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??The Refined Monster in a Suit

Dorian

They came to me wrapped in Armani and the scent of blood they thought no one could smell. Whispers slithered through courtroom corridors. Names spoken like prayers.

Mine, always last.

They wore crocodile skin shoes and smiles carved from lies. Men who shattered their wives’ jaws over breakfast. Women who drowned their infants, then wept on morning shows. Predators. Traffickers. Human filth in silk garments.

Monsters, every last one of them.

And I?

I welcomed them.

I shook their hands. Looked them in the eye. Let them believe they were safe. Because monsters recognized their own. And I spoke the language fluently… With teeth.

* * *

Victor Mendez – The Family Man

Victor sat across from me on the courtroom bench, dabbing fake tears with a silk handkerchief.

He even wore the same tie he wore at the funeral.

The bastard.

“Please,” he said, voice trembling just enough to pass. “I didn’t mean to kill her. It was… an accident.”

His wife’s skull was cracked in three places. Her body was stuffed in a suitcase. His seven-year-old son watched it all through a crack in the closet door.

The jury weeped. The judge sighed. The prosecutor fumbled over his notes like he’s the one on trial.

But me?

I won.

Victor walked free.

But not for long.

I didn’t kill out of impulse.

I stalked.

I learned.

I let the rot breathe before I smothered it.

Victor Mendez wasn’t just a case. He was a performance. A father, a husband, a respected architect.

The system choked on his money.

I won him the case.

I did it clean. Elegant. Surgical.

Because I wanted to be close when it ended.

Day One.

I trailed him through his routine, his gym, his office, the rooftop bar where he ordered virgin drinks like a good grieving father. The way he smiled at women, though… always a bit too long. Always the wrong kind of warm.

Day Three.

I memorized the cadence of his steps. The rhythm of his breath. The way he scratched behind his ear when he lied. I sat outside his condo, invisible in the dark, listening as he fucked his new assistant.

Day Five.

I stood in his room while he slept. He never stirred. Vampiric silence is an art, and I painted in it. I left pearls on his nightstand. A replica of the one his wife used to wear. Just to watch the cracks form.

Day Six.

He ran. Of course he did. He felt me getting closer. He switched hotels. Bought a burner phone. Booked a flight. Too late.

He didn’t notice the cab driver was me.

Didn’t notice the airport detour until it was too late.

Victor woke, choking on the smell of rot in the very room he killed his wife in.

His screams came shortly after.

The first thing he saw were the spikes, four rusted iron nails driven through his wrists and ankles into the steel table. Magic writhed beneath the surface, ancient and living, devouring him cell by cell.

“Dorian?” His voice cracked as he thrashed. “Wh—what is this? What the fuck is this?!”

I stepped from the shadows. My coat dragged behind me like a second skin, soaked in smoke and silence.

“This,” I said, “is the truth. Something the courts couldn’t stomach.”

His breathing quickened. “I—I thought you were on my side!”

“I was,” I crouched, trailing a finger along the edge of the blood-caked table. “Long enough to make sure you’d die my way.”

He struggled. The living iron chains tightened, teeth gnawing deeper, drinking his fear like wine.

“I paid you!”

“And now,” I said, straightening, “you’re paying again.”

Shadows unfurled from my hands like ink bleeding across water, only thicker, hungrier. They crawled up his legs, slit beneath skin like eager scalpels.

They whispered. In the language of monsters.

Victor whimpered. “W-what are they saying?”

“They’re asking your bones where your wife sleeps now,” I said softly. “They’re wondering what the screams sounded like inside that suitcase .”

He screamed.

It was delicious.

The shadows peeled his skin like fruit, strip by strip, slow and patient. His body arched off the table, his mouth stretched wide, but the only sound was wet sobbing and chains groaning with joy.

I circled him, dragging a curved ceremonial blade across his chest.

“You know what the worst part was?” I whispered near his ear, my breath icy with hate. “She still loved you.”

“I didn’t mean to—” he tried.

My hand plunged into his chest. Not physical, not at first.

Magic tore through flesh and memory. I pulled his sins to the surface. Made him feel them again.

The screams. The tape. The zipper closing. His wife’s lungs collapsing. His son’s shaking hands on the phone with 911.

“You’re going to die remembering every second , Victor.” I wrapped my fist around his heart. “Say her name.”

He sobbed. “Miranda... oh God, Miranda...”

“Too late.”

The room stilled. But not in peace. It was something colder. Something sacred.

Because justice didn’t ask for forgiveness.

It took.

