Chapter 23 The Present #2
“You were a monster to me,” I interrupt again, voice low and trembling. “So I’ll be a monster to you. You decided money and power mattered more than love. You destroyed your own life, not me. I’m just finishing what you started.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, like he’s praying that when he opens them, I’ll be someone else.
He opens them. I’m not.
I step closer, and against every better instinct, I lift my hand and place it on his cheek.
He goes still as a spooked horse.
His skin is warm. Feverish. It’s rougher than I remember around the beard line; his cheeks are hollow, his eyes too large. Beneath my palm, I can feel the flutter of his jaw, that stubborn muscle that clenches when he sleeps.
“I know you’re not untouched by it,” I say softly. For just a heartbeat, I let myself look at him the way I used to. Just for a moment, I turn into the ghost of who I was. “Somewhere inside you, there’s a part of you that haunts you for it. That’s why you have all those nightmares.”
He blinks, startled. “W–what?”
“What do you dream about?” I ask quietly. “I want to know what keeps you up at night.”
He swallows once. Twice. But he doesn’t answer.
“Don’t make me threaten it out of you,” I murmur. “Please. Just tell me.”
His breathing turns jagged. Panic first, then shame. He looks down at his hands.
“…The grave,” he says at last, voice trembling. “It always starts with your grave.”
I stay silent. Let him speak.
“There’s dirt under my fingernails,” he whispers.
“And I know it’s yours. From when I—” His voice splinters.
“And I’m standing there, watching myself do it again.
Every night. I’m screaming at the version of me in the dream to stop, but I can’t move.
I can’t stop it. I can only watch. Over and over. ”
His lips press together; his breath comes shallow and sharp.
“And then I hear you,” he says. “Not like a ghost. Not far away. Close. Right behind me. Laughing. Sometimes crying. Sometimes just… breathing in my ear. I don’t turn around anymore. I can’t. Because I know you’re—” He swallows. “—waiting for me to look.”
Finally, he looks up at me, pupils blown wide.
“You never look at me in the dream,” he goes on.
“You look past me. Like I’m already gone.
And then the dirt starts pulling me down into the grave.
And I know it’s my turn. So I go under. Every night.
For five years. I wake up choking.” His voice cracks.
“You were watching me all that time? You saw it all?”
I nod once.
“Yes,” I say. “I did.”
I smooth my hand down from his cheek to his jaw, to the pulse fluttering at his throat. It beats like a frightened rabbit beneath the skin.
A better woman might find that punishment enough.
But like we’ve already established, I’m not that woman.
I’m bad to the bone.
Bad and good, all tangled together.
That’s why it hurts so damn much, no matter what I do.
He leans into my palm, like the body remembers comfort even when the mind knows it’s over.
“Skye,” he whispers. “Please. Please, I’m—”
“I hear you,” I say, cutting him off. My hand slips away. The loss of it makes him shiver. “And I’m saying goodbye.”
Silence. The generator hums. The light hums. Something inside me hums with them.
“I’m going to do it now,” I tell him quietly. “And I’m going to try to do it kindly.”
A flicker of confusion crosses his face. “Kindly?”
“I’ll give you the dignity you didn’t give me.”
I step back just enough to move freely. My hand falls from where it hovered near his cheek.
“But just so you know…” My voice hardens. “I will never forgive you, Mark. You’ll take my hate with you to the afterlife, and the life after that.”
I interlace my fingers, then release them.
My body is still learning how to be a body again. How to breathe. How to stand. How to remember its own weight.
But somewhere inside me, the other body, the one that remembers the scythe and the way air bends around it, unfurls like a dark flower beneath my ribs.
I close my eyes. It would be easier with Pain here. Easier with the scythe. Easier if I were stronger.
But none of that belongs to this moment.
I’ll make do with what I have.
I reach for the pull.
I gather the cold that isn’t cold, the shadow that isn’t dark, the thinness between this world and the next that lives under my skin like a second set of ribs. It’s difficult, like trying to flex a muscle I haven’t used in a very long time.
My fingers tingle. The hairs on my arms lift. The light flickers once, and Mark stiffens, his breath catching. His pupils dilate; his body understands what his mouth refuses to say. I feel it without looking at him.
“Mark,” I say softly. “Look at me.”
And for once, he does. Really looks.
I open my eyes and meet his. “Goodbye, Mark.”
I pull.
A sound escapes him, thin as a ribbon. Then his body eases. His shoulders drop a fraction. His mouth softens. For the first time in forty-eight hours, his face is no longer locked in pain.
The air thins, then thickens. I don’t want to suffocate him or crush his heart or make him suffer. I only want to reap him, to draw his soul free and release him from the ache of being alive.
It’s mercy, I think.
For both of us.
I focus, narrowing down to the seam of my task. Sweat beads along my upper lip. My knees go loose. The light flickers again, harder this time. The air in the room drops three degrees.
“Almost there,” I whisper. “Just a little more.”
His pulse falters beneath his skin. The edges of my vision darken. My fingers, my real fingers, begin to go numb.
I pull harder.
I have to do this. It is the only way. He needs to disappear, or he will keep haunting me. I thought I had won when we captured him. I thought I could finally rest.
But the feeling did not last.
Why was it only temporary?
Something in me strains. For a moment, I am the woman under the willow again, with dirt in my mouth and no air in my lungs. For a moment, I am the ghost on the branch, watching the raven circle above. For a moment, I am nothing at all, and the relief is so sharp I could cry.
Then the truth hits me from every direction at once.
It was never about him. It was never really about what he did to me. My pain has always been about what I continued to carry long after it was done.
The world has always been cruel. It always will be. There will always be people who twist love into power, who take what they want because they can. You cannot stop that. It’s just the way it is.
But cruelty only wins when you let it stay. When you let it take root and become the story you tell yourself.
I was never powerless. I was hurt, but I was never powerless.
I could have looked away. I could have healed instead of circling the wound. I could have—
Something snaps inside my chest with a white, metallic pop, like biting into foil. The world tilts. The seam slams shut on the part of him I have drawn out and traps it like a finger caught in a door.
Mark exhales. His head tips back. The straps creak. The ribbon of breath slides another inch, another heartbeat.
I don’t take his soul.
I fail.
Then everything goes dark.
And I am no longer in the basement.