she wasn’t the girl you smiled at in the streets; she was the one you flinched away from.

she could slit throats the way you slit your own finger - quickly, sweetly, nearly past the brink of awareness. she spoke little, smiled even less. if she threw on a pair of aviators and squeezed her feet into those ridiculous six-inch heels the agency gave her to walk in, she looked just like any other Angeleno trying to run (waddle) from the paparazzi on a weekday morning. she had to force herself to swing her arms when she walked, so as not to appear stoic; it was even harder reminding herself to relax her fists and shoulders in broad daylight. from studying ladies’ faces she learned the right way to apply makeup - the normal way -  so she could melt into the sun-baked sprawl of foot traffic on a blindingly-bright day.

but no one disputed the fact that Cleo worked best at night. A lone bullet striking through the fog, a quiet knife kissing the heart tenderly to sleep - if nothing else, that to her was true human nature. in those moments hugging the cold brick walls and glass windows of her city she became feral. she could could fly and alight on her target like devil’s own beautiful angel, more graceful than she could ever hope to appear among people. inside her lived a heat that glowed like slow, viscous lava, a harkening back to the age where all she felt was the neverending focus required to kill for her next bite of bread.

from the beginning of time people had given her to the shadows. now, it was all she knew.

a hypothetical profile; if Cleo was ~25 years old.

ignore or read, up to you - I don’t expect anyone to, and there’s a part of me that hopes nobody does because I abhor any piece of personal writing that’s just brain spatter - this IS just brain spatter for my future novel