I stood slowly, eyes sweeping the blood-stained room, walls still papered in clouds and happiness.

This was where it happened.

Where he snuffed out the woman who trusted him most, then played grieving father for the cameras.

Tonight, the truth would be louder than grief.

The shadows responded to my command, wrapping around the room like theater curtains, projecting the lie the world would see.

The real carnage would vanish beneath the illusion I crafted, Victor, bound and mutilated not by me, but by the memory of what he did.

I laid him on the carpet, spine contorted, wrists slashed.

I let the illusion drip red in all the right places. A pillow nearby, the fabric soaked to suggest he’d been smothered by guilt. A child's lullaby playing faintly from an old cassette player, rewound on repeat.

And left behind, nestled in the blood pooling beneath his ruined body, was a single obsidian scale, slick with shadow, sharp at the edges, like a final verdict etched in silence.

My signature.

Always just enough to whisper to those who dared to look too close.

They’ll find him like that. No one will question the scene. It will look like suicide. Remorse.

The way cowards die when haunted by sins they swore they'd buried. But you and I both knew better.

This wasn’t suicide. This was sentencing.

And I was the judge.

Brielle Knox – The Heiress Cannibal.

She wore Chanel to court and painted her nails blood red, coincidental, I was sure.

Several young men. Missing. Drained. Disposed of like bad wine.

Found scattered, some in dumpsters, some in water, all reeking of elegance and rot. Pale. Hollow. Their blood replaced with bleach and perfume. The tabloids called it tragic. I called it a message.

She cried on the stand, voice trembling just right. Played the misunderstood socialite. The victim of circumstance. Daddy’s lawyers didn’t do their job.

That’s why she came to me.

Because I did.

I shredded the prosecution, smiled at the cameras, and walked Brielle right through the front doors in six-inch Louboutins and a smirk sharp enough to gut God.

She whispered “thank you” like it was foreplay.

But I wasn’t hers.

I was just waiting for the right time to collect.

She liked to hunt young men.

Boys just shy of manhood, fragile, hungry, impressionable. She drained them in alleys, in hotel rooms, in her penthouse soaked with incense and sin.

Seven confirmed. Several still missing. I knew where one of them was, though. Pieces of him were buried in her orchids.

I watched her for a week. Memorized her movements. Her weaknesses.

Brielle Devoux, art gallery heiress, philanthropist, and predator hiding behind press conferences and couture.

She sipped champagne over their coffins and offered scholarships in their names. A monster with lipstick, teeth, and diamonds under her nails.

She had no idea someone worse was watching.

I trailed her in silence. No shadow too dark for me to slip into. No room too protected I couldn’t bleed through.

She killed to feel powerful. I killed to return balance.

And now it was her turn.

The penthouse was still. Glass walls overlooked the city, but the lights couldn’t reach the place she was kept now. Her bedroom had been transformed, no longer a sanctum of silk and secrets, but a temple for judgment.

She woke up bound to the bed frame in red silk cuffs, enchanted to tighten every time her pulse spiked. Her body arched violently, mouth gaping in a stitched scream. My thread, made from the hair of her victims, held firm.

Moonlight carved her in silver. She still looked like art.

But I came to dismantle masterpieces.

I stepped forward, slow, deliberate. A blade glinted in my hand. Not metal. Not steel. But forged from bone and betrayal.

“Still wearing red, I see,” I murmured, brushing her cheek with the back of my fingers. “Though I much prefer you in blood.”

She snarled through the stitches, a silent curse. I leaned down, lips at her ear.

“Save it, Brielle. You’ve said enough for one lifetime.”

She squirmed as my shadows slipped under the bed, up her spine, and into her skin. They poured in like smoke under a locked door, whispering to every bone she broke, every heart she drained, every family she ruined.

“They’re not here for mercy,” I said, circling her like a predator in velvet. “They’re here to listen. To feel. ”

A flick of my wrist and her body convulsed, back arched like a bow as the shadows tightened around her ribs.

“I defended you. I stood beside you while you laughed at their names.” I reached down and dragged the bone-blade across her thigh. Her skin split neatly. No mess. Just precision.

Her eyes rolled. I waited until they came back.

“They called for help, Brielle. They screamed your name thinking you’d save them. But all you did was watch them drown in you.”

I reached into her chest, not physically. Not yet. My magic threaded itself into her nerves and started pulling.

One memory at a time.

The boy in the hotel. The one in the alley. The one she buried whole.

She thrashed harder, body jerking as if trying to escape her own mind.