Between Bruises & Blooms

These are not
good men.

Let us begin there.

No polishing
the knives
until they look
like halos.

No pretending
obsession
is suddenly holy
because someone
fell in love.

They lie.

Manipulate.

Kill.

Build cages
and sometimes
have the audacity
to call them protection.

Morally gray
would be generous.

These men
walked straight past gray,
set it on fire,

and kept going.

But the women—

God,
the women.

Seraphine
came out of captivity
with blood
still beneath her nails.

Emberly
walked unknowingly
into a revenge plot
and somehow became
the reason
revenge stopped mattering.

Rosalind
arrived
with murder
already in her plans,

a mother
with poison
in one hand
and everything
she loved
in the other.

Ginevra
found herself
running from danger
without realizing
she was asking
the danger itself
to save her.

None of them
were rescued
into softness.

They clawed.

Fought.

Manipulated back.

Survived.

Loved people
they probably
should have stabbed.

Occasionally
tried to stab them anyway.

And somewhere
inside all that blood,

revenge,

trauma,

obsession,

and spectacularly
questionable decision-making,

love happened.

Not clean love.

Not gentle love.

Certainly not
relationship-advice-column love.

Something darker.

Two damaged people
looking at each other
and saying

I see exactly
what you are.

Come closer anyway.

Morally black.

Fucking unhinged.

And somehow

I kept
turning the page.