Page 57 of Razors & Ruin
“The stuff they dredge up,” Nellie says. “How did they find this out so fast?”
I thought there’d be time enough to boil up my revenge. Ample opportunity for me to let it simmer, cook down, and reduce to a flavorful stock, but no. The mincing ponce took the easy road.
I could have got to Wetherby. With his fairweather friends treating him like a leper and the police no help, there were so many ways, even with his hatred and suspicion working against me.
Hell, I could have kept it simple and used Nellie to cozy up to him. Got him to pop by for his dinner and a very fucking close shave.
Wetherby may not have been directly responsible for Johanna’s death, but he was the symbol of her loss, the respectable face of a morally bankrupt undertow that flows through the city like raw sewerage.
I wanted to watch his dying pulse twitch beneath my blade.
Denied.
And the Beadle, the fucking bastard Beadle gets the spoils. Obviously, it’s another con of some kind, played for and got, but it boils my piss. How the other half live and die.
I ball up the paper and toss it into the oven, then reach into my inside pocket where the anonymous note about my daughter rests, snug and tight against my ribs.
I unfold it, taking in the words for the hundredth time, only to find it plucked from my fingers.
“Nellie, give it back.”
“This is done,” she says, holding the note close to the flames. Her skin pinks, a blister appearing on her knuckle as the paper chars at the edge, but she doesn’t seem to feel the pain.
“Johanna is dead. Wetherby, dead. The police have nothing; no one suspects us, and despite your incessant scheming, Currer Brook remains a ghost.”
She pulls her hand away and fans the letter to put it out. “Can’t you see? The universe moves for you, my love.Bendto it.”
Her words cleave my fury but do nothing to dim it. Instead, the effect is like Hercules cutting off the heads of the Hydra; for each snicked from the beast’s shoulders, two grow back.
My monster gains strength until I feel it straining beneath my skin, fangs bared, ready for the kill.
I reach her in one stride and snatch the letter from her hand, the other wrapping her throat. She draws a deep breath before I have a chance to cut her off, and she gives a victorious giggle as I exert pressure on her windpipe.
“I will turn this shithole city red, treacle,” I murmur. “I hope you have stamina enough to keep up because your bakehouse will run like a fucking river of carnage. You are right, you always were, and it’s about time I started enjoying myself.”
Nellie grins as I kiss her, her pulse rapid beneath my thumb, but it’s not until I commit the letter to the flames that it begins to slow down.
We watch the spiky writing blacken and merge, destroyed by a miniature version of the inferno waiting for us.
30
Two weeks later…
Sweeney
We fell into a routine with frightening speed, like it was predestined. Nellie said it first; she and I were meant to be. And what we are, what we do—it’s unique. Elegant, pragmatic, and poetically justified, at least to my mind.
The undignified death of Lady Wetherby, followed swiftly by her cowardly cunt of a husband, sent shockwaves through the upper echelons.
Everyone who attended the ball that night was sullied by the sordid event, and the social calendar of the season has been sparse ever since, with the well-off of the city mostly keeping a low profile.
This includes me, of course. I was there, and while no one seemed interested in that fact, my overtures to the gentry were dramatically overshadowed by Nellie and her confident gripstrength, with the result that I have seen no titled heads through my parlor door.
They come throughhersinstead.
Mrs. Lovett’s Meat Pie Emporium, now called, runs two sittings per night, six nights a week, with takeaway lunch boxes available on a first-come-first-served basis.
Her fare is already the stuff of legend; savory, yet sweet. Soft, but with a bite.