(Some concepts and storylines were written for narrative purposes only.)
Aefia trembled in place.
"You do recall that whoever was my victim, was left helpless and suffered a gruesome death. There was nothing to do them justice, since I was so good at hiding myself." Kazimir continued.
"I knew their names, you know? Mary Ann. Annie. Elizabeth. Catherine. Mary Jane. Every single one of them thought they were clever, too. They thought they understood the dark streets they walked in. But in the end, they were just flesh and bone waiting for a proper artist."
She silently gritted her teeth. Her fingers clenching into a fist as she growled in anger and fear.
"You wonder how a man like me ended up here, don't you?" Kazimir mused, tracing the flat side of the pocket knife along her jawline. "It wasn't disease that took me. It was a pathetic, wretched little coward—the brother of one of my victims. Came at me in a dark alley with an iron pipe while my hands were still warm and occupied. No grand trial. No gallows. Just a crack to the back of my skull and blackness."
He let out a soft, dry chuckle that rattled in his chest. "When I opened my eyes, I wasn't in hell. Or perhaps I was, and I simply found it accommodating. I was a devil—a starving, foul thing wandering the freezing wastes of this realm for decades. I devoured whatever latent magic I could scrape off the earth, waiting, hunting for a vessel that could hold me. And then... the Mides Queen gave birth to her eldest prince."
His smile stretched unnaturally wide, showing teeth that seemed a fraction too sharp. "A fragile, useless little infant. It took no effort at all to slip inside, smother his tiny soul, and take his skin for my own. I became the Crown Prince. But a man's nature doesn't simply vanish because he wears silk, Aefia. The hunger remains."
Kazimir tilted his head, his fingers tightening in her black hair, wrenching her head back just enough to keep the strain on her neck excruciating.
"By my sixth year, the palace grounds felt far too quiet," he whispered softly. "Servants began to disappear. A maid who spilled tea on my rug. A stable boy who looked at me with a fraction too much curiosity. I cut them down in the quiet corners of the estate. And do you know why no one ever found out? Why the grand Mides kingdom never suspected their darling prince?"
He leaned in closer, his breath freezing against her damp skin. "Because I never worked alone. Back in London, and here in this gilded cage, I had my lackeys. I only ever did the divine work—the throat, the precise slice across the carotid. The rest? The disposal, the clean-up? Other women did it for me. Noblewomen who envied their rivals, court ladies who hated the prettier maids... I gave them their targets, I cut the vocal cords, and they happily buried the remains, or did whatever they wanted."
Kazimir brought the razor edge of the pocket knife back to the hollow of her throat, pressing it back at the small piercing wound. The blade sat comfortably back at the slot, and Aefia couldn't even move.
"And the method... ah, the method never fails," Kazimir purred, his voice dropping into a suffocating, hypnotic murmur. "Do you know how I kept five women silent in the dark, damp alleys of Whitechapel? Simple instruction. I whispered in their ears just like this: If you make a sound, if you so much as draw a loud breath, the blade goes straight through your windpipe. And do you know what those foolish, pathetic women did?"
He grinned, his eyes wide and unblinking.
"They stayed dead silent. They froze in terror, believing that if they just complied, if they just kept quiet, I might let them live. They held their breath right up until the moment the steel sliced through their flesh. Silence was their promise of safety... and my guarantee of a clean job."
Aefia stayed completely still. Cold sweat mixed with the drying blood on her forehead, dripping rhythmically onto her neck.
Her mind wasn't in the damp, airless cell anymore. It had spiraled backward, plummeting through the dark depths of the palace basement she had explored days prior—where she had seen the calcified bones, the mutilated remains of servants preserved in dark magic, locked away in unmarked stone alcoves where no light would ever reach them.
The horrific reality of his words crashed over her with suffocating weight. She was kneeling before a monster who didn't just kill; he erased. If he slit her throat here, her body would be dragged down to those same dark alcoves, buried beneath the flagstones, and no one would ever know. No justice would ever be served.
The sheer terror of absolute erasure gripped her lungs, squeezing the air out of her chest.
Then, the spiral went deeper—tearing past this world entirely, ripping back to a dimly lit house on Earth.
