Chapter 56
SOREN
There are many things I love about my little poison.
Her stubbornness is one of them.
The way she keeps going when everything in her life tells her to stop. The way she drags herself up from places most people never come back from. Again and again. Like something in her refuses to give up, no matter how badly it’s been beaten down.
I’ve seen it.
All of it.
The nights where there was nothing left in her—when she sat on the floor with a bottle in her hand, crying like no one would ever hear her.
When she whispered questions into the dark, like the universe might answer if she just asked the right way.
When she turned to strangers on a screen, hoping they could teach her how to fix something that was never hers to break.
Oh, little poison.
So much pain.
And still—so willing to believe.
My gaze drifts over her now, slow, deliberate. The rise and fall of her chest beneath the thin fabric. The soft exposure of her throat in the spill of moonlight.
Unprotected.
Mine.
My hand settles there without thought, spanning the length of it, feeling the fragile rhythm beneath my palm.
It would take so little.
Just a little more pressure.
Just a little longer.
The thought doesn’t disturb me. It steadies me.
Because it reminds me how easily I could end this—how completely she exists at my mercy.
And still, I don’t.
Because I don’t want to destroy her.
I want to keep her.
She makes that difficult sometimes.
Fighting things she doesn’t understand. Resisting in small, pointless ways.
Like it could change anything.
Questioning things that would be easier if she just accepted them.
If she just accepted me fully, I could give her everything.
Not the scraps she’s been surviving on.
Something real. Something complete.
I could take that restless, searching energy inside her and direct it somewhere it actually belongs.
To me.
To us.
I’ve watched her try to fix herself in a hundred different ways. None of them worked.
But when will she come to understand that nothing about her needs fixing?
My grip tightens for a second—just enough. Her breath stutters in her sleep, a soft, broken sound slipping past her lips.
I still. Listening. Feeling it.
God, I love that.
The way her body responds without her permission. The way I can interrupt something as simple as her breathing, and she yields to it without ever waking.
My thumb shifts slightly against her pulse. Steady. Alive.
Mine.
“What are you dreaming about?” I murmur, more to myself than to her.
It doesn’t matter.
It will, soon enough.
Because eventually, there won’t be a version of her that doesn’t lead back to me. There won’t be a thought, a want, a need that I don’t already know.
My little poison. My misfit. My stray.
She just doesn’t realize it yet.
A faint smile touches my mouth, slow and wrong.
Because she will.
She already is. Learning. Softening. Turning toward me without even understanding why.
Exactly the way she’s supposed to. Exactly the way I knew she would.
Because she’s mine, after all.
And soon, there won’t be anything left of her that isn’t.