BloodLust: Judas’ Kiss

[TW: Death, violence, murder.]

I was going to kill my best friend. In the name of vengeance, of course. She had killed my parents, and from the moment Madame Leroux broke the news, I had vowed to take my revenge. 

Scarlet Leroux is the head of the Wasps mafia, the mafia I belong to, and has been like a mother to me since my own was murdered years ago. She called me into her office on the Summer Solstice, a holiday widely celebrated in our city that usually calls for a night off. She didn’t give a solid reason why I was being summoned, and I have to admit I was nervous. When I arrived, she told me I would be taking a slight break from my ongoing mission to assassinate Jacque Bellerose, our rival the Scorpions best assassin.

When she told me this, I was shocked, as this was my most imperative assignment that I had recently made a giant breakthrough on. When I asked why I would be taking a hiatus, concerned I hadn’t been making enough progress, she played me an unedited version of the security camera footage from the alley outside my childhood home nine years ago on August 1st. 

I watched my best friend drag my mother’s lifeless body out of our old backdoor. 

I watched Nerezza, my best friend since childhood, who joined the mafia first. She joined years before I did and convinced me too after my parents death. The girl who sat with me at my parents' funeral, held my hand as I cried. The girl who took me in and showed me compassion when I needed it most. 

I was shocked. I felt sick, I couldn’t breathe. I was disgusted. Most of all, I felt a deep, searing pain in my chest. The poison that is betrayal is more deadly than any venom. 

Despite feeling completely frozen in my own skin, the mafia waits for no one. I had to pull myself together. Clearly, Madame Leroux was showing me this for a reason. I couldn’t help but ask her, “Why? Why would she do such a thing? Are you positive this is legitimate footage?”

“More than positive.” She replied. “After all, our deep cover mobster inside the Scorpions headquarters brought us this tape. Nerezza has been a double agent for years now, and she killed your parents on their order. The order of Lothair Fontaine, the head of the Scorpions mafia. They knew you were a threat, and knew you had prospects to join us. They killed your parents, but Nerezza was the one who pulled the trigger. Now that we are aware she is a mole, we have to dispose of her. We are hoping her death will be quiet, a whisper in the grand scheme of life. No one will come looking for her if she disappears, and I figured it would only be right to make you the sole agent aware of this fact.” She pressed her hands together in front of her as she leaned forward on her desk. 

I stared at her, contemplating what this all meant. Leroux could not give me permission to kill Nerezza, as I was not an authorized executioner. Despite this, she was heavily implying she wanted me to have the justice deserved. The revenge I so desperately needed. So, when Leroux unofficially sent Nerezza and I on a vague last-minute mission to a lonely cabin deep in the woods on one of the biggest holidays of the year, I knew she was doing me a favor in the form of opportunity and plausible deniability. 

That night I met up with Nerezza outside the cabin. I had driven, and listened as she complained about her dreadfully easy life. She told me about the most recent mission she had been on as I pulled up. The cabin was gloomy, even from the outside, and shrouded with trees. 

I watched Nerezza get out of the car, her artificially red hair shining even in the pale moonlight. She had no idea what was about to happen to her.

I got out of the car and followed her to the front door. She opened it and walked inside, and I soon followed. 

I walked up behind her and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Let me get that for you,” I offered politely, slipping Nerezza’s coat off her shoulders and hanging it by the door.

She thanked me, and walked to the center of the house. The room we were in was small, the walls lined with animal carcasses and paintings of people long dead. The wall opposite to the door had a large window letting in a small bit of moonlight. The walls and floors were all a deep cedar, and even if we were allowed to turn the lights on the room still would’ve been dreadfully dark. 

I leaned against a wall, my arms crossed. I looked up at Nerezza, the deep pain searing inside of me. She was so casual, so relaxed, looking for an imaginary letter we were sent there to get. “I suppose I prefer these types of missions, don’t you?” I offered an attempt at casual conversation. 

“What do you mean?” Nerezza asked me as she messed with a taxidermy deer head.

“I mean, I definitely like the missions where I don’t have to kill anyone a lot more.”

“Actually? I find those to be a lot more fun, personally.”

She said it with such little contemplation, it disgusted me. “Do you ever feel remorseful? About killing someone? Do you ever think about their families, their children perhaps, who now are suffering at your hands?” 

Nerezza continued to gaze idly around the room. This conversation meant nothing to her. Little did she know, it was her last chance. Her final attempt at apology I was graciously giving her, even though I really shouldn’t have. Unsurprisingly, she disappointed me once more. “Of course not,” she replied flatly, “Who ever does?”

I blinked away the tears from my eyes. That really stung. “I do.” I nearly choked. “I always do.”

“Oh c’mon, stop being such a child. It’s part of the fun, pain of many for the effort of one. We’re physcos, in this biz. It’s time you start acting like one, Rosette.” She said it so nonchalantly. As if she hadn’t just admitted to the fact that killing people brought her joy.

“No.” I said with a newfound fury building inside of me, the uneasiness in my voice gone. “You are the psycho. Not me. Not any of us. We do what we do to survive. We are protecting people, each other, our family!” I was screaming now. “You are insane. You kill people and you enjoy it. You kill and destroy and have no perturbation about doing it.”

Nerezza was alert now, standing up to face me. She looked me dead in the eye and retorted, “That’s our motto, Rosette. Seek, kill, and destroy. We are Wasps. You and I, we’re the same. You hurt just as many people as I do.”

Those words burned me in a way I can never explain. She was so confident, so sure she was the one in control here. I shook my head, wiped the single tear that managed to escape and yelled, “No! I am nothing like you. I will never be anything like you.” I spit the word you like it was poison searing down my throat. 

