Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sasha knew this was dangerous.
One mistake after another had been the theme of her life of late.
But leaving him here…like this? That felt worse.
So she waited. And did her best to actively think about nothing at all. Fuck, she resorted to reciting the Dewy Decimal system in her head. Generals. Philosophy. Religion. Social Sci—
“Stop.” His voice was flat. Empty of its usual theatre. “Please.”
He’d asked politely. Shit. Chewing her lip, she let out a breath. “All right.”
Silence. And then more silence.
“You should be with your sister.” He said the words as though he were reading them off a cue card. Scripted. And badly acted. “Isn’t that what the good ones do? Strategize for your next move?”
“Probably.” She paused. “But I’m apparently not very good at being one of the good ones.”
She couldn’t see his face, his back was still to her. And that bothered her more than she cared to admit.
“Vile. Please talk to me.” Politeness for politeness. It only seemed fair.
He laughed. But it was hollow and wrong, and it cracked at the edges like paint peeling off an old wall. It belied a larger problem underneath.
“You want me to talk.” Finally, he turned to face her. His purple eyes were dim. Not blazing, not glowing. Just…there. Tired. “Why?”
“I want to understand.”
A slight narrowing of those purple eyes. “Why.” It was a statement. Not a question. A demand, not a request.
“I…” She hesitated too long.
His features creased in anger, frustration, then smoothed into something like quiet, beleaguered acceptance. As though this was the story of his life—and he shouldn’t be surprised. “It is. And I am not.”
Right. That.
“You wish to understand?” He turned to look up at the stained glass window. “Let us see if you can.” He stepped forward toward the wall, and it folded away from him. Simply curled away as if it did not exist and never had.
Cold air washed over her and she shivered. The warm lights of the library were snuffed out and plunged into darkness as the ceiling was replaced by a starry sky, with thin, gauze-like clouds drifting over them and partially obscuring a crescent moon.
The pale light it cast sent shadows in rows onto the path in front of her of…graves.
They were in a graveyard now—an ancient one, by the looks of things. The path Vile was walking on was made by carriage wheels, not tires, the grooves thin and deep in dirt and grass, not gravel or made of pavement.
The stones were thin and stacked close together. But she could see more modern stones mixed into the chaos—statues of broken-limbed figures that were anything but angels by their silhouettes.
Vile stopped some ten feet away from her and lifted his arms to gesture at the yard around them.
“Do you know what it’s like to know—truly know, in the marrow of your very existence—that you were created to suffer?
Not to serve. Not to teach. Not even to be feared, though that is certainly part of the job description.
” His mouth twisted into something bitter as he turned to observe the rows of the dead.
“To suffer. Endlessly. Without reprieve, without mercy, and without the faintest whisper of hope that it might one day end. Because there is no death waiting for me, only those I portray. There is only the next story. And the one after that. And on, and on, until your kind ceases to exist.”
Sasha said nothing. She barely even breathed. When she did, her exhale formed a misty cloud in front of her in the chill air.
“You think I don’t feel.” The absence of his usual performative cruelty made it twist in her chest like a knife.
“That I can muster lust, and obsession, and the thrill of the hunt—but never the real thing. Never the sacred thing. Love.” He rolled the word around in his mouth like it was a piece of glass. “And you know what the worst part is?”
Grief.
“You’re not entirely wrong.”
She felt her heart crack.
“But it isn’t because I cannot feel, Sasha.” His voice was barely above a whisper. “It is because I am never allowed to keep what I feel.”
He lifted his hand and began counting off his fingers. Each name fell from his lips like a stone dropping into a well.
“Heathcliff. He loved Catherine so fiercely it consumed them both. And what did it earn him? A life of misery and a death alone in a house haunted by the ghost of the only person who ever made him feel alive.”
Another finger.
“The Phantom. Erik. Extraordinary talent. Extraordinary devotion. None of it mattered. He loved Christine with every atom of his being. And she chose the handsome, wealthy boy who could stand in the sunlight without frightening children.”
Another.
“Frankenstein’s creature. Not the doctor. The creation. Who wanted nothing more than to be loved. Who begged for a companion. Not for power. For the simple, aching need to not be alone. And what did he receive? Horror. Revulsion. His creator couldn’t even look at him.”
Vile’s hand dropped as he gazed out at the rows of stones.
“Dracula loves Mina, and must die for it. Hook loved a life he lost and was mocked for grieving it. Davy Jones was a man in love before the sea made him into a monster. They all loved. Every last one of them. And every last one of them was destroyed by it. Not because love is destructive. But because love is not allowed for things like me.”
His voice had dropped to something barely audible. She had to step forward to hear him.
“If the villain falls in love, the object of that love is destined to die. Or to reject him. Or to betray him. It is not a possibility—it is an inevitability. A law of fiction as iron-clad as the hero’s journey itself.
” He paused. Something shifted behind his eyes.
“If the villain could love and be loved, then what would make him the villain?”
The question hung in the air between them.
“The fundamental truth that the moment someone loves me, the story must punish them for it. And the moment I dare to love someone, the story must take them from me. Because that is what your kind decided when they first sat around a fire and pointed at the darkness beyond it and said: that is where the monsters live, and they do not get to come into the light.”
He went quiet. When he spoke again, his voice was different. Smaller. Like he was recounting a memory that he had tried very hard to forget. “The Dark King loved the witch. With every ounce of his being…”
It took her a moment to realize what he was saying. He wasn’t speaking about some ancient myth.
He was talking about them.
“The Dark King loved the Witch of the Bog,” he repeated, slower.
