194|Beautifully Poetic

Natalie looked up from her screen at the sound of her bedroom door banging shut. But she gazed unseeingly at Levi, stunned disbelief in her eyes.

Was it all true?

Was this how everything ended?

The countless hours of drifting between anger and hate, those endless moments spent ebbing and flowing between shame and grief, propelled forward by the oars of her guilt…Was this what it had all boiled down to?

Paul's lifeless body sprawled on some cheap metal table of an overcrowded prison's canteen, his insides spewing out of his fleshy, wobbly stomach like a gutted fish?

It seemed so beautifully poetic that for someone who had obsessed over beauty and revelled in degrading women, Paul had been left out in the open, in such a humiliating pose that not only screamed of his vulnerability but the raw ugliness of his final moments, too.

The beauty of it all, though, was the message—WOMAN BEATER—tattooed on his chest with what Natalie assumed was a barbaric instrument made in the bowels of some d