Butcher & Blackbird: The Ruinous Love Trilogy

SLOANE

I slot my key into the lock at the service entrance of 3 In Coach and push the heavy steel door into the shadows of the corridor. When I slip it into my pocket, I keep my hand around the cool metal. Aside from the one to Lark’s apartment, I’ve never had someone else’s key before. Knowing how much the restaurant means to Rowan and his brothers, the ridged metal feels sacred to me. I like to hold it against my palm, to know that I mean something to Rowan too, enough that he wants me to share this place with him.

I know Rowan has been incredibly stressed with everything going on. I’ve felt him close down from time to time, and whenever I questioned him on it, he said he just wanted to leave the problems at work and forget about them for a while. That made sense, and I’ve tried to create the same safe place for him that he’s always made for me. Our own little realm where the outside world disappears for a while. But this morning was the first time I felt the picture shift in a way that had my guts twisting and my heart crawling into my throat. Until now, I’d not asked myself if the burden that weighs him down is me.

I have to keep reminding myself to take him for his word, that he didn’t mean it that way, even though my insecurities keep rattling around in my head like insects pinging against panes of glass. If he said I’m not a burden, then he’s being honest… right? We all say things we don’t mean. It will just take a day or two to shake it, and things will get better once Butcher & Blackbird is fully up and running.

I press the key tighter in my palm. It’s proof. He and I are not temporary. Our circumstances are, and they’ll pass in time.

“Rowan,” I call out as I near the kitchen. “I found this place online that looks pretty cool, with a rooftop patio. Maybe we could…”

My voice trails off as I enter the room.

Rowan is standing with his hands braced against the edge of the stainless steel prep counter, his shoulders tense, his head bent. When his gaze collides with mine, it’s wracked with darkness and defeat.

“What’s wrong…?” I ask as I slow to a stop and take him in. My heart surges with worry. Every spark of intuition tells me everything about this is very wrong. “Did something happen with the restaurant? Are you okay?”

I start to approach him, my hand raised to touch his arm, but he straightens abruptly and backs out of reach. My feet halt instantly. My heart rate doubles.

“Are you okay?” I ask again.

His voice holds no kindness, no warmth, not even familiarity when he says, “No, Sloane. I am not okay.”

My throat collapses around the words I want to say. Heat erupts beneath my skin, burning every inch of me from the inside out. My gaze bounds between the confines of Rowan’s dark, sharp stare, its edges bordering on lethal. “What’s going on?”

“What’s going on is that you need to go home.”

“Okay… I’ll just get an Uber—”

“No. To Raleigh. You need to go back where you belong.”

“I don’t…” a sudden burst of emotion chokes my throat. My nose burns. A sting floods my eyes. “I don’t understand.”

Rowan drags a hand through his hair and breaks his gaze away before he takes another step backward, clearly agitated that I’m lingering here. I’m desperate to take a step closer, to just touch him and make whatever this is stop before it all disintegrates in my hand like a castle of sand swept out to sea.

“Did I do something? If I did something, you need to tell me. We can talk it through.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose as a frustrated sigh empties from his lungs. “You didn’t do anything Sloane, this just isn’t fucking working. And I need you to go.”

“But… I thought you said we would do what normal people do. Talk to one another. Make it work.”

“We’re not ‘normal people’, Sloane. We can’t pretend to be something we’re not. Not anymore. I told you this back in April, on the tenth. I said that I never wanted to be like everybody else.”

I shake my head, trying to claw my way through confusion and into my memories. “I don’t remember—”

“Tenth or the thirteenth. Whatever. It’s just like I told you in the car on the way to the gala. I said even then that the restaurant was the only thing that made sense in my life. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that there are some things we can never have. I can never have a normal life. Neither can you. We’re monsters in this world.”

I know I’m not a normal person, but I don’t feel like a monster. I feel like a weapon. The final justice on behalf of those who can’t speak, delivering punishment for those who don’t deserve clemency. But maybe Rowan is right. Maybe I’ve just been deluding myself about my reign of vengeance, and I’m every bit the monster as the prey that we hunt.

