Amelia Hart could not stop thinking about the woman staying alone in room 1071, just down the hall, with the corner balcony and the beachside view. She was not jealous, she told her husband when he asked why her focus kept drifting, and she meant it; their room was perfectly lovely, with hot towels in the bathroom every afternoon and a king-sized bed that smelt like fresh orange peels and lily flowers. There was a trellis with vines of pink wildflowers overlooking a garden path. The luxury was just enough; Amelia had always thought of herself as easy to please.

The reason Amelia could not stop thinking about the woman staying alone in room 1071 was the color of her eyes. The first time she saw her, across the terrace on their first afternoon in Sicily, she had been bewitched by their rich golden hue, something much darker than amber, something that glowed. The woman from 1071 carried a plate laden with rich red fruits and a glass of sparkling water and smiled at Amelia in passing, and her eyes, they glowed, even underneath the dark protective shadow of her wide-brimmed straw hat.

The only other times Amelia had seen the woman from 1071 – once beside her at the bar, ordering a cocktail, and once passing her in the hall outside their rooms – her eyes had not been golden. They had been brown, tanned-leather brown, with a hint of green. Amelia had looked straight at her eyes, something she avoided with most people – but she wanted to see that golden color again. It hadn’t been there. She had run the moment over again in her mind so many times that she had almost convinced herself the golden color was unreal, some elaborate trick of the Taormina sunshine, turning Amelia’s strange daydreams to reality.

Her husband was well aware that Amelia tended towards rumination, although he never missed a chance to express his displeasure over it. They had married one year ago next Wednesday. All the papers had written Mrs. Harry Hart, because it sounded beautiful and fairytale-ish and, to Amelia, sweetly claustrophobic. At the time Harry had cherished her; now he tolerated her long empty stares and re-filled her sleeping pill prescription on the way home from work. “You’re so beautiful,” he had a tendency to remind her, as if, in the atrophying of her mind, she might forget the only thing he still found important about her.

Most marriages of passion run themselves into the ground before a year is out, Amelia had read in a magazine on the plane across the Atlantic. She had folded the corner of the page over and over and wondered what happened to marriages which had never been that passionate in the first place.

Harry was the son of an old college acquaintance of Amelia’s father, which was how most well-to-do Boston marriages happened as a matter of fact. They had both, by chance, attended Cornell Law. They shared classes and friends and childhood stories from well-off suburban developments just minutes down the road from each other. When Amelia went to visit her parents for the holidays, a spectacularly unwise decision to start with, she found herself being seduced by a young, roguish Harry Hart into a cliché carriage ride through Public Garden. And things went on from there.

Their collegiate romance was soft and academic; they shared an apartment in Fall Creek with a fireplace and an ugly, embroidered armchair that they couldn’t dispose of without breaking their lease. Harry made coffee in the morning and was magnanimous and kind when he told Amelia that he had received a job offer from a prestigious bank on Wall Street, and he knew that Amelia didn’t want to move to New York, and that was that.

But then Amelia had moved to New York, and one thing led to another, and they were living together again – except in a larger apartment, this time, with glass-windowed walls that overlooked Central Park and sleek marble countertops and no comfortable armchairs in sight – seeing less and less of one another, even less than they had when still shackled to the demands of academia. Harry’s friends were Amelia’s friends, because she was too busy to make any. He left the pot of coffee out in the mornings but stopped making sure it was warm. Amelia had been surprised when he proposed at the Italian restaurant they both liked on Madison, because she had been convinced he was breaking up with her.

They were perhaps not the best couple, but they were very good partners. Both fastidious and somewhat demanding. Harry didn’t have much of a sense of humor and jokes tended to roll over Amelia’s head. They synced their schedules to attend charity events for their respective jobs, took turns buying groceries and paying the cable bill, and never accused each other of being the one to leave the door open for the dog to get out. Anyways, it was usually Amelia, but she never admitted it to him. Little things like that had made people mad, before. It had made them scream. Like arguing with a brick wall, her mother used to say about her. Whispering behind hands to society friends. She doesn’t seem to hear you.

But Harry was good to her. He had planned this trip to Italy for their anniversary and took special care to get time off from work for it. He had coordinated all the details with the travel agency so Amelia did not have to do a thing; she was sure it was because he thought she was too “internal,” as he had a way of calling it, to manage the details herself, but the thought was nice all the same. After all, it would have been a shame to waste the plane tickets. Once they returned from Sicily, in eight days, Amelia would have the time and space to think again, and to wonder if maybe she shouldn’t start looking into lawyers.

But none of this had anything to do with the woman staying in room 1071, just down the hall. Or why, precisely, Amelia could not stop thinking about her once-golden eyes.

She learned the woman’s name at breakfast on their second morning in Sicily. It was over something silly; she had been picking up a piece of fruit and dropped the tongs. They clattered to the tile floor, and a tall woman in a navy blue caftan and elegant sunglasses knelt to pick them up.

“Careful with these,” she said, wiping them with a paper napkin and placing them beside the little tray. She lifted her sunglasses to the top of her head, and Amelia searched her eyes for that golden color. It wasn’t there. But she was smiling. “The edges are sharp,” the woman continued, oblivious to the alarmed inhale Amelia had taken, “and they might cut you. I’m Kat.” She extended a hand.

Kat’s palm was cool and dry to the touch. “Amelia Hart,” she responded shyly, tucking an errant lock of hair behind her ear. Her bangs, in the process of growing out, were askew across her forehead, still mussed from sleep. Though she was dressed for the day, there was an air of tiredness around her that she had spied in the massive mirror in the hotel lobby, which Kat did not seem to share. The hour was early, but she looked perfectly refreshed.

“Are you alone for breakfast?” Kat continued, oblivious to Amelia’s mental comparison. She stepped aside to gesture to a small, two-person table on the edge of the room, by a window overlooking the beach and the Ionian sea beyond. “You look like you could use some company.”

Truthfully, Amelia took pleasure in eating alone – found a constant meal companion one of the biggest downsides of marriage, missed the time when she could prop a paperback novel against a wine glass and didn’t have to constantly monitor whether or not food was caught in her chapstick – but for some reason she followed Kat to the table anyway, her small plate of pastries and fruit in hand. “Do you eat meat?” Kat asked as they sat. She took the seat out of the sun, shrouded in shadow. “I have a dish of baked sausage and eggs coming. It’s too much for one person.”

“Oh, I like meat.” Amelia smiled shyly and draped her napkin over her lap.

Kat ate elegantly and forcefully. There was an aura of authority around her, as if she was not used to hearing the word no – or at the very least, not expecting it. It made Amelia feel slightly sick to her stomach, but not in a way she didn’t like; it was as if she was a child, hanging upside down from the monkey bars on the playground, all of the blood rushing pleasantly to her head. She kept hoping Kat might lean into the sun more, so she could see her eyes turn that dazzling shade of gold again, but she steadfastly avoided it.

Between thick bites of ground sausage, dripping in fragrant tomato sauce and olive oil, Kat regarded Amelia, those eyes – those eyes – quizzical and amused. “How long are you in Sicily?” she asked casually, tearing a slice of bread into smaller pieces with her long, long fingers.

Amelia traced insignificant shapes into the cloth napkin on her lap. “Five more days,” she hummed. “My wedding anniversary is on Wednesday.”

