[X: WHEN ALL YOUR PROMISES ARE GONE]

SILA SAT ON THE ROOF of Malcolm Khalaji’s building and let his bare feet dangle over the edge, swinging and swinging and swinging. If his legs were only six inches longer, they would see him: just a pair of heels and ten curled toes, swaying in the air over Malcolm’s window, playing peek-a-boo with the lovers like a little peeping tom.

He wouldn’t look—no, no, he wouldn’t look, but he didn’t have to look to know. All those little buttons pushed, and really it had taken them so very long, but then but then but then…

He’d rather broken his Jamjali, hadn’t he.

He’d held his pretty little dragonfly in his palm and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until those translucent diamond wings crumpled and crushed and shattered to dust, and still…

Still, his Jamjali tried to fly.

He threw his head back and laughed, then caught himself, clapped a hand over his mouth, silenced it to a giggle. Even now he would think they were rushing breaths and grasping hands and low lost sighs, completely absorbed in each other, their own world of skin like two snakes coiling and coiling and coiling around each other, strong and lovely and glistening. He couldn’t interrupt, wouldn’t let them stop, had to be quiet quiet quiet as a mouse.

He wondered, now, as he wondered many things, and he listened to the high singing keen of the wind over the rooftops and thought to himself of many thinkings. Of his Jamjali, feral and hissing and spitting with his tail on end, swatting all claws at a stroking hand only to sulkily demand that hand back when it was withdrawn. Did he think he would be a gentle little lap pet, soothed and tamed and calm, for Malcolm Khalaji?

Did he think Malcolm Khalaji would fix him?

Bend him into all the wrong shapes, and force him into the outline the world had cut for him until there was no room for all his beautiful, fragmented, bleeding edges?

That couldn’t happen.

That couldn’t happen at all.

His Jamjali was at his most beautiful when he was broken. All those places where he had been sanded down until he’d gone soft and smooth were just dull, the shine and luster of him gone. He was lovely when he shone like shattered glass, shone like fire, shone like spilled blood, shone like a thousand running teardrops that would never stop.

And Sila would make him shine again. Make him right again, and teach Jamjali once again who he truly, truly was.

He would make the dirty clean again, washed in a river of blood.

Smiling, he swung his feet one more time, kicking his heels against the stone—then jackknifed to his feet, spreading his arms and embracing the wind, the sky, the high October moon as he let the night finger his hair and touch down the back of his neck and slither inside his clothing to lick and caress and stroke his hungry body.

“Here, kitty kitty kitty,” he whispered.

And laughed.

[THE END]

Read on for a preview from CRIMINAL INTENTIONS Season One, Episode Eight: COLLATERAL DAMAGE!