As if he himself did not believe them. “He was not supposed to. It was not part of the genre, or the trope, or the narrative. The Dark King was supposed to use the witch. Exploit her. Discard her. At best ignore her. That is the role.”
He flinched as if something had struck him. “But she stood in his presence without cowering. She invited him to tea when he sent his army to fetch her. She told him stories so cruel and so beautiful that they made him feel something. The Dark King who could not feel anything.”
Sasha’s vision blurred. She blinked hard and absolutely refused to cry.
“And then the Hero came, as the Hero always does.” Something in Vile’s voice hardened. Not anger. Resignation. “And the Princess stood beside him. And together they came to strike the Dark King down. Just as the story demanded.”
He met her gaze.
“But it was you, Sasha, who ended it. The Dark King loved the witch. But the Witch looked him in the eyes as the Hero raised his golden sword—and she did not stop it. Because she was not there beside him.”
She opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She shut her mouth again, uselessly.
“You chose them. And as I watched them standing there, side by side, I could see it in how they looked at each other. The thing that I will never have. A love that is allowed. Encouraged. Written into the fabric of every fairy tale. The Hero gets the Princess. They live happily ever after.” The words happily ever after fell from his mouth like they’d been dipped in acid.
They burned her just as badly.
“And the villain dies! Or is banished. Or is sealed away. Or is left alone in his tower, or his cave, or his goddamned library, waiting for the next set of fools to stumble in so he can play the game all over again.” He spread his arms, encompassing the graveyard.
“Villains are not allowed their happy endings, Sasha. That is the one rule that no story has ever broken. The villain cannot be permitted to love, or to be loved, because the moment that happens, the very foundation of storytelling collapses.” His voice was rising now, and the shadows at the edges of the aisle were beginning to stir.
“What would become of mankind, if the things they have labeled evil and monstrous were allowed to experience the one emotion that your kind holds up as the most sacred, the most holy, the most human thing in all of existence?”
And that was when she saw it. His hands were shaking.
“If the villain could love and be loved…then perhaps the villain was never really a villain at all. And if the villain was never really a villain…then what does that say about the heroes who destroyed him? If there is no right and wrong in this world, then what are we all doing here?”
The silence that followed was total. Even the wind in the dry branches of the trees that dotted the graveyard seemed to hold its breath.
Vile let his arms fall back down to his sides. His head hung. “There. Now you have it.”
Sasha didn’t know what to say.
Every possible response that formed in her brain felt inadequate. What could she say to a being who had existed for longer than language itself and had spent every moment being told he was unworthy of the one thing humanity promised everyone in their stories was the ultimate goal of living?
I’m sorry was an insult. I understand was a lie. I love you was a death sentence—for both of them, if what he said was true.
So she did the only thing she could think of. The one thing that didn’t require words. The one thing that couldn’t be read off a page or predicted by a plot or twisted into a narrative.
She could tell he was bracing himself. For her to turn around and leave. For her to go running back to Sidney and Virtue, armed with his confession, ready to exploit it like every other hero in every other story.
She crossed the distance between them.
With a careful hand on his arm, she turned him to face her.
And kissed him.
It wasn’t like any of the times before. Not the desperate collision of the Queen of Hearts’s balcony. Not the consuming darkness of the Dark King’s embrace. Not the sly, theatrical kiss of Moriarty in a gaslit London flat.
It was small. Soft. Quiet. Her lips against his, and nothing else. No tendrils. No shadows. No purple glow.
No lust.
No conquest.
No performance.
Just her.
And him.
He went rigid.
She pulled back just enough to see his face.
His eyes were wide. Both purple, but…different. Not glowing. Not performing. Unguarded in a way she had never seen them. They glanced between hers, bewildered. No. Scared.
“Sasha—”
“Shut up.”
She kissed him again. Longer, this time. Slow, and deliberate, and with every ounce of intent she could press into the gesture without letting herself think about what it meant or what it would cost.
Because she was a librarian. And if every story ever told said that the villain couldn’t be loved—
Then maybe it was time for a new story.
His hand came up. Hesitant. It settled against the side of her neck like he was afraid she might shatter. His thumb found the line of her jaw and traced it with a tenderness so foreign to everything she knew about him that it made her chest ache.
When she finally pulled away, his breathing was unsteady.
“That,” he said, and his voice cracked on the word, “was a very stupid thing to do.”
“I know.”
“You will die, now. The narrative will punish you for it.”
“Probably.”
“I cannot protect you from the story, Sasha.”
“I know.”
He stared at her. And for once, the monster, the villain, the living embodiment of every dark thing humanity had ever dreamed up, had nothing to say for a long moment. Finally, he broke the silence, his voice ragged. “You have doomed me once more to a broken heart…”
Placing her hand over where his heart might be—if he actually had a real one—on his chest, she nodded faintly. “I know.” She paused. “If—”
His lips crashed against hers with such a sudden and violent ferocity that Sasha cried out, muffled against him. He wrapped an arm around her lower back and dragged her flush against him. Something strong and warm wrapped tightly around her ankle. Something that was not human.
When he broke away, his eyes were once more glowing that fiendish purple.
He grinned, and a familiar fear pooled in her stomach.
“If I must suffer because of you later, Sasha dear, then I believe I have earned the right to take my time enjoying you while I can. Hm?”
Sasha never got the chance to respond. He pushed her backwards without warning. She tripped and fell over whatever had grabbed her by the ankle. Screaming, she tumbled backwards—
Into an open grave.
Darkness consumed her as she fell.
And kept falling.
To the sound of Vile’s laughter.