Chapter 40 BETH
BETH
Swallow it.
A distant thud pounded in my chest, the exhaustion from earlier before I fell asleep still settled into my bones.
Disoriented, I struggled to lift my head from the pillow, and then saw I it, a shift in the shadow.
My breath stuttered when I caught the silhouette of someone sitting in the worn-out armchair by the window.
“Oh, my god!” I bolted upright, my trembling hand immediately fumbling for the bedside lamp. The yellow light flickered to life, peeling back the darkness just enough to reveal a familiar face.
Zaghan?
“Did I scare you, baby?” he asked, his voice low, amused even, before he exhaled heavily and rose from the chair, his movement slow, unhurried.
I couldn’t answer. Confusion still tangled my thoughts, leaving me struggling to make sense of why he was here, in my room, at this odd hour…not that this was the first time he was making such a visit.
Then I saw something in his hand, a gift box with red stain smeared across it.
My breath caught. The red stain on the box was from his hands. It coated both his palms, too dark, still moist, painting his pale skin in shades of crimson.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper as I instinctively shifted back against the headboard.
He lowered himself onto the edge of the bed.
Too close, his presence suffocating, like always.
I knew he was coming. I waited all night before I fell asleep.
But I thought I was overly emotionally prepared for what was coming.
I was sure I had seen the worst of his darkness.
But right now, uncertainty hung in the air like a wet shroud on a cold winter night.
“You look so beautiful when you sleep, little witch.” He reached for my face, and I flinched away without meaning to.
A smirk curled his lips, his sharp features cast in wicked amusement. The scream rising in my throat remained trapped beneath my fear.
Please let this not be the blood of who I fear it was.
His gaze flickered back to his hands. The stains were not just on his fingers. They streaked up his wrist, splattered across his forearm, staining his crisp white shirt. And then I noticed the faint smudges on his cheek, the dark splotches on the lower part of his chest and his collar.
“Y-your h-hands?” My knees pulled up to my chest, my body trembling.
“Oh, the blood?” He gave a slow, deliberate glance down at himself before returning his gaze to me. There was a smile on his lips, but it was Zaghan, so it wasn’t warm, wasn’t kind, just mocking and sinister.
“Don’t worry, it’s not mine.” He gave a lazy shrug of his shoulders.
My stomach twisted. I knew it wasn’t his. My worry was whose?
“Whose?” I asked, ignoring the metallic scent choking the air between us, and that of smoke, like he had been near a fire.
“Whose blood, Zaghan?” My eyes darted over his body, searching for a wound despite his words. Then I caught another stain I missed earlier, a faint print on the other side of his shirt. The blotch was shaped into a hand print the more I looked at it.
Someone’s hand print.
Someone dying and begging for a second chance.
My back stiffened, fear curling around me. But I refused to let my thoughts wander.
“The box.” My gaze locked on the object in his hands. “What’s inside?”
He blinked at first as if the object, despite its size and possible weight, had momentarily skipped his mind. Then, he held it out to me. “It’s a gift,” he said, almost gently. “For you.”
A gift again?
Hesitation laced my movement as I reached out, taking the box from him. It was heavier than I thought. That meant it wasn’t jewelry again, not something delicate.
“I hope you like it,” he murmured, something dark creeping into his voice.
With trembling fingers, I tugged at the neon ribbon, carefully slipping it free. I barely registered the silkiness of the fabric, though a part of me noted absently that I liked the color, and that I may use it again under different circumstances.
Finally, I lifted the lid, and the scent of unfresh blood hit me like a hammer. The cold rush of realisation swept through me, sending a violent tremor coursing through my limbs. My fingers slackened and the lid slipped free from my grasp.
I refused to look. Refused to confirm what I already knew.
“Open your eyes,” he urged, his voice smooth, expectant.
Tears burned at my lashes, and I hesitantly obeyed, my gaze dropping into the box, horror gripping me in its merciless clutches.
In the box was a heart. A human heart; dark, bloody…dead.
A scream clawed at my throat but nothing escaped. Only a choked gasp, strangled by shock.
He sighed, a sound of exaggerated disappointment. “This was not the reaction I was hoping for,” he mused. “Considering all the efforts I put into this.”
I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. My entire body trembled, my pulse a frantic staccato in my ears.
