48. Chapter 48
The silence that follows Sadie’s wrath is not an empty one.
It’s full; dense with meaning and heavy with consequence. It presses into the cathedral and settles into my lungs like smoke after a fire has burned itself down to embers. I don’t move, but I don’t really need to.
Instead, I just watch where she stands over Peter.
What’s left of him, anyway.
She’s beautiful. Plain and simple.
Her chest rises and falls hard beneath the vest, still vibrating with the release in the aftermath of a moment where her world narrowed down to a single point in which she had absolute control. When she stopped living it and took hold of it by the throat without flinching.
Her mask is gone.
Leaving exactly what she is and what she’s always been.
My beautifully damaged monster.
Her gloves are streaked dark, blood glossy beneath the lights. Her green eyes exquisite where they stare at her hands around the crowbar. She flexes her fingers around the metal and I let her figure out these next moments. Let it all settle in just how brutal she can be when allowed to be.
It doesn’t surprise me that she doesn’t recoil or cry. She certainly doesn’t look away, and in that instant, something in me breaks open.
I have killed men who begged and screamed and men who laughed because they thought they were untouchable. I have never watched someone become this.
Never watched in real-time where someone shed all the bullshit and let themselves be exactly who they were always meant to be. My clever little fox lifts her eyes to my own and the stillness is so complete it feels ceremonial.
“Sadie,” I purr and she sucks in a breath before straightening.
Letting us remain in this bloody little ritual she has no realization she just started.
That this room will call to her over and over again.
That this will become the only place that she can truly be exactly as she was always meant to be.
She isn’t broken, but she never was. She was only contained and compressed by years of being told to swallow, endure, and survive quietly. And tonight? Tonight she expanded.
Stepping forward, I bridge the gap between us. Each movement careful not because I fear her, but because I respect the thing she is right now. She’s not prey or fragile, but something sharp and exquisite.
I pause in front of her, close enough that I can see the blood freckling her sleeves and the delicate curves of her face. A picturesque mask of freckles she’s never had before, but I find is devastating against the steel-green of her eyes.
I don’t bother to look at Peter as I lift my mask, interest warped into awe as I study her. She doesn’t flinch under my attention, but holds my gaze like she’s daring me to see all of it and decide who she has become anyway.
Fuck.
This is not exactly what I had panned, but it is better.
Not the slaughter, that I had pinned to a T to my great amusement. No, it’s this thing in my chest that I hadn’t expected.
I have spent my entire life believing so whole heartedly in patterns. I observe, I test, I apply pressure, and I see what breaks because of it. But Sadie shatters that every time I try, and I—fuck, I want her all the more because of it.
She belongs here at Pitch.
She belongs to me.
The possessiveness doesn’t come like a sudden strike.
It unfurls slowly, inevitability masquerading as logic.
Of course I would feel this way and this would be our conclusion.
She has seen what I am and stepped closer anyway.
She has blood on her hands and not a single hint of apology in her eyes.
She crossed the line people don’t come back from and she is still herself.
No.
Maybe that’s not right.
She is more.
I reach out before I can think better of it, my hand sliding to cup her face and then tangle back in her messy blonde hair. Tugging sharply so that her breath catches the way I like and she bares her throat to me. Submission in its most simplistic form.
Her pulse is racing against my wrist, but I can also see it in her throat. Underneath that adrenaline though, I can see the satisfaction in her gaze. How alive she feels here in an environment built for us both.
“You did well,” I praise.
She hums and wets her lips, ignoring the blood that stains them as she peers up at me in anticipation. I hold her captive as I glance past her finally to the body on the floor. To the ruin of a man who thought he could take and never be seen for what he has.
Someone will clean it up, I’m sure.
For now, I focus on the woman standing in front of me, bloodied and unrepentant, eyes bright with something feral and honest. I feel it settle fully then in the face of everything that is and ever will be.
Love is not the right word.
Love is too soft for what I feel for her.
This is recognition at the deepest level.
This is knowing, with absolute certainty, that there is no version of the future where I let her walk away.
Not because she knows too much but because she belongs to my world now.
Because I made her the monster and she has shown me she can stand in it.
And I refuse to go back to a life where she isn’t in it.
I stroke my thumb along the blood at her jaw, holding her steady as I marvel at the creature she is.
“Let’s go home.”
“Which one?” She teases.
I grin, catching her bottom lip beneath my thumb. “The one I stole you away to.”