Kat quirked an eyebrow. “How many years?”

“One. Harry wants to have a candlelit dinner on the water to celebrate.” Amelia cleared her throat, unsure why the word celebrate tasted so bitter. “Harry is my husband.”

“I figured.” Kat’s throat flexed elegantly when she swallowed her coffee. “Sicily is a beautiful place to spend your anniversary. Your husband has good taste.”

Amelia felt herself scoff, felt herself mutter “oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Before the blood could rise to her cheeks in embarrassment, Kat had laughed, a loud, reckless bark of a thing, so sudden it startled Amelia in her laminate rattan chair.

“Fair enough.” Kat dragged her bread through the leftover sauce and passed the bite to Amelia, who – inexplicably – took it in her hand and placed it on her tongue. Savory and acidic. She chewed and swallowed. “I can’t tolerate a man for any extended period of time, so you’re already a bit more successful than me.” Kat winked. “And I travel alone, if you know what I mean.”

Amelia was not sure she did. She adjusted her legs beneath the table, feeling fidgety. Out on the water, a strong breeze pushed a wave over its crest, sending it crashing into the shore. The early morning swimmers on the beach laughed and shrieked in delight; the oblivious sunbathers lay there unimpeded. Somewhere, a seagull crowed. Kat pushed the sausage dish into the center of the table, and Amelia took her own spoon to it, moaning softly at the taste of the sauce on her tongue.

“What brings you to Sicily, then?” she asked, hoping that Kat might incline her head just right, that her eyes might catch the sun again.

Kat waved the question away with a hand. “Work,” she said. “Of a sort. I’m an art collector. While I’m here, I’ll be looking at estate sales, networking with certain restoration experts. All of which is to say,” she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, leaning in, “I’m trying to write this whole trip off on my taxes.”

An art collector. “Where are you from?” Amelia raised a piece of melon to her lips and nibbled on it in a way she hoped was casual.

“New York. The East Village, specifically.”

An art collector from the East Village. Amelia felt inadequate. She felt small. She felt a burning, deep within her, a desire without a name. A distant part of her considered forgoing all of her plans to follow this woman all day – to hold her hand, to hear her speak about her life, to absorb the golden aura that was no longer contained to her eyes. Kat looked up at Amelia and it felt as if her breath had been stolen from her chest.

The eternal shimmering moment broke with a hand on Amelia’s shoulder. “Good morning, darling,” said Harry, leaning down to kiss her on the cheek. He hadn’t shaved, and his stubble scraped uncomfortably against her skin. His skin did not feel like Kat’s. Amelia was distantly aware that she shouldn’t be comparing them.

“You must be Harry.” Kat’s smile was tight and controlled. She really must not like men, Amelia thought, and felt foolish for thinking it, because it was obvious in the tense lines of Kat’s body, in the way she stiffly stood up. “Sorry to have stolen your wife away.”

“I’m sure no harm was meant.” Both of Harry’s hands landed possessively on Amelia’s shoulders, and she thought briefly that it was the most desire for her he had shown in months. “Amelia, dear, I’ve gotten us a table outside.”

Outside on the terrace, there were bugs, and the sun was a harsh ray compared to the soft balm of inside, but Amelia stood anyway, her chair making a grating sound on the patio floor. “It was lovely to meet you,” she said to Kat, and meant every word with an effusiveness she had never shown to a stranger before. Kat inclined her head, a patient smile on her face, and something in her eyes said you’ll be back, though it was gone as soon as Amelia noticed it was there.

“You as well,” Kat said, and then, boldly, “find me if you ever need company.”

What an erringly confident thing to say with Amelia’s husband standing not three feet away. And yet, as they crossed the patio to the table Harry had found for them outside, Amelia found herself looking over her shoulder, back to where Kat still sat, twirling a silver ring around and around her finger, eyes locked on to Amelia’s retreating form. There it was; that golden color, glowing once more.

——

It was a trial run of their separation. Harry wanted to visit museums, Harry wanted to look at art. Amelia wanted to be everywhere Harry wasn’t, which was how she ended up at the infinity pool on a secluded balcony high above the resort’s private beach, with a loose cotton shirt on over a swimsuit too skimpy to make her truly comfortable. It had been a gift from Harry. She took a violent joy in only wearing it when he couldn’t see.

Across the balcony, Kat lounged on a barstool in the shade and stirred a colorful drink with a swizzle stick. Every so often, she glanced out onto the sun-soaked terrace, squinting like there was something there to find. Amelia, who hadn’t brought a book or her phone or anything else to keep her entertained, watched Kat go through three drinks before making her way over to the bar.

“Hello,” she said shyly, and took the faux-leather seat beside her new acquaintance. She wondered if she might be on the end of a tepid reception, given the way Kat’s back hunched over the bar, but she seemed to straighten on Amelia’s approach, her smile opening up into something wide – genuine.

Kat was dressed even more showily than Amelia, if such a thing were possible. She wore a navy blue halter top so dark it was almost black, loosely knotted just under her shoulder blades and around her neck. Her bottoms were high-waisted, the same color, showing off an expanse of smooth alabaster thigh. Unlike Amelia, she had no cover-up. Amelia found her eyes drawn to the exposed skin, the contours of Kat’s muscle and flesh, achingly delicate. She wanted to run her finger across her skin and see if it dipped under her touch; she realized at once it was a strange thought.

“You’re alone,” Kat noted, and wordlessly slid her drink across the bar into Amelia’s empty hand. She took a great gulp and tasted citrus and cordial. It was balanced well. “Where’s your worse half?”

“At the Museo de Sale,” she sighed, rolling a wayward bit of orange peel around in her mouth. “Or the Archeologico Regionale Paolo Orsi. I forgot to ask.” She spit the pithy peel into her palm, discreetly, but noticed Kat’s eyes hitch on the movement nonetheless.

“I’ve been,” Kat said cryptically. “But not for a long time.”

They lapsed into an easy silence. Amelia sat sideways on the stool, her right side propped against the marble top of the bar, and every time she kicked her feet her sandal brushed Kat’s bare calf. She expected to see gooseflesh raised in its wake, but her body was placid and smooth as a lake on a calm day, and Amelia could not explain the sudden desire to see Kat’s surface shudder.

“What’s your full name?” she asked, for no particular reason, and to clarify added, “what is Kat short for?”

“Katerina.” Kat had acquired another drink, a tumbler of something amber-colored and sweet-smelling, and sipped it carefully. “I’m from Eastern Europe, originally. My name sounds it. Katerina Leventhal Karnstein,” she added in a haughty voice, with a twinge of an accent Amelia supposed must be from the region which she had grown up in. A real European, the exoticness of it, made Amelia feel small all of a sudden. It was one thing to be American and ignorant in the face of the Italian staff of the resort, who were, after all, being paid to wait on her. It was another to appear uncultured in front of a woman such as Kat, who Amelia was starting to suspect she liked very much.

The thought was stomach-clenchingly terrifying, and she didn’t know why.

“Your accent is good,” she said evenly.

“Well, I’ve lived all over, and for a long time,” Kat offered. She traded drinks with Amelia once more, finishing the dregs of the orange cocktail while Amelia sipped at the warm liquor. It tasted like a beachside campfire. “You should have heard me when I was younger. I sounded downright atrocious.”