His fingers suddenly clamped around my jaw, forcing my head back and making me look up at him. His grip was bruising, his breath hot against my skin.
“Where’s the fucking gratitude?” he growled, his voice laced with something raw and unhinged, and I whimpered.
“I brought your lover’s heart to your doorstep,” he continued, eyes dark and hollow. “Wrapped it all pretty for you. And you can’t even manage to spare me a ‘thank you?”
Tears spilled over my lashes. My chest heaved, but my voice faltered.
He tilted his head, gaze flickering over my tear-stricken face. Then slowly, his lips curled into a grin that shared resemblance with a blade with jagged edges.
“I didn’t kill him,” he confessed, his fingers loosening around my jaw only to stroke my face with an unsettling gentleness. “We had a nice chat, actually. About you.”
A sob broke from my lips. For a moment, I wanted to believe him, believe that Zaghan, a man who killed someone for simply touching me, allowed another that slept with me go scot-free.
Because it was Rowan McRae. He never did anything wrong.
He chose me despite how broken I was. I didn’t want him to die.
In an instant far less cruel than this, I wanted him to have escaped Zaghan’s wrath, to have lived. I needed him to live.
He didn’t deserve to die because of me.
“He told me about how he fucked you, you know,” he continued, his voice tinted with something venomous.
“How you moaned his name when my name should be tattooed on your fucking lips.” His fingers dug deeper, burrowing comfortably into my skin.
“You gave him every part of you that belonged only to me, Beth.”
I shook uncontrollably, my face burning under the vice of his hold, but he didn’t let go. He stroked my face with one finger, the rest breaking open my skin.
“Don’t look so sad, baby,” he whispered, “We’re best buds now. We even made plans. Sleepover tomorrow. Maybe braid each other’s hair.” His grin turned sharper, wicked. “You should probably join us. I’ve always wondered what a threesome looks like.”
A sob cracked my body, fingers clenching the blanket in a desperate attempt to ground myself.
“Come on, say something, little witch,” he pleaded. “I went through all this trouble to bring your lover’s heart closer to you, just the way you wanted it, and you are not saying a word to me?”
I whimpered when he suddenly yanked the gift box from my lap. His bloody fingers dipped inside, grasping the slick, still-warm organ.
The squelch of shifting flesh made my stomach churn, bile rising from my throat.
“Maybe,” he said, voice lilting with something dark. “You don’t understand what this means. Maybe I should help you appreciate it more.”
I didn’t get a chance to react when his blood-coated fingers shoved forward, pressing something wet against my lips.
My entire body seized, locked in place.
N-no!
“Shhh,” he cooed, his grip tight as he pushed harder. The muscle was soft, pliant, smeared in Rowan’s drying blood.
I tried to shake my head, but he clamped down harder, pinching my cheek until my mouth was forced open just enough.
“Open wider.” His voice dripped with something twisted. “I don’t want to force the entire thing down your throat.”
Terror exploded in my chest.
I tried to push at him, claw at his hands, but he was stronger, so much stronger.
His thumb hooked into my mouth, parting my lips further. And then…
The taste hit my tongue first; coppery, foul, and thick.
I choked a garbled sob as he pressed the chunk against my teeth. The texture was spongy, raw, and strong. And it made my stomach lurch.
“Chew it,” he whispered, lips brushing the shell of my ear.
I shook my head frantically, whimpering and gagging.
“Chew!”
His hand slid from my jaw to my neck, keeping it there, fingers flexing around my throat. A sob shuddered out of me. I couldn’t breathe, and my lungs burned. My body trembled, instinct kicking at me to fight. But I couldn’t. The hand around my throat was strong and unyielding.
“Eat, Elizabeth.” His hand tightened only a fraction. And the choice was taken as my body betrayed me and my mouth closed. The chunk of flesh sat heavy on my tongue.
He released his grip, allowing enough air for me to sob through my nose. When I refused to chew still, he smirked, his hand moving lower, hovering over my stomach, pushing, pressing.
I gagged.
“Swallow it,” he ordered, his tone sickly sweet.
With the cruel pressure building against my abdomen, I realized I had no choice. My jaw quivered as my teeth sank down into the organ.
