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Charlie stood across the street from the old bank, hands twisted together. Her eyes darted down the dark road, to the warm glow of the saloon where Miles sat with a bottle of something strong and bitter. To the turn of the corner that led to Grandpa’s house where Mom was mixing up whatever horrible chemicals go into a lethal injection. She suppressed a shudder, glancing back to the large, imposing door of the bank.
Just behind that door, was a man she had clutched fleeting snapshots of, all her life.
When she was four, before the Blackout, he was her uncle’s handsome best friend, the one with the curls and the brilliant smile, the one she’d crushed on in that charming preschool way.
When she was twelve, he was a mysterious bogeyman, tucked up in his crystal Philadelphia palace while the people starved for his taxes, like a villain from a fairytale.
When she was twenty, he was the murdering son of a bitch that stole her father and her brother and everything she’d ever cared about.
Then he had his world torn away and she lost a few more people and grew a thicker skin and now-
At twenty-one, she had formed yet another opinion of Sebastian Monroe but in two hours, she’d never get a chance to see it play out, this almost complete picture of the man she’d in turns adored and ignored and abhorred.
Charlie rolled her eyes. She was going to burn that goddamn rhyming dictionary Aaron had been reading aloud for three nights while he doodled. She sounded like a dystopian Shel Silverstein. Visibly making up her mind, she marched out into the empty road and up to the Patriot guard stationed outside the bank.
“I’d like to see him,” she announced, voice loud and cracked with false bravado. “Monroe.”
“I’m sorry, miss, lots of people’d like to give him a piece of their minds. We can’t be havin’ a riot.”
“Mi-Stu Redman was allowed in because he asked for him. Even a monster gets to say goodbye. Tell him Charlotte Matheson,” she paused for effect, the guard’s eyebrow lifting in a satisfying quirk, “is here to see him.” She sounded far more confident than she felt, or at least, she hoped she did. The name typically lent her a little credence (fear?), even if the pretty face didn’t.
Charlie wasn’t sure why they let her in, if Monroe confirmed he wanted to apologize or say goodbye or tell her to fuck off himself, but let her in they did, with a warning look and a, “You’ve got five minutes, Ms. Matheson. If you intend to make your peace, just don’t leave any marks where the cameras’ll get ‘em.”
She scoffed under her breath, disgust welling up in her throat.
“Charlotte.”
His voice, that warm, rocky sound like rain on a tin roof or guitar playing in the back of a dimly lit bar, ran up through her toes and she lifted her eyes to his face. Chains jangled, bouncing off the walls of the vault.
“Why are you here?”
She pressed her lips together, feeling chapped. “Guess I just had to see for myself.” Charlie stepped into the makeshift cell, maybe a foot of awkward, stale air between them.
“What do you want to hear?” His question was low, quiet, and she pinned him with an inquiring look. “I’m sorry? I’m about to die cold and alone? I deserve what’s coming?”
“No!” Charlie swallowed her too-quick protest, biting her lip.
“This is what you always wanted. Public indignity and execution.”
“No,” she murmured, shaking her head, hands clenching into fists at her sides. “Too impersonal. Wanted to shoot you myself.”
“Then why didn’t you, all those chances?”
“It would have killed him.” Charlie winced at the bare honesty but, then, what would be the point of lying to a man who would be taking your secrets to the grave in a couple of hours?
He stared at her for several long, confused seconds. “Miles?”
She nodded, reaching a hand out slowly, as if she wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to do with it. The rattle of his chains was too obnoxious to ignore as she slid her fingers in between his. “It might not be tonight, or tomorrow, or even a year from now, but eventually he’ll kill himself over you.”
Nudging her knee with his, he squeezed her hand. “Hey.” He stared at her until she looked up, reluctant. “Then you can’t let him.”
“S’not fair,” Charlie mumbled, teeth sinking into her lip and her vision swimming with watery denial.
“No, it isn’t.”
She pressed the heel of her free hand to her forehead, willing traitorous tears to stay inside her skull. One crept down her cheek anyway. She thought she heard him suck in a shaky breath, his grip tightening til he all but crushed the fine bones of her hand.
“Don’t cry for me, Charlotte. You’ll break your mother’s heart.”
“Since when do you care about my mother?”
“Since when do you care about me?”
Hearing it spoken out loud, this preposterous idea that she cared about him, for him, made her lips twist into a lemon-sour scowl. “I don’t.”
“Then start acting like it. Say your piece and get out of here.” His voice was hushed, gaze shooting to the blank-faced guard pretending not to listen in.
“I have nothing to say to you. A scolding isn’t going to bring anyone back.” Charlie blinked, trying to force away the stinging in her eyes.
He tucked his chin down, staring at their clasped hands and she followed the look, stretching her thumb out to caress the cold cast iron at his wrist. “I love him,” he mumbled. Something crossed his face that she didn’t quite understand, something like hate or that old paranoid terror of betrayal. But he wasn’t lying: when he lied, his jaw clenched and his shoulders squared, as if he were putting on a plastic mask and playing at general. “He knows that. But I thought you should too, before I- go.”
“I knew that already.” It sounded clipped and harsh in her head and that wasn’t what she meant so she pressed her free hand to his chest, the fabric of his shirt rough and scratchy on her palm. “I think- everyone knows that.”
He swallowed hard over a knot of tears, eyes welling up. She’d mocked him for that once. Now she only supposed that even monsters have tear ducts. “You should go.”
“Ms. Matheson? Your time’s just about up.”