“I’m sure you could never.”

“You flatter me.”

“How long is a long time? To have lived away from home?” A curiosity purred in Amelia’s stomach. Kat seemed alarmed, and she felt the need to withdraw the question, but before she could do so a warm hand laid on her thigh, and she saw Kat smiling at her – and those golden eyes were back, prescient, powerful.

“We should talk about you some,” Kat suggested, something swirling in her tone, hypnotic and all-encompassing – Amelia had the strange sensation that she was being hollowed out, for only a moment – and even though she did not mean to, when she opened her mouth, the dark things inside of her began to spill out.

——

Kat roped Amelia into a long walk along the beach, her sandals dangling from her fingers, and then dinner out in the city at a restaurant she said she said she knew well. It was fancy, Kat informed her, and had a strict dress code, so Amelia went to her room to change into the nicest dress she had on hand, a silky pink number that she had been reserving for her anniversary dinner but no longer felt inclined to save. In the mirror, she thought of how Kat’s eyes might drag over her figure, the soft curves on display that Harry always wanted tightened, hid. She loosened the spaghetti straps a half inch more.

Kat met her in the lobby and looped their arms together. She smelled like vodka and vanilla, a strangely seductive scent. Amelia had eaten little that day. She was sure the alcohol was going to her head. Kat tightened her grip on Amelia’s arm and led her over the cobblestone streets with a sober sureness.

The restaurant was hole-in-the-wall, lived-in. A stout woman wearing an apron greeted them at the door and led them to a small candlelit table in the far corner of the restaurant. A pimply teenager in tails poured them glasses of red wine. The woman kissed Kat on both cheeks, left menus in their hands, swept away in a flurry of Sicilian. Kat leaned over the table and confessed in a low voice, “I’ve never met that woman before in my life.” They laughed into their hands.

Amelia could not take her eyes off of the other woman – off of the delicate collarbones left exposed by the low neckline of her ocean-blue dress, off of the way her dark hair curled against her cheeks. There was something stirring in Amelia that she had not felt since her wedding night to Harry, a desire that had been squashed by months – no, years, really – of making herself preen for undeserved attention. The attention Kat gave her was nothing but deserved, and constant, and intoxicating. Amelia swallowed a mouthful of wine and Kat’s eyes traced the movement of her throat. Sauce from her busiate clung to her lips, and Kat wiped it away with her thumb, eyes darkening.

After dinner, they took shots of limoncello and wandered the back streets of Sicily. Music poured from restaurants and shops, pools of yellow light spilling onto the sidewalks. It passed over Amelia’s face and she felt warm. Kat’s skin stuck to hers where their arms looped, with sweat and friction.

Amelia was pleasantly drunk; the evening felt fuzzy. They were stopped outside a gelato stall. Kat had just finished exchanging a few euros for a cup of something blood-red that smelled like raspberries. There were a pair of Sicilians sitting on the stone edge of a nearby fountain. One wore denim shorts and a pair of stylish sunglasses; he had the casual arrogance of a man who knew his own power, but he wore it well, and he had his arm draped over the shoulder of the girl beside him, a slim thing with round almond eyes and pin-straight black hair. They watched the pedestrians go by. They were laughing.

She found herself strangely entranced. She thought of herself first as the girl, serious and quiet, small under the protective arm of someone more powerful, and found she didn’t dislike the weight of it, the heavy comfort of knowing someone had her best interests at heart. But there was a draw to the man, as well, to the crook of his knees spread wide on the weathered stone, the outlines of his muscles underneath his tight cotton shirt. Amelia was not admiring his physique, but she was coveting his power. She’d never considered that might be something she’d want, all for her own.

Her own dissatisfaction hit her suddenly, like a freight train. It barreled towards her on a creaking track and the headlights were golden.

“Are you all right?” Kat asked, her gelato spoon tucked into the corner of her mouth.

“I don’t really like my life.”

Kat’s eyes widened in surprise. “What was that?”

Amelia found that she couldn’t say it again. But the question seemed rhetorical. Kat took Amelia’s hand in hers, lacing their fingers, and pulled her down the street. In her other hand, she held her gelato tight enough that small, melted droplets spilled over the side of the paper cup and left sticky trails down her wrist.

“Your life seems lovely.” Amelia could not tell if Kat was being honest. “A wonderful husband, a well-paying job, a vacation to Sicily. The modern American dream.”

“Do you want a husband and a vacation to Sicily?” Amelia teased. Kat pressed her lips together as if suppressing a smile; her answer was clear. “And my job might pay well but it’s not interesting. Filing forms, answering phones, fetching coffee for lawyers with ten years on me. Beg and beg and beg for an opportunity. It’s exhausting.”

“It’s exhausting,” Kat agreed, “to not be seen for who you are.”

“And my husband.” Amelia had never found herself saying such things before, angry and violent and true. She had always tried to count her blessings and respect what she had been given. Something about Kat opened up the well of resentment inside of her – or perhaps it was only aggression, masquerading as resentment, pent-up like a pot of hissing steam. “My husband is an idiot.”

Kat held a hand to her chest, affronted. There was a delightful twinkle in her eyes that betrayed her. “Is he?”

“No, he’s not. He’s intelligent. But he’s boring. He’s only gotten more boring as we’ve gotten older.” They left the busy streets behind for quiet alleyways. Their joined hands swung between them. Kat licked melted gelato from the inside of her wrist, and Amelia couldn’t look away, her voice dazed as she added, “our relationship was easier when we were playacting at adulthood. Now that we’re here, it feels like going through the motions. We used to fuck, but we don’t anymore. I don’t think he wants to.”

Amelia had never spoken this candidly about sex in her life. Kat took it in stride; barely even blinked. “Do you want to?” she asked. It was a reasonable question, and it did not take Amelia long to think of an answer.

“Yes. But not with him.” A flush spread across her neck. This attention was making her feel sick to her stomach, like she had all day, but it was colored differently, hot and insistent instead of nauseating. She was beginning to suspect she was not actually sick at all. “He was awful. You wouldn’t believe how awful he was.”

Kat’s eyes lit up. “Self-serving? Arrogant? Completely unfamiliar with the female body?” Amelia nodded, her lip trapped between her teeth. “Men are all the same, you know. They get their two pumps in and they think they’re set. It’s different, with women. We like variation and stimulation and pleasure. Drawing it out. The chase. A woman like me would never pass up the opportunity to ravish someone like you.” With the end of her spoon, she tapped the tip of Amelia’s nose. “And I’d make you feel it, too.”

Amelia blinked slowly, feeling outside of herself. Kat dipped the spoon back into the gelato and gathered a generous mouthful.

“What does that mean?”

“I think you know,” Kat said, but Amelia did not hear her. She was entranced with the motion of the spoon, moving closer and closer towards her mouth, dripping gelato onto the cobblestone at their feet. She parted her lips to accept it, imagined her saliva mixing with Kat’s, and closed her eyes.

She suckled at the spoon. She felt Kat’s hand reach up and stroke her cheek, her skin cold but gentle. “Oh, darling,” she murmured, low and under her breath, and before Amelia fully understood what she was doing she had surged forward, pressing closer to Kat, to feel the low brimming heat of her, to get her up against the rough brick wall of whatever alley they were standing in and slot herself between her legs. Kat let out a surprised gasp. Amelia decided the best course of action was to swallow it into her own mouth.

