Smiles. So easily given, so easily stolen. So easily pasted on, laden with so little meaning. But oh, Roux's smile held a world of meaning behind it now. She grinned down at her victim, their blood splattered across her muzzle with cruel delight, painting the alley walls.
"I told you," she whispered, her voice throaty and low. A menacing rasp. The sound of nightmares, of terror unfolding. "I told you to stay away. To keep to your own, to not mess with what you don't understand." Ivory claws dug passed fur, passed skin, into flesh. The stray beneath her let out a pitiful mewl of pain. In another world, in another life, maybe Roux would have pitied them. But not now, not today. "But you didn't listen, did you?" She seethed, and then slammed the cat into the cobbled street below. "No, no you didn't."
Roux had been expecting it - the crack of skull. The sudden limpness to her victim's body. The vacant-ness of their eyes. That didn't mean she could avoid standing there for a bereft moment, wondering if this could have been different. No, she didn't think so. So instead, Roux let out a soft sigh, shut the dead cat's eyes, and then gouged her claws into their chest, ripping a vertical line from there to their soft underbelly, one that was now stained red with blood.
It was her mark, after all, Roux reminded herself of this fact as she turned and walked away, never once looking behind to take stalk of the death trailing in her wake.
The mark of The Crimson Curse.