“You said five minutes,” she snapped back without tearing her eyes away. Charlie curled her fingers in his shirt, yanking him to her with a clang of iron and sealing her lips over his. If they’d had the presence of mind to give into this before reaching Willoughby, it would have been a battle of unresolved tension and fumbling hands.
But they didn’t have time for any of that, no matter how much she wanted him to trap her against the wall and work his fingers inside her before they lost their chance forever, audience be damned.
Instead she only leaned into him, squeezing his hand, and kissing him deep and long and goodbye. It took him a few seconds to catch up but then his free hand was at her hip, stretched as far from the wall as chains would allow, and tongue stroking across hers.
She craned her neck, thigh edging between his, and for a moment, the bank vault-come-jail cell didn’t matter. A thin line of sweat dripped down the back of her neck and he jerked at his chains, growling into her mouth. Charlie should have felt satisfied at his frustration; rather, she only wanted his hands free. She wound her arm around his shoulders, clinging, shirt riding up beneath his fingertips as she traced blunt teeth with her tongue. Fine bristles of his mustache scratched at her lips and chin and cheek and she twisted against him, his hardness pressed into her thigh and her breasts pushed up against his chest, cleavage almost innocent beneath the lavender fabric of her shirt.
The Patriot guard cleared his throat, appearing both discomfited and out of patience. “Time’s up, Ms. Matheson.”
He suppressed a moan as she pulled away, both of their lips raw and tender and their matching eyes crackling blue. Charlie had to look away to control herself, eyes falling on the rat’s nest in the corner, her breath coming in quiet, shallow gasps with the weight of his hand still on her hip. “Goodbye, Bass,” she whispered in a rush, stepping away and out of the vault.
She heard him slump back against the wall, hands probably falling limp at his sides and that wide devastated look on his face. Charlie squeezed her eyes shut as she was led to the front of the bank, a grubby hand wrapped a little too tightly around her arm.
“Was that really the appropriate reaction to the man who murdered your family, Ms. Matheson?” The voice was big and booming, flatly American, and Charlie grit her teeth as she spun on her heel to find Truman standing there with his hands on his hips. As an afterthought, she realized he was probably the one that had let her in to see him, out of sheer curiosity if nothing more sinister.
“Excuse me?”
“Well, that is the story your grandfather’s been passing around town for six months, isn’t it?”
“And you think rumors give you the right to judge my reactions?” She stalked a step closer to him, glaring.
“I’m very sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. Just, surprised, I suppose. When you turned up here, I half expected you to put him out of his misery an hour early, not- well.” Truman seemed to size her up in a glance, lingering too long on firm young curves and bruised lips. “He’s a monster, Charlotte, not a poor tortured soul.”
She slapped him, almost before she realized she wanted to, but found she didn’t regret it, even when his composure flashed angry for a moment and the Patriot asshole behind her barely held in a gasp. “First of all, nobody calls me Charlotte.” He’d probably just heard Bass say it but that was different. “More importantly, don’t you dare try to tell me who he is. I am not naïve about what kind of a man you have locked up in there. I watched my dad and my little brother bleed out in the dirt because of him. Believe me, he is a monster and a self-important, delusional one at that. He deserves every bit of pain you can lay on him.
“But before the Blackout, he was family. They all think I was deaf and blind before the lights went out because I was just a kid but I remember. He came to Thanksgiving, he played football with my uncle and my grandfather in the backyard, he brought me Skittles every time he came to visit. He probably just stopped at the drugstore but I thought he hung the goddamn moon. I know who Bass Monroe is, far better than you ever will.”
Charlie drew a deep breath, hand still raised, and flushed against her will. She hadn’t meant to go off like that or to say all those things to a perfect stranger and an enemy, no less, personal things that she hadn’t even really admitted to herself. Truman just stared at her, perhaps a bit shocked that she could string so many words together at once, given that she had barely spoken outside the house since returning to Willoughby.
“Now if you’ll excuse me.” She stumbled over the words, not that they sounded all that intentional to begin with, and stormed from the building.
Just before the door banged shut behind her, she heard the guard mutter to Truman, “He’s a cradle-robbing son of a bitch too, I guess.”
Charlie sank down onto the edge of the sidewalk with an audible sound of frustration, burying her fingers in her hair. He’d be gone soon. The crowds were already starting to gather outside the courthouse.
Maybe it would be easier, when he was just a memory of a man who became a monster.
Maybe then she could hate him again. Have the appropriate reactions.
She wasn’t gonna hold her breath about that (he got under the skin of a Matheson like nothing else.) Taking one more self-pitying gasp though, Charlie made up her mind about something: she might not be able to hate him as much as she wanted to but nor did she intend to play Mina Harker to his inner demon. Truman could think she was Bass’ too-young, starry-eyed pet all he liked.
She wouldn’t be his undoing, wouldn’t be his saving grace, wouldn’t be his at all. Charlie stood, dusting herself off.
She could do it, watch him die.
She’d had her little thrill. She could do it. She could do it. She could do it.
She was still chanting in her head as she stood there, watching him walk towards her, shackled, and felt her heart stop in her chest when he paused. He said something, something about Miles she thought, and then he was gone, door shut behind him and a needle in his arm.
He’s a monster, she told herself. He deserves this, no matter what puppy dog eyes he made or how many men he cut down in her name.
Monsters didn’t deserve love, didn’t even deserve the spreading heat between her thighs at his cold, blue stare that was something like looking in a mirror. Right? Charlie scowled.
Oh, fuck off, Mina Harker.