Kissing Kat felt like nothing she had ever quite done before. Her mouth was strangely cool, tasted of raspberries from the gelato and liqueur from the limoncello and, distantly, something else, something foreign and feminine that Amelia coveted. Her tongue was firm; she conducted a wet exploration of Amelia’s mouth, all-encompassing, knee-quaking; her hands came up to frame her face and play with the edges of Amelia’s bangs.

Kat moaned, a more desperate sound than Amelia had ever heard a human creature make, and flipped them around so it was Amelia’s bare shoulders digging into the wall, Amelia’s head cradled in Kat’s hands as she kissed her, and kissed her, and kissed her.

What about Harry, a phantom woman who was not Amelia anymore called from the far distance. What about you? Amelia did not care who she was anymore, if that person could not be Kat’s. Oh, to be kissed by her, to be kissed and kissed and kissed.

“Amelia, Amelia,” Kat whispered like a prayer, like a melody. She moved her hands to Amelia’s neck, to brush her hair aside, to place her lips in its place, worshipping, soft. Amelia felt like a burning sun, like a wanton thing, spinning in place yet desperate to collide into something. She found her hands, without really understanding it, drifting across Kat’s abdomen. Her nails scratched at her stomach over the fabric of her dress. Kat hissed against her neck, and Amelia felt the light scrape of teeth.

More. She needed more.

Her fingers dipped lower, as she slid against the wall, trying to keep herself standing while Kat launched a single-minded attack on her composure. The hem of Kat’s dress she mapped in her mind. The small lace ruffles. The smooth, untouched skin underneath. The expanse of thigh – Amelia thought of Kat, at the bar earlier, resplendent and pale and ethereal, ripe for the sun – she brushed her fingers along the skin, she prodded it, she kneaded it, she needed to feel.

Kat hissed again. It trailed into a filthy moan, those teeth – sharp, sharp teeth – scraped into Amelia’s neck, and she wondered what Harry would think when he saw the marks on her neck, if she would have to sleep with concealer on. Would it get on the sheets? Was it worth the trouble? She couldn’t be certain that she cared.

Amelia had one hand holding tight to Kat’s hip. The other explored the warm, damp paradise at the apex of Kat’s thighs. She had no idea what she was doing.

Another scrape of teeth, and then Kat latched onto Amelia’s neck, and a starburst of pain exploded into the surest, most overwhelming pleasure she’d ever experienced in her life.

Kat moaned. Her hips bucked.

Harry had never bitten Amelia. The bruises he had left had never felt like this. Everything was blurry and warm and wonderful, and it took Amelia a disturbing amount of time to realize the skin of her neck had broken, and her blood was pouring into Kat’s mouth, down her waiting throat, and being swallowed.

When the realization hit her, her arousal turned to frozen ice, she jerked away, tearing Kat’s mouth from her neck. The lower half of her face was painted red. How foolish Amelia had been to think the spilled gelato looked authentic – this was much worse, more pigmented, thicker and headier, and Kat blinked at her owlishly. Her canine teeth were sharp, pointed, stuck out over her lip awkwardly, like a child caught with their hand inside the cookie jar. Amelia’s chest heaved; Kat was not breathing.

Blood dripped from the open wound on Amelia’s neck and soaked the collar of her dress. She refused to move an inch, and so Kat’s hands stayed braced on her shoulders, their bodies rapidly cooling.

Amelia could smell metal and earth and vanilla and vodka. And then, she couldn’t smell at all. The world tilted, quite suddenly, and spun out of control and then went violently dark. She lost consciousness there in Kat’s arms, who held her tight so her bare knees didn’t scrape against the rough cobblestone.

——

Her next memories were blurry, half-formed. She saw herself from a distance, held in Kat’s arms like a baby. They passed the entrance to the hotel. The employees stepped aside for them without saying anything. Kat carried Amelia up the grand staircase, into the elevator, down the hall to her room.

Inside, Harry was asleep in bed. On the left side. Under the covers. Kat laid Amelia down on top, far enough away from him that there was a flat expanse of white duvet between them, cavernous and careful.

Kat disappeared into the bathroom. Amelia’s dream-gaze did not follow her; she remained perched in a high corner of the room, simply observing. When Kat returned with a warm, wet washcloth, she carefully wiped at Amelia’s exposed skin. Trails of dried blood on her neck disappeared and turned the washcloth pink.

From Amelia’s suitcase, Kat retrieved a soft shirt and sleep shorts. She stripped her from her pink dress, folded it, and buried it underneath a long-forgotten bathing suit. Back at Amelia’s side, she gently dressed her sleeping body, was so soft with her boneless limbs. The Amelia that watched felt herself almost cry with the gentleness of it.

When Kat was done – had tucked Amelia in underneath the duvet and left a glass of cold water beside her – she rounded the bed and crouched by Harry’s side. He snored in his sleep.

Kat stroked her pointer finger over the stubble on his chin. She drew her finger back like it burned her. She cringed.

“I hate that I’m doing this,” she whispered, “but du solltest sie lieben, denn du hast sie. Du wirst sie lieben.” Amelia couldn’t understand the words. She wanted to. She wanted to know everything coming out of Kat’s mouth, intimately.

“Make it better,” Kat said finally, in a clinical tone of voice, and stuck the tip of her own thumb in her mouth. When she removed it, a glistening bead of red blood quivered there. She smoothed it across his temple. An indiscriminate smudge. It disappeared as soon as she stepped away.

Kat left the room quietly, a shadow. She pulled the door shut behind her and the lock clicked. Amelia returned to herself. She slept. It became a dream.

——

Amelia woke the next morning drenched in sweat between the thin sheets of her bed. Her skin was clean. Her pajamas were soft.

Harry lay beside her. He was shirtless and his boxers, damp with sweat as well, clung to him. The bed felt like a furnace. Amelia tried to shift, to find some relief. There was a prickling anxiety around her whole body, as if she had forgotten something very important and it was about to bear down on her head like a sharp sword.

She felt at the side of her neck, where two incisions stung, scabbed over. She rubbed at them and felt the dried blood flake away, ruby red rising under her fingers and dampening them. She rubbed and rubbed and she must have moved more than she had thought, because Harry shifted awake next to her, stretching lazily.

In all the time she had known him, Harry had always slept on his back. And yet today he rolled onto his stomach, nose pressed into the sheets, and inhaled deeply like he was savoring something. Amelia watched his eyes dart around behind his closed eyelids. He reached for her across the wide expanse of white sheets and his warm, damp palm found her elbow. He seized it. He dragged her to him.

“You look beautiful this morning,” he rumbled, his face buried in the hair at the nape of her neck. Amelia felt herself being handled like a ragdoll and thought with a sudden stupidness that there was nothing she could do to stop it, that she had to let him treat her this way. Harry entwined their legs. She felt him rut against her. Something cold and sickly was taking root in her stomach. “Irresistible,” Harry whispered, and kissed her shoulder.

