Ruthless Creatures

“I live with the ghost of a man I thought I’d grow old with, the suffocating weight of questions that will never be answered, and the crushing guilt of knowing the last thing I ever said to him was, ‘If you’re late, I’ll kill you.’”

David’s disappearance plays into the dark-romance and mystery genres. Since Nat doesn’t know for certain what happened to David, his memory haunts her. Calling him a “ghost” confirms that she is unable to get free from the relationship and foreshadows the revelation that David is also a kind of “monster.”

“I know better than to mix business with pleasure. I just need to focus and do what I came here to do. If only she wasn’t so goddamn beautiful. I don’t like to break beautiful things.”

Kage’s overwhelmed and desirous reaction to Nat introduces the theme of Women Humanizing Brutal Men. Although he is typically a cold-blooded assassin, Nat makes Kage feel guilt and shame at the idea of harming her. He realizes that her “beauty” distracts him from his “focus”—he doesn’t want to “break” her but to treat her carefully and tenderly instead.

“Okay, Nat. Man up. Woman up. Whatever. Just […] get your shit together.”

Nat’s diction here subverts gender norms. To keep her composure while saying goodbye to her wedding dress, she uses the idiom “man up” to pull herself together, before switching to the more appropriate “woman up.” As she ends with “whatever,” Nat indicates that no gender is exclusively associated with a person getting their “shit together.”