A squelch echoed and a foul, metallic taste hit my tongue.
I gagged again, tears pouring down my cheeks. My throat tightened, but before I could swallow it, a violent shudder wracked my body. The pressure coiled in my chest and churned in my gut until I doubled over the bed, retching.
The sound echoed far louder than it should have. Wet, broken, and animalistic. The piece of the heart hit the floor with a dull, obscene sound, sloppy, slimy, and unholy.
A series of coughs echoed right after. And then nothing for a moment stretched too long. Nothing but my dry-heaving and pounding heart echoed in the room.
I heard nothing from Zaghan. No breaths. No movements. No voice. Just his silence that locked my spine in place, the fear withholding me from looking at him, and seeing the disappointment in his stormy eyes.
Then all of a sudden, I heard it. The sound low in his throat. It wasn’t a laugh, not a sob. His breathing turned uneven, sharp pulls of air like his lungs were scraping for oxygen. The calm and calculated thing earlier, like he had control over his emotion, fractured completely.
I felt it when he rose to his feet, his shadow suffocating, pressing in as he paced about in the room. And the more he covered the length of the room in repeated strides, the louder and sharper his breaths.
My gaze remained cast down, too afraid to look up, too terrified to see the way the frown on his face had twisted into an expression too grotesque to withstand, too monstrous to not give me a heart attack.
“Are you–” he was saying but stopped, his voice breaking. Then he tried again. “Are you fucking serious right now?”
Afraid of what he would do next, I shifted on the bed, pushing myself into a corner, willing my body to vanish into the old wooden headboard.
A sharp gasp broke out of my lips when something suddenly slammed into the wall far away from me, glass shattering and raining onto the floor like glass. I didn’t know what it was, the light wasn’t bright enough to see what was left of it.
Another object whizzed through the air, hitting the wooden door so hard it rebounded and cracked. My body shook as fear enveloped me, chest tight while my broken sobs echoed amidst the chaos around me.
He paced like a caged thing, hands buried in his white hair, fingers fisting, pulling.
“You couldn’t–” he laughed, a loud, wild thing that didn’t sound like it should belong to a human being. “You couldn’t even swallow it? You could–” His voice broke again, long fingers dragging across his face, eyes blown wide, shining with something feral. And his breath was fast, too fast.
He took long and wild strides toward the bed, and I whimpered, pressing my body further against the creaking wood.
“I carved him open for you.” His voice rose, sharp and accusing as he stood by the side of the bed, gaze lethal.
“I ripped out his fucking heart with my bare hands because he touched you. I set him on fire and watched him burn. Brought his precious, little heart for you, and you chose to be an ingrate?”
Fire. It wasn’t enough that he killed him. He set him on fire. A fat roll of tears tracked down my cheeks, hot, burning.
“You let him inside you,” he snarled. “So why can’t you fucking keep his heart inside your stomach?”
My hand tightened around my body, like if I did it religiously, hold myself tight enough, I would not fall apart. I would not break.
“You made me do this,” he accused, his voice hoarse as he paced again, fingers twitching, breath ragged and sharp.
“This happened all because of you. I just wanted–” He took a sharp breath in, almost dry-heaving.
“I just wanted to fix it. I just wanted to erase it all. Erase him, so you wouldn’t choose him over me. ”
He stopped moving and the room went quiet again. It was all too fast, too sudden, it made me even more terrified.
Then he walked around the bed, toward the side I had moved to. My heart leapt to my throat, expecting him to do something…violent. Maybe wrap his fingers around my throat and end me for good.
But he knelt before me instead, the action slow and deliberate. His hands trembled as he reached out, brushing my hair back with a tenderness that made my stomach twist.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he murmured, his voice soft, almost soothing. “I shouldn’t have gotten angry like that. You’re too overwhelmed. And I–I pushed too hard.”
My throat closed as his thumb traced my jaw. “We just did it wrong.”
I shook my head. “No, please, no.”
“We need to fix it,” he noted, voice certain.
His eyes searched my face, not for consent, but for compliance, for surrender.
“I’ll be calmer, baby,” he promised. “I’ll be gentle this time. I’ll show you how to make it right, okay?”
Then he walked back around the bed, towards where the box sat, grabbing the remaining chunk of Rowan’s heart.
No!