“Harry, stop.” It had been months, at this point, since he had wanted her like this. She had wanted it – in fact, she had spent hundreds of dollars on new lingerie, lacy, white or yellow or pastel pink hugging at her hips, and all of it he had ignored. She had tried her hand at seduction tips from magazines when she ran out of subtle hints. She had started to understand that it wasn’t that she wanted him, but that she wanted him to want her, that she craved being wanted like something sufficient for life. Like how she had felt last night, in Kat’s arms, with Kat’s bloodstained teeth in her neck. The very thought of Kat had her muscles relaxing but for all the wrong reasons. It was not Kat’s arms around her, it was not Kat licking at her skin and tasting the salt.

The sickly feeling deepened, taking root in the marrow of her bones. Amelia wrenched away, and Harry moaned, a desperate sound. She made space between them in the bed, and when that didn’t work, when he still reached for her, she disentangled herself from the sheets and stood barefoot on the wooden floor, crossing her arms protectively over her chest.

“What’s gotten into you?”

Harry only blinked; he had no answer for her. He squeezed her pillow tight enough to leave the indents of his fingertips behind.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, “you’re my wife.” And it was a reasonable explanation enough to want her, but Amelia did not want him, and she absentmindedly rubbed the side of her neck again, where the blood had stained it. Harry’s eyes were drawn to the movement and he frowned. For a moment, it appeared as if something was on his mind, hovering at the boundary of his consciousness, and he needed to voice it – but the expression passed as fleetingly as it had arrived, and he crawled towards her, arms outstretched.

“You feel so good,” he said, but he was not touching her.

Amelia turned on a heel and went into the bathroom, locking the door behind her. She drew a cold shower.

The world felt muddled as she went about her morning routine, scrubbing her skin raw with the exfoliating soap the hotel provided and smearing sunscreen across her nose. Everything was numb. When she emerged from the bathroom in a plush hotel robe, her pajamas hanging from her arm, Harry was already dressed and sipping a cappuccino by the balcony doors. He spared her a single, icy glance as she dug in her suitcase for an unwrinkled sundress, then muttered something about seeing about those walking tours from the concierge before ducking out of the room. A return to normalcy, Amelia thought peacefully. She had no sundresses which were not wrinkled. She changed into a clean two-piece bathing suit and one of Harry’s shirts instead.

The weather had reported storms, but Amelia had no idea; she hadn’t looked at her phone since she had plugged it in the night before, hoping that if she avoided all notifications Harry would not even think to message her, or to return to the hotel. Perhaps he would get bored with Sicily, hail a cab from whatever obscure corner of the city he had found himself in and spontaneously hop on a flight back to the States. He would forget all about his wife, with whom he was meant to be celebrating his anniversary tomorrow, over a candlelit dinner at a beautiful restaurant that sold bottles of wine for thousands of dollars and served portions smaller than their fists.

The sky was slightly overcast. Amelia imagined that she felt the sun on her face. The beach crowds were sparse; off to other tourist activities in this less-than-perfect weather. A psychic fog seemed to hang over her mind; she registered her general loneliness with a sense of detachment. She was looking for something without knowing what that something was. The puncture wounds on her neck had closed up in the shower, but she kept feeling at them every so often, to remind herself that they were there.

And then, as if the clouds had parted to show the shining moon, there was Kat: in a loose black cover-up and another wide-brimmed hat, carrying a thick paperback book under one arm. She had a frozen drink in hand with a curly straw perched between her lips. She looked like a petulant child going through a goth phase, and Amelia was struck with the sudden urge to be near her; inexplicably, to be the cotton fabric that she wore or the pages of the book she would turn in her fingers.

Amelia raised a hand in acknowledgement. There was an empty lounge chair next to her; she saw it in perfect clarity, all of a sudden, the rest of her day. Kat would approach and smile shyly and sit down beside her. Amelia would say just the perfect thing about what had transpired the night before – whatever had transpired, the memories fuzzy but the feeling unmistakable – and they would laugh it off. They would stay on the beach until the light faded, and return to their rooms to dress for dinner. They might order arancini and walk down the cobblestone streets. They might share another cup of gelato. Maybe, if Amelia convinced her, they would sneak off to a secluded beach cave and Kat would lay her down, spread her out and kiss her and her hands would– oh, how she wanted.

She saw it all in such a visceral instant that when Kat caught her eye and deliberately looked away, Amelia did not understand. She continued to wave at her, even as Kat’s cheeks flushed a curious scarlet – surely, she had never been that red before – and she padded away through the sand. Amelia watched her down the beach, until she disappeared behind the curvature of a billowing umbrella and was gone.

She resolved to wait at that very beach lounger in case Kat came back, but she never did. Eventually, Amelia got cold.

She ordered room service and ate it alone in bed and let Harry kiss her when he came back from his walking tour. Whatever spell had overtaken him that morning seemed to have faded. He ruffled her hair, disinterested, and changed into his boxers in the bathroom. When he emerged, he asked her where they were having dinner the next night, even though he had made the reservation.

——

Despite herself, Amelia woke feeling guilty. It was their anniversary trip, after all, and she had barely spent any time with Harry beyond disembarking the plane and spending the night sleeping in the same bed. She felt she should remedy that, maybe offer it to him like a parting gift.

She lingered in the room while he showered and dressed, and he picked up on the hint; he offered they take a boat ride around the coast, something the hotel offered. A majestic, sun-bathed cruise across the Ionian. Amelia told him it sounded like a capital idea. She really said that – “a capital idea” – and Harry looked at her funny because she’d never before talked like a newscaster from the 1920s, but he took her hand down in the lobby and interlaced their fingers anyway.

They sat on a white metal bench by the bow of the boat, the spray just barely dusting their faces. Amelia was warm. The day was beautiful. She had been married to this man for one year. That by itself was an accomplishment to be proud of, especially for a woman like Amelia, who often found things happening around and to her and considered herself adept at the concept of temporary. Harry had known that when he married her. Maybe that’s why he tried so hard to stay.

“We should have kids,” Harry said, completely out of nowhere. Some deep, internal part of Amelia shriveled immediately in response. Forget all that affection.

“Why?” She could not hide the note of disgust from her voice.

Harry shrugged, appearing nonchalant, but the muscles of his jaw tightened imperceptibly. “We’d have handsome kids. And it’s about time for it, anyway.” He draped a possessive arm over the back of the bench, around Amelia’s shoulders.

“Neither of those are very good reasons,” Amelia pointed out. If Harry was surprised that she had called his bluff, he did not show it. He just fell quiet and let Amelia sit with the disquieting idea of children in her gut, disrupting her whole idealistic day.

The sun was warm, so warm, and Amelia had forgotten her sunglasses; she closed her eyes. On her eyelids was painted a beautiful fresco in clear, bright colors. A European palace at the height of luxury. Gauze curtains in the windows; plush rugs imported from the Middle East; sheets of the highest thread count. Endless caverns of rooms painted in dark colors, brightened by the sun through the stained glass windows. Comfort in every corner. Breakfast buffets. Red fruit and sausage and eggs in tomato sauce.

A pair of glass balcony doors thrown open on a bedroom, just as luxurious, and debauched. Sheets and pillows covering the floor. Amelia saw herself, laying in the center of the bed, her fingers tangled in the sheets, naked but for a soft yellow slip that barely covered her. Across the room, sitting backwards on a chair near an elaborate vanity set up, Kat watched her with dark, almost predatory eyes.