She remembered the heavy, erratic footsteps on the porch. The smell of cheap whisky and stale tobacco wafting through the front door. Her father coming home, his face twisted in senseless, drunken rage. She remembered the sound of her mother weeping, the dull thuds against the living room wall, and the inevitable moment the door to her bedroom was kicked open.
Feelings flared back to her mind, of when she was beaten until her ribs cracked, thrown into the dark storage closet, and locked inside for three excruciating hours without a single soul coming to help. No medical care. No comforting words. Just the cold, dusty floor and the suffocating dark.
But I didn't die, her mind screamed through the haze of memory.
The Red Crescent youth club she had joined in secret back at her school. She had learned how to bind wounds, how to stitch it up with adult help, how to suppress shock, and how to keep herself alive in that dark closet using a smuggled roll of gauze and pure, stubborn spite.
That dark closet hadn't broken her. It had stripped away her capacity for fear, leaving behind a cold, unyielding mind of pure survival.
Aefia's trembling slowly ceased.
The cold sweat on her skin hardened into ice. The sheer absurdity of Kazimir's theatrical arrogance suddenly felt less like an inescapable nightmare and more like an insult to everything she had bled to survive.
Aefia let out a low, shaky breath through her nose. Then, slowly, her shoulders settled.
"Is that... supposed to scare me?" Aefia rasped.
Kazimir's smile faltered slightly, his eyes narrowing at the sudden shift in her posture.
Aefia forced her head up, ignoring the agonizing bite of the iron sickles pulling at her shoulders and the sharp edge of the blade digging into her neck. She looked directly into his golden eyes, her blood-crusted garnet gaze burning with a terrifying, unhinged clarity.
"You talk so much about your little alleyways, Kazimir," Aefia whispered, her voice rough, slurred, but laced with a lethal, venomous mock. "You think you are the only monster who learned how to bleed in the dark?"
She shifted her neck forward, intentionally pushing her skin deeper into his pocket knife. Blood pooled heavily around the blade, but her expression didn't flinch by a fraction of a millimeter.
"On Earth, I learned how to patch my own broken skin in a locked closet while my father drank himself to sleep," she purred, a quiet, sickening smile breaking across her blood-stained lips. "And in this world? If only you knew how much of a pain-tolerating, bloodless psycho I have become."
Kazimir's grip on her hair tightened, but his golden eyes flickered with a sudden, subtle hint of hesitation.
"I didn't hide in alleys," Aefia continued, her garnet eyes flashing with a deep, violent crimson light. "When a group of faculty members took the person I held most dear... I didn't whisper threats. I walked into their space, locked the doors from the inside, and slaughtered an entire group of professors until the floor was slick with their guts. Every single one of them."
She let out a raspy, breathless laugh that sent an echo straight down the damp dungeon walls.
"So don't lecture me about silence, Jack," she whispered, leaning her weight right onto his blade as a calm smirk curved her lips.
"You and I... we are on the exact same bloody page. The only difference is... you need a knife to feel like a man. I just need to open my mouth. If not, I just raise my sword."
Kazimir blinked, startled for a split second as her words hung in the suffocating silence between them. He stared at her smirk, his jaw tightening as the absolute arrogance of her declaration sank in.
A low growl escaped his throat. He didn't pull the blade back. Instead, he twisted the steel, digging the tip half an inch deeper into the soft flesh of her neck, letting her warm blood spill over his knuckles.
"You speak as if you hold the upper hand, little princess," Kazimir spoke through gritted teeth. "You talk of raising swords and opening your mouth, yet here you kneel, chained like a rabid dog to my dungeon floor. Do you truly think your little speeches change a single thing?"
Aefia didn't flinch as the blade cut deeper. The raw, searing pain in her neck was nothing compared to the roaring flame of hatred consuming her chest. She simply stared straight into his eyes, her smirk widening into something terrifyingly unhinged.
"They change everything, Jack," she rasped, her slurred voice dripping with quiet confidence. "Because a predator who relies on fear loses all his power the second his prey stops being afraid."
She then looked down at his hand holding the blade.
"Besides... Shouldn't you be worried how I am still alive despite having a blood buried into me? Shouldn't you be thinking how I am still breathing even with a literal steel stuck in me?"
