He hates her, and there are three reasons why.

She is moral. She is pressed up against the wall, fingers scrabbling against flaking wood. Her eyes are filled with a righteous fury mixed with terrible fear, and he can sense how little she thinks of him in the way her nostrils flare and her eyes spark.

She is ravishing. Sweat is running down her pale skin and her heart shaped face is framed by beautiful brown locks. With every gulp of air, her breasts heave and shudder. Her skin seems malleable, touchable, and he grabs her arm and squeezes hard enough to break the tiny veins hidden underneath.

She is innocent. Even now, she doesn't believe that he will do it. She thinks, after all they've been through, that he will be forced to back down. She doesn't understand the darkness that lies ahead and the darkness that taints his soul. How can she understand?

Breathing heavily, Daniel pushes her into the wall. She tries to pull away and he grabs her chin, squeezing too tightly. Her eyes are watering and she tries to kick, but he effectively pinions her legs. With a shuddering gasp, she stares into his own dark eyes. He can see her soul, and it is bottomless and pure and pathetically frightened, although she tries to hide the fear.

For a moment, he thinks he won't kill her.

And then it comes back to him, why he hates her.

Morals

When Daniel first comes to, she is there, dabbing at the blood on his shoulder with her green and white scarf. "You've been hurt," she tells him. "Let me fix you up, alright?"

He lets her, and keeps the scarf wound around his own arm as a token. Even after her leg is torn by the water beast, he keeps the scarf. Daniel has grown attached to it, and he fears the pain that will come with removing it. She stares up at him with blood splashing down her leg and her face contorted with pain, and she doesn't ask for it.

This courage evokes a sort of self-hatred inside Daniel. Why is it that he, a British gentleman, cannot be chivalrous enough to give a lady her own scarf back? How can he watch her bleed and whimper? What is wrong with him?

Thinking about these things drives him to distraction, and yet he doesn't give her the scarf. And she still doesn't ask.

As they limp about in the storage and it becomes increasingly obvious to him that he was never a good person, the hatred festering inside Daniel begins to flow towards her. He might have considered himself a new person, but now he knows that he has not changed a bit. He is still the disgusting, murdering coward he's always been. If only she hadn't torn up her bloody leg, if only she hadn't given him the bloody scarf, he might never have known. But she did.

If she will only ask him for the scarf, it will prove that she is just as cowardly and pathetic as him. All she has to do is ask. He waits, as they dart through darkened passages and come to a stop next to a pile of bloody clothes. He waits in vain.

He hates her because she brings out the worst in him: the fact that he has no morals at all, and he never will.

Sex

When the two of them enter Daniel's old room, she pulls off her coat.

She means nothing by it, Daniel knows. His rooms are hotter than the rest of the back hall, and she has begun to perspire. Still, the fluid grace with which she stretches her limbs makes him wonder. He wonders just how far she can stretch, and what she would feel like if she were in his arms. Such thoughts are disgusting directed towards a young woman like her, but he cannot help himself. She is beautiful. He wants her.

When she lies down on the bed and closes her eyes, he feels himself growing hot. The room seems to close in on itself and he moves towards her. She is wearing men's trousers, and he finds himself studying the waistband. In a moment he could hook his fingers around the band and yank the fabric down to her ankles. He imagines her writhing underneath him, whimpering his name. He takes several deep breaths and then he touches her.

His fingers skim over her inner thigh and she stirs briefly before opening her eyes and looking at him. "What are you doing?" she asks, fatigue written all over her face. There is no pleasure or excitement in her gaze. All he sees is that tired, hollow stare.

He slips closer to her, until he is looming over her. She lies back down and he knows that she isn't even frightened. He could do anything with her and she would not have the strength to resist.

"I want you," he tells her sincerely, and watches warily for her reaction.

A blush colors her cheeks and she closes her eyes again. "Don't do this to me, Daniel," she whispers, and he can tell that she is apologetic. "I can't. I just can't."

The rejection crushes him, and he moves away from her and doesn't say anything. Her legs are still slightly parted, and the same dizzying heat sweeps over him. His eyes roam across her curves and the heat in his pants gets a little worse. Those curves are forbidden to him. She won't let him have her.

He hates her because she is beautiful, and she is determined to keep herself untouched, but her beauty is overwhelming and it is slowly driving him insane.

Innocence

When Daniel escorts her into the prison, she doesn't understand it. The blood in the cells does not frighten her because a certain part of her refuses to believe it is blood at all. "Rust," she says, when she catches him looking. "Right?"

"Right," he tells her huskily, and she is pleased.

Even when they find the notes and diary entries and read them, she refuses to understand. Her mind will not let her piece together the puzzles. She will not make Daniel a monster. She can't even see how he could be a monster.

She admits that Castle Brennenburg makes no sense to her. She doesn't see what Alexander's game is; she doesn't understand the dog heads in the drawers and the vitae and the bloody clothes in storage. The bloody prison and the screams of terror that they both sometimes hear, it is only a frightening place to her. It holds no connotations because she has never patrolled these corridors, hunting down frightened little girls.

At one point, Daniel admits that he is afraid he has done something terrible. She looks at him for a moment, and puts her hand on his shoulder. "It's the past, Daniel," she says. "You can't help what you were."

Damn her. Damn her to hell. That isn't the answer he was looking for, because he is still the same person. Maybe he doesn't remember his old self well, but they are one and the same. He has murdered. He can't go back now, even with a blank set of memories.

She doesn't notice his distraction because the only thing she can see is the vague fearfulness of the prison. All she cares about is leaving a place that frightens her. She has nothing to glean from these chipping walls, no dark secrets to discover underneath rotting bedframes. And she can't understand Daniel's obsession with the place, because she is so pure that she can't make him evil in her mind.

He hates her because she is innocent, and he wishes that he were too.

She is moral.

Still staring into her eyes, he presses his shoulder into her chest, keeping her firmly pinned against the cell wall. He has trapped her in this little room, for their final battle of wills and contradicting personalities. She never even saw it coming.

With great ceremony, he unwinds the scarf from his shoulder and wraps it around her swan-like throat. She trembles as he knots it clumsily and pats it into place by the dip in her collarbone.

She is ravishing.

With a small growl, he tilts her chin up and kisses her full on the mouth. She does not respond, but it doesn't matter. His tongue slips through her lips and slides across her teeth. She tastes just as he imagined she would; sweet and bitter at the same time.

He pulls away with a rope of saliva still connecting their lips. She looks undone; all that is left is the terror, and a small note of disbelief. Even now, she can't see it. Even now, because…

She is innocent.

"You stupid bitch," he whispers, closing his eyes. "Open your eyes. I'm going to kill you. I've killed already. I'm a monster. And you're dead."

He opens his eyes again. The unseeing stare is gone, and what is in her eyes now is worse. That rush of pure understanding, and then of visceral terror. She knows. She sees. She has grown.

You bastard, her eyes seem to say, and he slams her head into the wall.

Again, again, again. Cracking, splintering, wailing and screaming and whimpering and then nothing. In his palm is a pulpy, bloody mess, interspersed with shards of bone. He holds what used to be her head against the wall for a moment, and then releases it. The corpse slides to the ground, where it curls into a ball. The wall is splattered with dark red blood.

Daniel turns away from the mess, and he knows he has won. There is only Alexander left to hate, and when Alexander is gone…

Daniel will be the only one left. And he is ready to hate himself, to hate himself with a ferocity that even Alexander will never be able to understand.