Zaheer.

The villain who fell in love.

Zaheer had never been good. No matter the perspective, or the point of view, he had always been the villain. Zaheer did not kill for revenge, he did not kill because he enjoyed it, he did not kill because of bigotry, Zaheer killed because he did not want beautiful people to ever have the experience of growing old and ugly.

Zaheer believed in love, though he did not know what it felt like, sometimes, he imagined being in love, and he would smile as thoughts of a non-existent lover filled his head, he imagined the soft caress of a woman, he imagined waking up in the lofty bosom of a woman, and sometimes he would hold a woman's corpse to his chest, whispering sweet things in her ear, as though she could hear him, and kiss her cold eyelids ever so tenderly.

Then he met Sunshine. She was warm, and Zaheer knew immediately he set his eyes on her that he was in love with her. She was so beautiful that sometimes it was hard to look at her, Zaheer wanted to trace his knife over her glowing skin, but he couldn't bring himself to hurt her. And when she smiled at him, it rocked his whole world and everything he had ever believed in, but it was her eyes. Her beautiful, brown eyes that was copper against honey, sunlight against a bottle of whiskey, the colour of the earth after rain, cinnamon and ginger and cassia, the dust from the hooves of horses that had him in an absolute chokehold.

Sunshine loved him too, she wasn't scared of him, she didn't know who he really was. And when he held out his arms to her she would smile and let him embrace her, and as she slept, Zaheer would look for words in his head, but no simile or metaphor could describe the simplicity in beauty of the way her eyelashes rested on her cheeks, nor the surge of love that he felt each time she opened those eyes and smiled at him, or the crazy hammering of his heart when she trailed kisses all over his body.

But Sunshine could not bring herself to forgive him when she saw him holding a knife over her sister's dead body. Zaheer had always thought he would rather die by her hands than not feel them at all, but as she held the knife to his neck, tears streaming down her lovely doe eyes, for the first time, Zaheer felt cold in the sunlight.