I’m caught on these questions when Rowan lets out a frustrated sigh, like this is taking up too much of his time. The hurt of it twists and burns in my chest.

“My restaurants are all that really matters,” he says, pointing toward the dining room before pressing his finger to the stainless steel counter. “I need to keep my focus here. Trying to have both these places and a relationship is not feasible for me. So you need to leave. Go home.”

Rowan’s hard stare doesn’t let up. It drills right into the depths of me. It doesn’t waver as the first tear falls from my lashes to carve a hot line down my cheek. He doesn’t even blink when the next ones quickly follow.

“But… I love you, Rowan,” I whisper.

Rowan isn’t warm, or kind, or anything but cold and clinical when he says, “You think you do, but you don’t. Because you can’t.”

My mind is spinning. My heart is crumbling into ash. Part of me wants to run as much as he wants me to. Run and run until I don’t even know where I am anymore. Until I can’t feel this pain.

But I plant my feet.

“I’ll go, if that’s what you want,” I say, my voice tight and small. “But I need you to tell me something first, please.”

“What.”

“I need to know why I’m unloveable.”

It’s the first time I’ve seen even the slightest hint of hesitation in Rowan since I stepped into this kitchen. But in an instant, he swallows it down. And nothing else comes.

My anger blisters beneath the weight of this imploding loss. “Tell me.”

I’m met with nothing but a dark, lightless stare. Tears flood my vision until I can barely see Rowan through the watery veil.

“Just be honest with me. Why can’t you love me? What’s wrong with me? Tell me—”

“Because you’re a fucking psycho, that’s why.”

Rowan’s words hit me like a slap. The tears stop. My breath stops. My shattered heart. Even time. The moment of silence between us feels eternal, a pain that’s carved right into whatever is left of my soul, his words branded there forever. I know in an instant they’ll follow me, a ghost that will never let go.

Rowan folds his hands into tight fists as he leans a little closer, as though trying to force this revelation through my eyes and into my brain. “You kill people and cut bits of them off and make an elaborate show out of stringing up some batshit crazy map that no one can figure out but you. Then you gouge out their fucking eyes and make them into decorations. I know I’m no fucking saint, but that shit is next-level insane. That is what’s wrong with you Sloane. You’re unhinged. You’re going to crash and burn. You’ll take me with you if I let this keep going. So you need to fucking leave.”

I take an unsteady step backward, then another, and another. Discomfort registers for the first time in my hand, and I realize I’ve been gripping the restaurant key so tightly that it’s bitten into my skin. I pull it from my pocket and stare at the silver resting on the red marks in my palm.

My gaze lifts, not to Rowan but the sketch I drew last year. It’s framed near the door to the front of the restaurant, right where Rowan can see it as he works, where it’s safe from the heat and humidity in the kitchen. Just like I thought it was safe in his skin. Like I was safe in his heart.

But I’m not.

When my attention drags to Rowan, I hold his eyes for the last time.

I give myself just one breath to remember every detail of his beautiful face. His full lips. That scar I wish I could kiss. His navy eyes, even though their glare cuts right through me.

In the next breath, I turn my hand and let the key slide from my skin and fall to the floor.

I say nothing more as I pivot on my heel and leave 3 In Coach.

I run the whole way back to his apartment. Twelve blocks. Three flights of stairs. It’s only when I take my set of house keys from my pocket and burst into the living room in a mess of sweat and uneven breaths that I let myself cry again.

I’m a fucking psycho.

I thought he was just like me. I thought we were the same. It might have started with a game, but even from the beginning, it felt like so much more. Like I’d finally found a kindred soul. All these years, these crazy experiences, the longing and loneliness of the in-between—I thought it added up to something brighter on our horizon. We were getting closer, weren’t we?

It’s what I let myself believe.

How could I have been so wrong all this time?

I love Rowan. Right down to my fucking core. I love the future I saw with him, and now he’s ripped it right out of my grasp.

