She placed the polish brush against her nail for the 4th coat. The black color was beginning to get thick but she kept painting her fingers obsessively. The nails were naturally long and slightly curved, she was often complimented on them. The door shook again, raging on the other side. The hinges rained loose plaster flakes onto the faded white and black bathroom tile while she just sat on the sink in her garters.

“Leila! Open the fucking door baby!'”

You beast, she thought and smiled, finishing another coat. Break it down great ape. Break it down for me. She knew he would. Blowing on the fresh lacquer, she looked up coyly at the shivering door, her nipples hardening, making her cunt tighten slightly.

You look like Ava Gardner, Cosi told her when she was twelve. Leila was filthy, but when she smiled she did look like Ava. That’s where the lace garters and corsets came from. Probably why she started her burlesque career at fourteen. Why her and Cosi left Minnesota and squatted on the Sunset Strip. Those hinges won’t hold.

“Remember,” Cosi said. “We will make it. You’re Ava and I’m Bettie.” The knife had gone into the handsome man, and they stood over him in surprise then.

“What have we done Cosi?”

“We survived Leila, take everything out of his pockets.”

“The knife!” Cosi licked the blood off the blade. “We’re keeping it”

That was 6 years ago, no one noticed murders in Los Angeles, not murders by burlesque dancers mistaken for old Hollywood pin-ups. Cosi and Leila, their act was raunchier the more they killed, and the more killing they did the richer they got. They bought, furs and silks, outfitted themselves in lovely see through costumes that showed curvy young womanhood. Cosi and Leila worshipped each other on stage as they delicately ripped the fabric of their show gowns. Men went wild for a tantalizing moment alone with them. Strippers were obscene and tasteless, yet somehow so much tamer compared to the performance the carnal duo proposed. When they took the stage, there wasn’t a soft dick in the house.

“What if we bring blood into the act?” Cosi asked.

“You mean like pour it all over each other?”

“Paige would’ve done something like that.”

“Not Ava though.”

“Sweetheart,” Cosi would cuddle up next to Leila’s breast and coo. “You’re not Ava, you’re her bastard, satanic, blood thirsty child.”

Leila had pushed her away. “Am not”, she huffed, arms crossed, suddenly confused as to what it was they were really doing every night at the cabaret, and then in the alleys afterwards.

She developed a taste for cheap sex, Leila had. She liked men to make her an offer of money before she let them take her body. Then, right as they were about to cum, she’d knife their belly, a deep stick through the soft middle flesh that made them collapse.  Just the way Cosi had that first night they discovered their predatory nature.  She would feel their insides the way they felt hers, this made her smile, as she often dug her nails in through the wound. Then, as they were dying, she’d ask them, in a cozy, smug tone, “How much am I worth now?” Ha you’re whole life, she thought, every rotten cent you’d ever make and every woman you’d ever dream of fucking.

Cosi thought this was funny, she was more ruthless with her killing. She poured two gin fizzes for her and her man before taking them down a deviant lover’s lane, slipping him a tetrodotoxin, for making “zombies” she said. They’d think they were about to get their dick sucked when the poison started kicking in. Totally paralyzed and yet completely aware of everything, she would dismember their manhood, and show them the scraps. They often didn’t die of blood loss, Cosi said, but suffered massive asphyxiation from the panic she caused, like frightening a rabbit to death. Cosi, was imaginative. And they were a team, obviously, the gruesome twosome of whorish gruesome inclination.  However, Leila left Cosi, when she woke up next to her dead lover.

Luke was nothing special, but Leila did not want him dead. He was a sharp lover and he never asked questions. Cosi was  jealous of anyone standing between her and her crimson companion, but Cosi never killed out of the night scene, never off the safety of sadistic LA. One night Leila went to bed with Luke, in a vicious embrace, ripping the satin tapestries from the walls and causing her to moan as many of her murder victims had during their final moments of ecstasy. It exhausted her to the point of delirium. She woke up in a sticky pool, to Luke’s cut throat and his cock shoved down his
own throat. Ironic, he had once said, she was the only one who could really swallow his whole dick, turns out he was the other one.

Trapped in the bathroom Leila was ready for the brute to come at her, maybe tear her to pieces, she figured after what Cosi and she had done that was the least she deserved. He didn’t know any of that, however, no he didn’t know anything. He was just the thug she’d been letting beat the shit out of her to keep Cosi at bay, and maybe get a little of what she thought she deserved. Now the big gorilla was working his way through the door and she was gonna let him kill her this time. In this instance the door caved and the burly barbarian barreled into the bathroom, blood hungry from snorting lines of blow off her tits all fucking night. She was ready for this. Though, the next thing Leila knew she was on his back with her nylons double wrapped around his throat. Killer instinct taking hold. He suffocated within seconds and she was on top of yet another body. Her shoulders released and she let a breath out softly. Then, a coquettish voice jumped at her from the ripped hinges.

“How much are you worth now?”

By Emily Smith-Miller