Kat. Beautiful. In a silk robe that brought out the gold in her eyes. Regarding Amelia with no particular instruction, just content to watch her be. She had a plate of strawberries. She was eating them whole, even the stems, and the color of them stained her teeth.

The Amelia of the dream sat up from the bed. She stalked towards Kat. Her eyes shone, and she bent, bracing her hands on the back of the chair, and kissed her.

So sweet, so easy, so soft, Kat said, but the Kat in the dream was not speaking. Sourceless, Kat’s dry-wine voice echoed in her skull.

Amelia felt a tugging in her stomach. The dream lurched, turned to something she couldn’t control. Kat’s hands were all over Amelia’s body, touching, grabbing, squeezing. I want to break her. I want to break her.

Distantly, she felt her fingers scrape against the metal bench beneath her. In the dream, Amelia pulled a sharp knife from behind her back and pressed it against Kat’s neck and watched dark blood, so dark it was almost black, bead and drip languidly. Thick like a syrup.

“Amelia,” someone said, and she heard it in her ears this time, “Amelia.”

Harry was standing by the railing of the boat. He had stood up and left her. She hadn’t noticed. He was waving impatiently – he wanted her at his side – and Amelia stood to join him, but it didn’t feel quite as good as it had when she was padding across a silken rug to Kat’s waiting body, thrumming, under her thrall.

The boat ride ended. Eventually, Amelia stopped shivering, and let the sun warm her again. They wandered the streets of Taormina without much speaking until it was time for their dinner reservation. Harry insisted on buying Amelia a sea diamond bracelet, but she kept it in her purse.

The restaurant was polished, well-lit, everything shone – Amelia could see her reflection in her wineglass. She was wearing mascara and a nude shade of lipstick that nonetheless made her lips look blunt and chalky. She had decided not to wear the pink spaghetti strap dress she had worn out with Kat, because it still had a few droplets of blood on the neckline, and was instead wearing loose palazzo plants and a dark blue blouse. She felt more like she was going to a business meeting, and less like she was with her husband on an anniversary dinner.

Harry made polite conversation about the things he had seen in Sicily, never thinking to ask Amelia what she had done – although what had she done, really, besides hang around the hotel and beg for Kat’s attention? She wished she were doing that now. He made polite inquiries to her mental state. How have you been sleeping, he asked over appetizers. Does the world around you feel real?

Amelia, all of a sudden, was experiencing the restaurant in greyscale. A headache ate away at her temples. She ate veal and tasted tang, tasted blood.

“I think you should take some time off from work,” Harry suggested. He talked around a mouthful of eggplant and took a dainty swallow of sparkling water to refresh himself. “All that stress… it’s been getting to you.”

Yes, Amelia thought suddenly, I want to take time off of work. I never want to return to the office. I want to luxuriate on a veranda in Sicily, drinking wine and eating fresh grapes and cheese, and take care of my lover when she returns from dominating the world with shoulder rubs and a warm bath. I want to be warm. I want to stop thinking.

The daydream felt real enough to distract her from Harry’s monologue. He said something about relaxation; he said something about recentering. He suggested a retreat for pre-menopausal women, and Amelia felt all her affection curdle in her chest.

“Only a year of marriage and you’re looking to get rid of me,” she said softly, and was aware that it sounded like a desperate plea for something, anything to change, but it wasn’t. It was the quiet realization that everything had already changed, and she was a sharp-edged thing trying to fit herself into Harry’s easy, round life.

“I’m not saying that,” Harry said, in a tone of voice which suggested he very much was saying it. “But you know how you get, Amelia. Distracted, forgetful, irritable when you’re called back to reality – I saw it earlier on the boat.” She wanted to object, that’s not what that was, but it wasn’t entirely true, so she kept her mouth shut. “Maybe your caseload has gotten heavier. Maybe your… condition-”

“My condition?”

“-has caught up with you. I have no idea what’s going on in your head. That’s the problem.” Harry stabbed a piece of eggplant with his fork so hard the tine threatened to bend. He chewed sullenly. A child who was negotiating to stop their favorite toy being taken away.

“What is my condition?” Amelia felt her fingers tightening around the cloth napkin in her lap; she imagined ripping it to shreds and dropping it into his wine to soak.

Harry waved his fork around her face, vaguely. “Your- isolation. I don’t know what it is, or I would have suggested how to fix it by now. Whatever keeps you from wanting to have kids,” he said, casually, unaware of how the sentiment kindled the flames at the back of her throat, “and whatever gets you all – I don’t know, distant when we have sex.”

“I think we should get divorced,” Amelia answered. She took power in saying it like that, divorced, like an action they would take, and not a divorce, something passive that would happen to them. “I think you know it, too.”

Harry set his fork down on the table. He steepled his fingers in front of his forehead. He sighed, “Amelia, you’re being irrational. I’m trying to help you, I’m your husband-”

“You’re trying to fix me,” Amelia said, and Harry did not disagree. And that was that.

She dabbed her napkin at the corner of her lips, collecting blood-red sauce on the white cotton. She dropped it on her plate so the sauce splattered – on her blouse, on the tablecloth. She expected Harry to raise a curious eyebrow. Instead, he sighed, like he had been expecting it.

“I’ll see you back at the hotel,” she said, and collected her purse from the back of her chair. It was just along the water – she knew the way if she walked. It was the same direction her and Kat had taken only two nights ago. When she ran her fingers along the brick walls, she swore she felt the phantom sensation of teeth, tugging insistently at the skin of her neck.

—— 

A scratchy-voiced singer sat behind the piano at the hotel bar, but Amelia was not distracted by them. The world felt fuzzy, every inch obscured up to the boundaries of Kat’s form, slumped over the bar and sipping at a martini. She scrolled through her phone absentmindedly; the idea of a creature as ethereal, as immortal as Kat having a cellphone hit Amelia square in the chest. A sort of affection washed over her. She longed to drape her arms over Kat’s shoulders and attach her mouth to her neck and rest there.

She settled for approaching on soft feet and tapping her on the shoulder.

Kat turned sleepily, but when she saw it was Amelia, her back straightened, eyes going dark. “Hi,” she said tepidly, a sort of slur to her voice Amelia hadn’t heard before. She wondered if Kat was drunk – by the dilation of her pupils, she certainly was – and if when she got drunk, her childhood accent slipped out. How darling. Amelia needed to cradle her, needed to-

“You shouldn’t have found me,” Kat sighed, disguising a small hiccup with a hand over her mouth. “You shouldn’t have been looking for me.”

“Why not?”

“I’m bad for you.”

“I want you to be.”

Kat had no response, but she turned her body fully on the barstool so that she faced Amelia, reclining with one elbow on the clean marble surface. Amelia thought to cage her in, but Kat was like a startled animal, skittish and unsafe. “I don’t think you know who – what – I am. Or what I’m capable of-”

“I know perfectly well-”

“You think you do, because you’ve heard stories, and you thought they were romantic. But they’re not. Something like this,” Kat sighed, gesturing between them, “is practically second nature. It doesn’t mean anything. It happens on instinct. I’ve been hungry.”

It sounded like an excuse, Amelia thought, and then she did step forward, further into Kat’s space. The other woman’s breath hitched, her eyes going slightly crossed, and Amelia thought that if it was an excuse, it was a poor one.

“Can it happen on purpose?” Amelia reached up with one hand and pushed an errant strand of Kat’s hair out of her eyes.