What if this is always what was waiting on the other side of the mountain? Just a jagged cliff to fall over?

It takes me a long moment to realize I’ve moved from the center of the room to Rowan’s sofa. I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting. I don’t even know how much time has passed since I arrived. It feels like my head is stuffed with cotton, a fuzzy barrier between my thoughts and the world.

I blink and look at Winston, who sits across from me on Rowan’s favorite chair, his eyes a slash of yellow in his plush gray fur.

“You’re probably even more psycho than me. You’re named after a fucking undead cat,” I say to the feline as another burst of tears crawls up my throat. I toss a defeated wave in Winston’s direction before I drop my head into my hands and fucking sob. “So yeah, like, I totally get it with the whole look of death thing you’ve got going on, but you’re still getting on a fucking plane and coming with me because I’ll be damned if I go back to Raleigh alone.”

I cry a flood of tears that feels never-ending until something soft grazes my hand. My damp palms slide down my face and Winston stares up at me, his gentle purr a rumble of comfort. When I lift my arm, he climbs onto my lap and lays down. “So, I admit I’m a psycho and now you want to be friends? I guess that tracks.”

We sit like that until my tears eventually slow, just me and the cat and the vibration of his purr against my thighs. And after a long while, when the knowledge that Rowan could come back at any moment eats away at my thoughts enough to dominate them, I set the cat aside and rise.

“If we’re getting on a plane, we’re going to do it looking hot. And I don’t mean in a trash fire kind of way,” I say to Winston as he stares at me, seemingly disgruntled that his warm human bed has moved.

I head to the shower, turn it up until it’s scalding. Every one of Rowan’s products goes down the drain, because my fucking psycho energy is real in the moments when I’m not a snotty, sobbing mess. Then I dry my hair, do my makeup, promise myself I won’t cry again so I don’t ruin the best eyeliner job I’ve done in a while. I even put on some fake lashes, because fuck it. If I’m going to be a psycho, I’m going to be the hottest damn psycho Logan International Airport has ever seen.

Of course, some of that perseverance ebbs away when I book the next flight out of town and pack up my shit.

By the time I call Lark, my determination is nearly gone.

“Hey, Gold Star Tits, how are you?” she asks, her voice a chime of bells.

A deep breath streams through my nose. “Um. I’ve been better.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Rowan,” I say, blinking back the tears. “He broke up with me.”

“What?” There’s a long stretch of silence. I nod, even though I know Lark can’t see me. “No…”

“Yeah.”

A sound of anguish bleeds into the line from Lark’s end of the call. Whatever glue holds my heart together enough to keep it beating softens with the sound of Lark’s distress on my behalf. Jagged points of pain lance me from the inside out, scoring muscle and bone.

“He couldn’t have… You can’t be serious…” Lark whispers.

“Dead serious, unfortunately,” I reply, putting the phone on speaker as I sit on the couch and pull Winston onto my lap. “I just booked a flight back to Raleigh. I want to get out of Boston right away. Can I stay at your place for a little bit until I figure out what the fuck to do with the tenants in my house?”

“Of course. Always. As long as you want. Text me your flight details and I’ll change my flight so we can leave together.” A string of swears and disbelief flows from Lark as I text her my flight number. When the details come through, she repeats the information before she heaves a long sigh. “Oh sweetie, there has to be some kind of mistake. That man loves you.”

My huffed laugh is bitter and sardonic. “That’s what I thought too. But he made it pretty clear that he doesn’t. I’m a ‘fucking psycho’, apparently, and therefore can neither love nor be loved. I guess that’s not news. Turns out, I’m too psycho even for him.”

“That’s what he said to you? And you didn’t pluck his eyeballs out and flush them down the toilet?”

A faint smile passes over my lips and fades away just as quickly as it appears. “I probably should have.”

“What else did he say?”

“I dunno, some weird stuff,” I reply, trying to remember the recent details that already seem hazy beneath the pain. “He said I needed to go home, and at first I thought he meant here, to the apartment. But then he said ‘no, to Raleigh’. When I asked why, he wouldn’t give me a reason at first, just that it wasn’t working between us and that the restaurants had to take priority.”