Kazimir's golden eyes narrowed into razor-sharp slits. His mask of refined royalty completely shattered, revealing the grotesque, twitching madness of the killer beneath. The sickly purple veins along his jaw flared violently, throbbing against his pale skin as his dark magic reacted to the sheer, toxic arrogance wafting off her.
"Then let us see how confident you remain when your vocal cords are sliced in two," Kazimir snarled, his fingers knotting tighter into her hair, wrenching her head back until her joints popped.
"Oh really?" She chuckled. "Even after I have spoken about my past accomplishments, you are not stepping back. Hm... What is up with you? Did they forget to put you in an asylum in times of your lives?"
"Shut up," he warned.
Aefia didn't stop. "Hit a nerve, didn't I? A grand, infamous killer... throwing a tantrum because a chained girl refuses to play the role of your little Whitechapel victim."
"I said shut up!" Kazimir roared, his theatrical cadence completely dissolving into unhinged rage. "You think you are clever? You think your little survival story makes you special? You are nothing! Just another arrogant piece of meat waiting to be carved!"
"And yet," Aefia purred, her garnet eyes flashing with an icy, mocking brilliance that pinned him in place, "you haven't cut. You have been standing here for five whole minutes, holding a blade to a chained girl's neck, giving grand speeches... because deep down, Jack, you are terrified."
Kazimir froze, his chest heaving, his jaw clenched so hard the muscles quivered under his pale skin.
"You are terrified because for the first time in two lives, the person in front of you isn't looking at a monster," Aefia whispered. "They are just looking at a pathetic, insecure man who needs iron chains and a dark room to feel like he exists."
"I will tear your throat out!" he snarled, raising his wrist to execute the final, lethal slash.
"Go ahead," Aefia sneered, her smile stretching wide, manic, and utterly devoid of fear. "Do it! Drive the steel in! Cut the windpipe! But let's be honest... At the end of the day, you are nothing compared to the victim you have decided to choose today.
"And I do recall warning you about the destruction I will cause to this Kingdom. So officially, you are losing everything." She offered a polite smile.
"I didn't leave guards at the door because I don't need them," Kazimir said, his fingers tightening in her black locks, wrenching her head back just a fraction more until her throat was stretched entirely taut. "No one is coming to save you. No noble ally. Just you, me, and the quiet rhythm of your heart slowing down."
Aefia's garnet eyes narrowed. The throbbing ache in her skull was blinding, and the heavy iron sickles pulled mercilessly at her socket joints, but something in her blood was waiting patiently to be let out.
She let out a faint, bloody laugh—a dry, rasping sound that rattled in her chest.
Kazimir's smile faltered slightly, his eyebrow twitching upward at her reaction. "You laugh?"
"Jack... the Ripper," Aefia choked out, forcing her slurred voice to steady, her gaze locking dead onto his golden eyes with unyielding venom. "You brag about butchering defenseless women in dark alleys... like it makes you a god."
She shifted her weight forward, ignoring the way the steel bit deeper into her flesh, drawing another thin line of red.
"You came to another world... gained magic, gained a title, gained an army..." Aefia whispered, a cruel, mocking sneer breaking through the blood on her face. "...and you are still just a pathetic coward who can only feel powerful when his victim is chained to a wall."
Kazimir's expression darkened instantly, the playful, theatrical malice vanishing from his features, replaced by a cold, suffocating fury. The dark purple veins along his jaw flared violently as his grip on her hair tightened to a bruising intensity.
"You speak too much for a corpse," Kazimir hissed.
"Maybe," Aefia purred, her garnet eyes flashing with a sudden, brilliant crimson light from deep within her pupils. "But a real villain doesn't leave their weapon in the enemy's blood."
"What is that even supposed to mean?" He asked, stopping the blade above his head.
She only smirked.
BOOM!
A catastrophic explosion detonated high above the subterranean levels, sending a violent shockwave tearing through the foundation of the palace. The dungeon walls groaned under the sudden pressure, dust and heavy stone debris raining down from the cracked ceiling to the cold flagstones around them.
"You had your fun." She spoke out loudly, pulling on the iron sickles screwed tightly to the stone wall. "Now is my turn."