“Well, yes.” Light applause scattered through the bar – the singer had finished his song, and was bowing for his small audience. Kat pursed her lips and closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she looked a little steadier, a bit more clinical. “It’s a thrall, that’s all, Amelia. I’ve attracted you to me because I was trying to lure you, on purpose or not. It’s natural, but not healthy, and I don’t- I don’t plan to take advantage of you, like some others in my… position would.”

“I thought you said a woman like you would never pass up an opportunity to-”

Kat grabbed Amelia’s wrist harshly, hissing – but still, her touch was soft. Like she was afraid to break her. “This is different than that. You’re not… you’re not offering. You’re not offering,” she said, more sternly, when Amelia tried to protest. “That’s the definition of a thrall. A lure.”

“Well, what if I want to be lured?” Amelia found herself speaking slightly louder than she had meant to, and Kat’s eyes darted around the bar, now quieter, now more exposed. Her cold fingers tightened around Amelia’s wrist, and she swayed on her feet, suddenly lightheaded.

“You don’t know what you want,” Kat whispered.

When Harry had said things like that before, Amelia had scoffed, internally, berated him for being so pigheaded, but now she practically swooned. I don’t know what I want, she thought, and went willingly when Kat tugged her away from the bar, and I need you to tell me.

“We can’t talk about this here,” Kat said stiffly, and so they went upstairs. Amelia like a willing supplicant – wondering senselessly what her own blood tasted like, and if Kat would offer her a taste, make a mess of her neck and smear her fingers in it and offer them to Amelia like holy communion to take in her mouth and suck clean – in the elevator, clinging to Kat’s arm, down the tenth floor-hall. The intensity of Kat’s effect on Amelia had grown threefold with her proximity. She smelled like a fresh summer rain and a bottle of wine decanting. Amelia hardly noticed they were stopped outside her own room, that Kat was using a pin from her own hair to jimmy the lock.

She pushed the door open with her foot, and there they were, in the space Amelia had clinically shared with her husband for the past six nights. Amelia’s will returned to her only long enough to press the door shut behind them. When Kat turned, she was immediately lost in those eyes – gold, again. Shining. Uncanny.

“Amelia,” Kat sighed, and as if she could not help herself, she took two great strides forward and took Amelia’s face in her hands and kissed her. The second their lips touched, Amelia felt herself wrenched through a timelapse past that wasn’t her own – cold, wet, and hungry in a rotting manor in the Austrian countryside, a lavish party and a dark man with red eyes, a woman’s neck, the stench of death in an alleyway, a woman’s neck, endless train rides, gold bars stacked in neat rows, a woman’s neck, a woman’s neck-

Kat ripped her mouth away and tripped backwards, landing awkwardly on the edge of the bed. The mattress squeaked damningly. Amelia paid no notice. This was primal, she thought as she straddled Kat’s lap, easily, and rocked her hips into her. Whatever inhibition Kat had loosened inside of her, it was nothing new. It had been there all along, every second glance and clenched fist, and now it was released like a metric ton of weight being chucked into a roiling ocean, a tsunami the byproduct of Amelia’s own desire.

“You unlocked me,” she muttered, nonsensically, against Kat’s lips, her gloss smeared off, her mouth open, panting. Kat seemed to grin despite herself.

“Don’t say things like that to me,” she pleaded, but she was smiling. She couldn’t stop smiling.

Everything was heat and Kat and more. Amelia held on tight to the only solid object in the room, which seemed to be the muscles of Kat’s back where they flexed under her loose cotton shirt. She skated her fingers over Amelia’s chest, the ghost of a touch on her breasts, before retreating down to her hips and rubbing firm circles there with her thumbs. “Darling,” she repeated like a mantra, “my darling, my sweet, mein mond, ich will dich nicht verletzen, please.”

“Hurt me.” Whether or not Amelia knew what Kat had asked tacit permission for in German, or whether it was a response of pure instinct, was not clear in the moment. “Tear me to shreds. Taste me. Please, please, I-” and her words fell off into a broken gasp as Kat’s hand found its way between her legs and her mouth, her red red mouth, landed on that very same sore spot on Amelia’s neck. A wound reopened. Perhaps it had never closed. Perhaps it had never been a wound.

Amelia rocked her hips, chasing a phantom sensation that was more than anything she had felt before, indulgence doubled and redoubled in every nerve ending in her body as Kat drank from her, content, making small humming noises. After she came, Kat still worked at her, fingers and mouth, and she found herself going soft, running her fingers through this beautiful woman’s hair and working out the tangles.

Go on, my love, she thought with such a startling intensity, clearly, as if Kat might hear her. Take what you need from me. It’s all right. I know you’re hungry. I know you crave me. I want you to crave me. I want you to want, I want. I want, you want, I want you-

Kat mumbled something unintelligible. When she looked up, her eyes were bright golden, and blood coated her chin. Amelia laughed, stroked a single tear from Kat’s eye. “It’s okay,” she said out loud, in answer to Kat’s unasked question. “You’re so good.”

Kat moaned. Beneath Amelia, her hips twitched. When she finally pulled her mouth away, the entire lower half of her face was so red, so crimson dark and erotic. A thin, shimmering rim of gold threatened to be swallowed by her pupils; she held Amelia ever tighter and she couldn’t quite tell if the possession arose from Kat’s bloodlust or some other feeling deep inside her. She sighed in contentment, thinking quite happily that the dynamic had reversed – whatever spell Kat had placed on her, intentional or not, had faded, and all that was left was Amelia’s determination and Kat’s desperation. And how nice it felt, to hold someone who wanted to be held by her.

She leaned in to kiss her. She leaned in to lick the blood from Kat’s chin and find out what she tasted like. She leaned in, and metal burst on her tongue, and it felt so heady that she did not feel or sense the door to the room wrench open, or the air leave the room in a rush.

Kat tightened her hold around Amelia, and it was the sharp pressure of her fingernails landing in the muscles of her arms that forced to her to turn, finding Harry silhouetted in the sobering white light of the hall beyond, his tie askew, his face like a morose abstract painting. He seemed to have no emotion and every emotion all at once.

Amelia sank onto the bed beside Kat, her body going cold, feeling sticky and strange. Her blood was shared between their lips, and the red gave them away. She knew it. She knew Harry could see her pants unfastened and her heaving chest and Kat’s awestruck face, the sharp incisors that hung over her lower lip. She knew Harry, ever puzzling, was putting the pieces together. She imagined him with a crossword at the morning breakfast table. An act you catch your wife in the midst of with a mysterious woman. Eight letters, begins with a C-H. She watched him pencil the answer in, his jaw flexing, his mouth opening.

“Amelia,” he said softly, and Amelia realized she did not like the way her name sounded coming out of his mouth anymore. You stupid fucking donkey, she thought, and it was somehow the cruelest thought she had ever had about him.

There were many ways to go from here, but it turned out that the newfound possessiveness that bloomed inside of Kat like a poisonous flower would guide them down a certain road. Her hands tightening around Amelia’s waist, her lips drawing back to reveal her sharp teeth. She hissed. The blood leached from Harry’s face.