“What’s this all about, are you insane? Rosette, I am your friend.” Nerezza placed a hand on her chest like she was sincere. She seemed genuinely surprised at the fact I was suddenly so emotional. I don’t blame her. How could she have caught on yet? 

I pulled the handgun out of my waistband.

Instantly Nerezza’s hand reached to her pants to retrieve her own in a desperate effort of retaliation, only to discover it was gone. I had taken it along with her coat back when we had first arrived. Her eyes widened as she realized her sabotage was planned long ago. “I see you’ve decided to betray me. May I ask why that is?”

I kept the barrel of my gun pointed straight at her. I did not waiver, my eyes did not flick away from her for even one instant. Her hands did not move, she knew I had her cornered. I knew I had to be careful still, because Nerezza never goes down without a fight. I had learned that the hard way. “I have a feeling you already know. Does the name Marie Corrado ring a bell?”

She smirked before rolling her eyes. “So that’s what this is all about? Please, I did what I had to do to benefit myself in as many ways as possible. Was what I did morally wrong? Sure. But what isn’t in this life we choose to live? You know me, Rose. I know much more than you think. I know that you know nothing.” 

She had no idea what this was truly about. She thought I was confronting her about being the mole. She had no idea what I was about to do. I gritted my teeth. “You and I both know damn well we didn’t have a choice in leading this life. We never have. You are as much of a predator as they are. Feeding on their lies so they can fatten you up and use you like a farmer does his prize cattle. You think you’re the wolf but you are Lothair’s sheep, Leroux’s dog, and my enemy. So don’t call me Rose ever again. And don’t be so sure about what you know.” 

Nerezza placed a hand on her hip and let her shoulders hang idle. She was feigning relaxation with her usual sassy demeanor. It was infuriating, how full of herself she truly was. “I’ll call you whatever I want, Rose. And I am no one’s animal. I am a better agent than you will ever be. I managed to trick the head of the Scorpions into using me as an affair partner to gain information on the Wasps. I gave him so little, and I gained so much.”

It was almost sad how she didn’t realize she was being abused by this terrible system. “You’re proud of that?”

“Of course I am. I have everything I want.” She smiled at her beauty queen, old-man-winning smile. 

“No. You have nothing. You’re being used, Nerezza. You always have been. At least, that’s what I used to think. But you are malicious, and not just in compliance. You desire to hurt people. You feel no remorse when daughters are left alone and have to do whatever it takes just to survive.”

Nerezza gave me a curious look, but moved past it quickly. She mockingly raised her arms to the back of her head, daring me into action. She spoke, “You seem to be so dead set on me learning my lesson, huh? For all the sins I’ve committed. Because you’re just so much better than me, aren’t you?” She moved her hands into a prayer position across her chest. 

I played into her sarcastic mocking of me. “I am better. I am better enough to kill the girl who is helping perpetrate the abuse system me and all the people I love are caught in.”

She scoffed at me. “So do it. I dare you. Shoot me. Shoot me and see what will happen. Margaux will come for you. The entire organization will. You may know I’m a traitor, but they do not. You will end up lying in a ditch before dawn.” Her voice was commanding and steady. Even so, her eyes had welled with tears and I noticed her lower lip shake ever so slightly. 

I chuckled. I felt no pity for this girl. This traitor, of not only the Wasps, but me. “That, my dear friend, is where you are wrong. Everyone knows. Even your precious little sister. We know more than you think. We know exactly who you have been giving our secrets too, and what you’ve exchanged it for. And we know exactly where you were on August 1st, nine years ago. Do you recall where you were on that date, Nerezza?”

At first she stared at me, a glazed look in her eyes, confused. Then the realization hit, and a look of sheer terror overcame her face.

I smiled. A devilish, purely evil smile that spread from cheek to cheek. I nearly laughed. I hated her. I hated her so much. And it was time for me to take my final revenge. “I knew you would recall once I had mentioned it. Because I know where you were, Nerezza. Leroux told me herself. As a related inquiry, do you know why the organization sent me here, with you, in a remote location, where nobody besides them and us know where we are? Do you have any clue why they would choose me, of all agents, on an imperative night, to be the least available? Do you? Because I know, Nerezza. I know.”

I pulled the trigger and shot her in the heart. 

Immediately she bent at the waist, nearly falling backwards and having to take a few stumbling steps to make up for it. Crimson blood began to leak from her chest. In desperation she grasped and clawed at the hole in her torso with both of her hands. I watched as trickles turned to a river of red, her blood seeping through the cracks between her fingers. She gasped and cried, before started to cough, and then hack. She dropped to her knees and crawled towards me, slowly and through cries of agonizing pain. She threw herself at me, her bloodsoaked hands gripping my thighs. Through tear soaked eyes she looked up at me and gasped, “I’m sorry.”

I glared down at her, tucking my handgun back where it belonged, concealed. I brushed a hair out of her face as she coughed blood onto the hem of my shirt. “Are you? Are you really? Because five minutes ago you didn’t seem remorseful at all. You’re not sorry you killed my parents, Nerezza. You’re sorry I decided to avenge them.” I pushed her off me and looked down in disgust at my blood-soaked attire.

I watched as Nerezza’s eyes rolled back into her head. Finally, she fell in a crumpled heap to the ground.

I watched as she took her final breaths before collapsing into the jaws of death. As soon as I could hear the silence of an emptier room, the after-kill sensation hit. My breath quickened and I began to shake and the adrenaline wore off. I just killed someone. I just killed one of my best friends. I gazed down at my shaking, blood-soaked hands. I watched her life drip off my fingertips.

It was then the terrible feeling set in. She was right. I am no better than she was. I am a killer. I am a betrayer, just like her.