Her pursed lips wrapped around the end of a straw to suckle a long island from its glass. Her dark eyes met his down the bar. Through the scattered, dim light, they glistened with an animal wanting and a hint of desperation that signaled to he alone to hunt, chase, conquer. She presented the bar stool beside her with a flit of her eyes, to silently suggest he join. He took the offer like a lion sauntering to a kill that’s already accepted death.

She was a nobody, comparatively speaking, but he was somebody. Rumor had it he was a cleaner for a local crew running guns and drugs out of the red light district. There was no evidence of the rumors, of course, but that didn’t stop them from forming. It didn’t hurt that he made a point to keep the mystery about him, never saying much about himself, or anything for that matter. For anyone who’d spent enough time in the little watering hole off the beaten path, at least some whiff of Anton had manifested to them.

“Allison,” she said, head tilted to drink from the side of her straw.

“Anton,” he said, mounting the stool beside her. “What brings a girl like you to a place like this?”

She smiled, chuckled. He’d left out the “beautiful” part, but it was word for word what most guys said. He didn’t know that of course, but it revealed his obvious desires. Where other men would’ve fallen flat though, Anton walked sure-footed as Christ on water. He had the clout and cash to back up any challenge to his status, to say nothing of his manhood. They were two, beautiful people in a drab, ugly place, that stood out like sore thumbs. Both of them knew it.

The next hours passed in a retrospective haze. Allison was younger than most, good looking with hips, breasts, and waist all in perfect proportion to her hourglass shape. Her dark eyes and hair accented the bits of pink flesh peering out along her clavicle, back, and navel from the neo-modern dress that framed her diamond belly-piercing in glowing light.

Before either of them knew it, Allison was leading Anton by the hand to the bar door. They slipped out into the street toward his high-end sports car. The flashy style perfectly suited his reputation, and more pointedly, his date. If there was anything Allison loved, it was fast cars for even faster men. He was certainly one. They spent the whole ride home in various states of sex, receiving mouth or hand, Anton the one, Allison the other.

Coursing with fresh ecstasy and lust, they spilled from the car, clothes half off. He carried her in to his palatial home, took her once just inside, then again anywhere else they could reach. Their stamina finally gave out in the bedroom, Allison on her hands and knees, wet and sweating from more sex than she could ever recall having at once. They gave virile new meaning in one another’s minds as they collapsed on the bed together.

Her body was slicked with sweat, glistening like her eyes had in the low-light from a lamp by the beside. He sparked a cigarette and smoked in silence while she let pleasure course upward from her loins and out to her shaking limbs. They lie in the still aftermath, drinking up the last of the erotic night as the liquor-high furled up its tendrils to slink away until its next return.

Contrary to Anton’s expectations, Allison climbed atop him again, kissed her way along his body before taking him in her mouth one last time. With a final, pulsing throb, he flooded her throat and she swallowed, began to kiss her way back up. She settled her groin atop his, the wetness there pleading for more attention as she bit at his neck.

He groaned something mixing pleasure with pain, dug his nails into her back. The pleasure drained from him. All was pain. Sudden, piercing, as if being stabbed. He struggled, managed to throw her off. She fell sideways off the bed, rebounded onto her hands and knees. He swore repeatedly, vision darkening. He fell off the far-side of the bed as she rose to full height to watch.

He writhed on the floor, retching, ready to vomit. His limbs tingled. Needles sank deep along punctures flooded with molten steel. The pain was too much. He vomited beside the end table. Dry heaves forced the painful needles deeper. His pulse raced, veins inflating like balloons to cause ever-present blood flow to hurt more and more.

Anton fell around on the floor, like a wounded insect tackled by its predator and grappled around in its limbs. Allison merely watched, eyes locked on him. Her face was empty, blank, nude hourglass shining with a fine coat of sweat. Anton made one last attempt to stand.

His legs were too weak, felt of rubber beneath a marble slab that was his torso. He collapsed onto the bed, sweating profusely and gasping for air. His heart skipped beats with erratic arrhythmia–he stretched an arm out at Allison, felt it seize entirely. With a last set of gasps, his eyes rolled back, and his body went limp.

Allison stood in place, more satisfied than usual. The cleaner had been dealt with, and soon everyone would know. They wouldn’t know who’d done it, of course, only speculated how. Indeed, when Allison read the digital newspaper only two days later, Anton’s cause of death was exactly as she’d predicted.

She sat on a cafe patio, soaking in the sun of a warm, Floridian morning. The tablet in her hand read out an article that could have been overlooked by even the most intrepid investigators. The most important part however, was a line that read, “… died as a result of a Latrodectism, a toxic effect of the bite from a Latrodectus Mactans, more commonly known as the Black Widow spider.”

Allison sipped her cappuccino and smiled. No one would ever know. That was why she’d been paid so much to “clean” the cleaner. Even her clients didn’t know the truth, only the calling card. That alone made her chuckle. She sipped her drink again, and let the sun warm her hourglass shape.