One of the reasons Amelia had married Harry was because he never asked unnecessary questions. Now she longed for him to ask, if only so she could answer. She thought she needed to answer out loud to know, in her own mind, what was happening, but Harry did not ask. He seemed not to need to. Later, Amelia would like to think she could see the moment Kat, in Harry’s eyes, had gone from slut to threat. It was just as Amelia looped her arms around Kat’s neck and brushed her fingers through her hair. It was in response to this blatant rejection that Harry fell into a blind rage the likes of which he had never experienced before.

It was just his luck that there had been a fruit platter on the table in their room, right by the door, left by the concierge earlier in the day. It was just his luck that this fruit platter had a knife on it, large, serrated. And it was just Harry’s luck that he gathered his faculties enough to lunge, fist tight around the knife’s wooden handle, the blade quivering in his grip. And forward he went.

It wasn’t clear whether he was aiming for Amelia’s back or Kat’s chest. In the end, it didn’t really matter.

Amelia felt herself thrown to the bed, held down by an invisible weight on her chest. Kat was up like a shot, and Amelia watched, frozen, as Kat tackled her husband to the ground. The knife clattered to the floor. They both landed with a sickening thump. Harry took the brunt of it.

He grunted with the force, but he did not say anything. His words stuck in his throat – or no, better, they flowed through his bloodstream into Kat’s waiting mouth. Amelia heard the suckling sounds, saw Harry’s face pale, his legs and arms thrash, scratching at Kat, who did not falter. Mouth-wateringly strong. Kat crouched on the ground and held Harry’s throat to her mouth by the head until he fell limp. Until he was as white as the fresh bedsheets the hotel left for them every morning.

“Mine,” she said the whole time, sometimes as loud as if her voice was in Amelia’s head, sometimes barely audible. “Mine, she’s mine, she’s mine and you can’t have her. Mine, all mine. Mine to have and love and protect, mine all mine, you can’t have her-”

With a particularly savage shake of her head, Kat tore away a chunk of Harry’s neck and spit it on the ground beside her, returning to the ground meat of his throat with a vicious focus. The wet sound of the skin hitting the wooden floor snapped Amelia from her frozen trance, and she lifted herself on shaky legs from the bed, kneeling on the carpet beside Harry’s body. She felt his wrist. His pulse was sluggish, slow, fading rapidly. His whole body was cold. Blood poured from his neck, splattered Kat’s dress, his own tan suit jacket, the floor and the walls and the ceiling. The whole room was red. Amelia placed her hand on Kat’s cheek to draw her attention, and the red room felt still.

“Yours,” Amelia said, like an answer to a question, and then, “and I always was.”

Kat ripped her mouth away from Harry’s brutalized neck. The loss of suction made a wet, uncomfortable sound. "You weren’t.”

“I was and didn’t know it,” Amelia said, and leaned over the unmoving body of her husband to kiss Kat, bruisingly, certain. She thought that Harry’s blood did not taste as good as her own. She wondered if this meant her and Kat were soulmates, destined to handfast under a silver moon and go skipping through fields of poppy like all the stories she used to believe in.

“I think you might be the death of me,” Kat said nonsensically, nipped at Amelia’s lip gently, and Amelia thought yes, of course. Her mind cleared of its heat and fuzziness. The hiss of the air conditioner returned to sting at her; the weight of half of Harry’s body was heavy on her lap. She stayed there and let the blood seep into her clothes, let Kat kiss her, and kiss her, and kiss her.

—— 

A hired car slowed to a stop in front of the hotel, where two women waited, suitcases resting at their feet. The taller had her arms wrapped around the shorter from behind, face pressed to her neck, wide-brimmed hat hiding her from the stinging sun. The shorter had a faint discoloration around the ring finger on her left hand, as if something had recently been removed, but not before a tan line could make its damning presence known.

The shorter woman – an American, the driver had determined – made small talk while her companion loaded their suitcases into the trunk of the car, politely turning away the help of the bellman. “Did you have a good vacation?” the driver asked. He was a weathered old man, he’d been driving taxis between the airport and the hotel and the airport for seventeen years, and he could never manage to mask his thick Sicilian accent. He’d seen a million happy and unhappy vacation parties come and go. Something about this pair – affectionate, almost sickeningly so – made a certain part of his brain prickle with recognition, but he couldn’t place it.

“Just lovely,” the American woman sighed dreamily. “Although this sunburn won’t be going away anytime soon.” The driver chuckled along with her.

“I heard about some nastiness at this place,” he said tepidly, because he was old and fond of gossip, and he could only bribe the valet drivers so much for information. “A body found in a room, yeah? Very upsetting, very upsetting. Hope that didn’t trouble you at all.”

The American woman’s eyebrows raised. She seemed not to have heard the news, from her sharp inhale, but her back was stiff. After a moment, she relaxed, raised her hand to her mouth delicately. “Oh, my. That’s awful. We hadn’t heard anything about that- we knew something had happened, of course-” The companion – who was certainly European but doing a good job of hiding it, the driver thought bitterly – slid into the backset of the cab. She wrapped a comforting arm around the American’s waist. “Darling, did you hear? All those police cars around here this morning. They found a body in one of the rooms.”

The companion whistled low under her breath. “Goodness. I hope whoever it was died peacefully.”

“Ah, it was gnarly, I hear,” the driver grinned. The companion raised an eyebrow in interest. The American frowned tightly. They always were uptight, in the driver’s experience. “Bloody. Blunt force, I hear, but his neck made a mess of. A mess, a real mess.”

The American nodded sagely, brow knit. Beside her, her companion remained preternaturally still, and the driver thought he saw, for the briefest of seconds, a smile play about her lips. Gallantly, but clearly wishing to change the subject, the American woman said, “I sure hope they catch whoever did it. I’m glad we’re leaving tonight.” Her companion nodded, drawing in a deep breath. “I wouldn’t feel safe another night in that hotel with a killer about.”

“What if they just… walked up to you at breakfast one morning?” the companion wondered as the driver pulled away from the hotel and onto the busy street. He thought he could place the American woman now – she looked very similar to another he’d driven to this very hotel, not a week ago, but she couldn’t be the same. The other woman had been traveling with her husband. And she’d looked miserable. This woman glowed bright as the sun.

“Horrible,” she agreed with her companion, burrowing slightly further into her side. “I think next anniversary we’ll avoid a city altogether, right, darling? We’ll go for someplace in the mountains. Or a seaside cottage in Maine.”

The companion chuckled softly. “Whatever you say, my dear.” She kissed the temple of the American woman lovingly; the driver couldn’t help but smile at them in the rearview mirror. He suddenly longed to be home, with his own wife of almost fifty years, sitting on their back patio and sipping coffee while they watched the birds. Love, he thought, was often contagious.

Whispers drifted from the backseat to the driver’s ears – the couple would soon be redecorating their East Village apartment, it seemed, and could not agree on the color for the curtains. When they began to discuss exactly what they would be doing to each other when they got home, the driver, as all good cabbies learned to do, tuned out.

He noticed something strange about the two women as they removed their luggage from his taxi at the airport terminal. Stranger than the way the taller one seemed determined to keep herself out of the sun, even though it was a beautiful Sicilian day. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it at first, but as he was pulling away from the terminal and setting his sights on his next destination, it hit him. Their eyes. Both of their eyes had been a sort of abnormal color. If he focused hard enough on the memory… yes, he was sure their eyes had been golden.