, “We both know that’s bullshit.”

“Maybe, it’s that you are afraid I’m right.”

“No.”

Natalia released the woman, leaning back in the chair once more. A queen on a throne of unrighteous bodies. 

“You are running because you think I’m right,” Natalia was grinning wildly, she looked almost feral with her bloody hands and vicious expression. “You think I’ve corrupted you.”

“You’re wrong,” the woman argued desperately.

“About what sweety? You? Or him?” She spared the dead man a thoughtful glance. 

“What you are doing is wrong,” the woman insisted.

“So I’m right about you?”

Ignoring the comment, the woman continued. “You cannot take the law into your own hands. You can’t torture people because you think they deserve it! You aren’t judge, jury, and executioner! This,” She gestured to the carnage that surrounded her, the carnage she was kneeling in, “is wrong! You are wrong!”

“What I’m hearing is that you’d rather me leave this man to the mercy of the court system?”

“Yes! Let the law punish people. It isn’t your place.”

Natalia’s smile faded. Now she looked disgusted. “The man whose blood you are kneeling in raped six women. Four of them filed reports. All four cases were dismissed, by the same judge too. The law is only as capable as the people who enforce it.” 

The woman looked ashamed but said nothing.

“The law should thank me for doing its job for it. For cleaning up its messes.”

“No,” the woman said, “one judge’s incompetence doesn’t give you the right to torture people, to decide whether or not they should die!” 

“Why the fuck not.” Natalia barked, the woman recoiled. “It isn’t my fucking fault these people do the shit they do!”

“Why do you get to decide they need to die?” the woman yelled back. “Why do you get to be the one to make that decision?”

“Because I say so!” Natalia stood up abruptly, towering over the woman. “Because I fucking say so!”

“And if I say otherwise?” the woman picked up her gun. “What then?”

“If you are going to kill me, just do it already.” It was an order. But the woman didn’t move.

“I am judge, jury, and executioner because I say so. Those people, that man, deserved the pain they received because I say so. They deserved to die because I say so. If you disagree, then shoot me, or yourself, or turn me in. I am right because I say so, none of the shit that comes out of your mouth will change that.”

“You can’t- you’re not,” the woman was struggling to breathe, fresh tears rolling down her cheeks. “You aren’t right.”

Natalia crouched in front of the woman, pulling the knife she’d used to kill the guilty man from her pocket. She splayed her hand out across the base of the woman’s neck, pressing on her collarbones, placing the tip of the knife against the woman’s soft skin. 

“I am right.” She said. “Do you know why?”

There was no answer from the woman, only a broken sound from the back of the throat.

“Because I said so.”

Natalia pushed the blade through her neck. The woman didn’t struggle. Natalia frowned as a fresh coating of blood spilled across her hand. She normally enjoyed the feeling of slick blood on her skin more than this. Then again, she normally felt nothing but contempt for the blood’s owner.

She may have whispered ‘I love you’ as she laid the not so unbiased woman beside the guilty man, she may have not.