A week in Villian Ville felt like a century.
Every night, Tim and Jenny killed. Every dawn, they lived. The rule was simple: spill blood or be erased. Together, they had become a rhythm—blade, scream, silence. But the rhythm never ended there.
After each kill, when Tim's hands still shook from what he'd done, Jenny would slide onto his lap, press her bare stomach against him, and kiss away his sanity. Her tube top left little to the imagination, her shorts even less. In the dim candlelight of their borrowed room, she looked like temptation given skin.
At first, he resisted. His father's blood was still too fresh in his memory. The faces of their victims clung to him in nightmares. But Jenny's lips burned hotter than guilt, and every time she straddled him, every time her thigh brushed against his, his conscience collapsed.
It became their ritual.
Kill. Kiss. Forget.
The nights blurred into sweat and gasps, their bodies colliding like fire and oil. Jenny knew exactly what she was doing—how to move, when to tease, when to devour him whole. Her laughter filled the dark as her hair spilled across his chest, her hands pinning his wrists like chains. Tim lost himself willingly, night after night, drowning in her curves, her heat, her devil's smile.
By the second week, guilt no longer lingered. It was Jenny he craved, Jenny he watched when she leaned over the table, her shorts riding higher than his self-control. His eyes followed her chest when she bent forward, his thoughts derailed whenever she swayed her hips. Every glance was another nail in his coffin.
He told himself it was survival—that she was helping him forget the horror of killing. But the truth was simpler: Jenny had become his addiction.
Her kisses were stronger than any drug. Her touch rewired his body until even holding his knife felt like foreplay. He wasn't surviving Villian Ville anymore; he was surviving Jenny.
A month slipped by in this haze. Nights without her were unthinkable, and mornings were spent waiting for the next kill so the cycle could begin again. Lust was stronger than guilt. Desire replaced fear. The village's rules meant little as long as Jenny was there to ease the cost.
Until the morning she wasn't.
Tim woke to silence. No Jenny draped across him, no mischievous laugh, no teasing fingers tracing his jaw. Only the cool air and an empty bed.
On the table lay a folded note.
Tim's stomach sank before he even touched it. He unfolded the paper, Jenny's looping script cutting through him:
"Don't look for me. Survive if you can."
The words mocked him, crueler than any blade.
At first, he thought it was another of her games. He tore through the room, shouting her name, convinced she was hiding in the shadows, waiting to pounce on him with another kiss. But the streets were silent. Jenny was gone.
That night, the moon rose and demanded its due. Tim stumbled through the hunt like a drunk, his knife heavy in his hand. The shadows seemed sharper, the village hungrier. When his victim's blood sprayed across the cobblestones, he didn't feel the usual relief. Only emptiness.
No Jenny to push him down on the bed. No Jenny to grind the guilt out of him until his mind went blank. Only the echo of her laugh and the memory of her bare skin pressing into his.
He killed because he had to, but for the first time, he didn't want to survive.
Because without Jenny, survival meant nothing.