“But I thought it was working.”

“Me too.” I pick at Winston’s fur, replaying every word of our breakup, even though I’d give anything to forget them all. “I asked him to talk it through together. That was something he’d said at Fionn’s place, that we would talk about stuff like normal people do.”

“That sounds reasonable and pretty non-psycho to me.”

“Yeah. Same. Then he said something kind of strange.” My brow furrows as I open the search function on my home screen and type in the word ‘lobby’. It brings up a message from Rowan as one of the options, and I press on it to open his text. “He said that he ‘never wanted to be like everybody else’. He claimed specifically that he’d told me that on the way to the Best of Boston gala on April tenth.”

“Okay… what’s weird about that?”

“I don’t remember him saying that. Not ever. And the gala wasn’t on the tenth.”

Lark pauses. She’s probably thinking I’ve lost my shit, and she might be right. “Maybe he got the date wrong?”

“But the gala was two days before his birthday, on the twenty-seventh. Don’t you think that’s kind of strange that he wouldn’t remember that?”

“Sweetie, I dunno. If he’s in the midst of a breakup and obviously stressed about restaurant shit, he might have gotten the dates wrong.”

“I guess, but then he corrected himself and said the thirteenth. It’s the way he said it, the way he put it all together. It was just weirdly specific,” I reply, scrolling through messages he and I shared around those dates. “He said something else about our conversation in the car on the way to the event, that ‘the restaurant was the only thing that made sense in his life’. But I’m positive he never said that.”

“Hun, Sloane, I love you. I love you more than anyone, sweetie, but he might not fully remember all the details. I mean, he’s clearly fucked in the head if he’s going to give you up, so who knows what’s going on upstairs, you know?”

Lark keeps talking, explaining every reasonable theory for why he could have said what he said.

But I don’t hear a word as I push the cat from my lap and rise to my feet.

Because I’m staring at a text I’d sent him at the end of March, the same day he’d called and asked me to be his date for the awards.

Do you think this gala will have an ice cream buffet? If so, I should probably let them know that you only accept freshly-milked semen.

My blood turns to shards of ice in my veins.

I remember holding that white tub in my hands in Thorston’s kitchen as I read the homemade label to Rowan.

April tenth to thirteenth.

I know what he said on the way to the gala. I remember it as clearly as I remember the warmth of the kiss he’d pressed to my neck in the lobby, the tingle of electricity in my skin when he’d taken my hand across the leather seat during the drive. ‘At least one thing is going right at 3 In Coach’, he told me. ‘Stuff inevitably goes wrong. It just… feels like a lot lately.’

Lark is still talking when I say, “I have to go,” then disconnect the call.

My fingers are cold and numb when I open the app for the camera I installed in the restaurant kitchen.

My stomach churns as I take in the details on the screen.

“No…” Tears flood my vision. “No, no, no…”

I clutch at my heart as it shatters for a second time. Blood drains from my limbs. The edges of my vision darken and I press my eyes closed tight. A sound of anguish tumbles past my lips as my knees buckle, my phone dropping from my hand. I know the horror I just saw is real. But there’s no time to fall apart.

What if you’re not fast enough? 

I don’t answer that question. I can’t. The only thing I can do now is try.

I swallow the lance of pain and steady myself to take one turn in the middle of the room. My gaze lands on my leather case where I keep my scalpel among my pencils and erasers.

Hands shaking, I pick up my phone and dial the Unknown Caller, a contact whose name I never entered into my phone. He answers on the second ring.

“Spider Lady,” Lachlan says. “What’s the occasion?”

“I need a favor. Urgently,” I reply as I whip my case from the side table and stride toward the door. “You have as long as it takes for me to run twelve blocks.”

“Sounds fun. I like a challenge. What do you need?”

“I’ll tell you what I know,” I say, already descending the stairs by twos. “And you’re going to give me everything you can find on David Miller.”