Especially afterthat—after letting me choke the breath from her lungs and still looking up at me like I’m worth something and she’s not afraid of what I am.
She doesn’t say anything—just stares, blue eyes glistening in the dark like the ocean at midnight, pulling me under.
Then a soft smile tugs at her lips, faint but fucking radiant, like it doesn’t belong in a world like mine, and maybe that’s why it hits so hard. Because it’s like a light cracking through the rot that lives inside me.
She leans in, her fingers threading through my hair and then our lips meet—no heat, no fire, just this quiet burn that settles low and deep, carving her into the parts of me I thought were long dead.
Chapter Eighteen
Wrath
It’s blurry, too fucking blurry, as if the world’s been smeared in ash. Everyone around me is a shadow, faceless, dark, whispering things I can’t understand.
I try to make sense of where I am, whose voices are bleeding into my skull, before I look down at my hands.
Small. Bloody. Shaking. Not mine, but mine.
And then I see her.
She’s suddenly there beneath me. Pale. Naked. Motionless. Her long black hair spills across the floor like ink leaking from a corpse.
I can’t see her face, my mind won’t let me, but Iknowit’s her. I know it in the kind of way nightmaresknowthings before they show them.
My lips part to speak, to scream, but a voice slithers into my ear, breath hot, venomous:
“Do it.”
Male and evil. But familiar in the way decay smells familiar in the dark.
The air turns to ice, but sweat pours off me, dripping from my hair, stinging my eyes.
My limbs don’t listen to me, a fucking puppet-strung and possessed, and I move without will, lowering myself between her legs, shame strangling me as I fight from the inside, clawing to wake the fuck up.
And all I can do is watch as I tug myself free, seconds from fucking her corpse.
Until my vision suddenly sharpens, too sharp, and her face finally comes into focus.
It’s Aurelia.
But not alive. Not even close.
She’sdead and decaying. A corpse.
Maggots squirm through torn flesh, burrowing into the soft meat of her cheeks. Her lips are cracked open in a silent scream, her skin the colour of rot.
I flinch back, eyes wide, choking on a breath that won’t come.
“DO IT!”
The voice bellows, almost demonic now and it rips through me like barbed wire, my spine locking straight.
Then, her eyes snap open. But they’re hollow and empty. She starts shouting words I can’t make out, deep, fast and hellish.
When a scream tears out of her throat, shrill and unearthly, piercing straight through my head, I scream too, my voice no longer mine—high, innocent,helpless.
And then, flames.
Her bodyerupts into an inferno, fire swallowing her whole, and before I can even think to run, it consumes me too, searing through my skin, straight through my soul, dragging me down into a sudden black hole.