4. Drystan
Chapter Four
DRYSTAN
The three-hour drive back to Hellebore Mansion is a fever dream of rain and violence.
I keep the headlights off for long stretches, letting the darkness wrap around me.
Luke lies unconscious in the back seat, wrists and ankles zip-tied, duct tape over his mouth.
Every time I glance in the rearview mirror I feel the same sick satisfaction.
He touched her. He put his hands on her.
The memory of his fingers sliding under the waistband of her cargo pants plays on repeat in my head until my knuckles turn white on the steering wheel.
He didn’t care for her, didn’t even open the door and when she said the flower was toxic he didn’t protect her. Fucker didn’t care about her for a second.
By the time I turn onto the private road that leads to the mansion, the storm has grown vicious. Rain hammers the roof feeling as if drills are inside my skull. I smile into the darkness. Soon the rain will have blood to wash away.
I drag Luke down the narrow stone steps into the basement. His head bounces against every edge. The air grows colder, damper, thick with the musky scent of hellebore. My garden’s gift. My mother’s legacy.
When I was a child, my mother kept the hellebore in a secret corner of our garden.
She tended them with quiet reverence, black petals glistening.
My father hated them. He called them witch flowers, poisonous, ugly.
One day he ripped every single plant from the ground and burned them while she watched.
She never cried in front of him, but that night she sat on the edge of my bed and whispered, “They are more than flowers, Drystan. They are weapons when you need them to be… and protection when the world tries to take what you love.”
She died in a car accident two months after I turned twelve. The official story said it was an accident, but I never believed it, even though there was never any proof of foul play.
My father destroyed everything she loved. Now I grow what he burned. An entire garden of black hellebore blooms behind the mansion walls: beautiful, deadly. A living monument to the only person who ever understood obsession.
Tonight, they will serve as both weapons and protection.
I drag the fucker through the backdoor and into the basement.
I strap Luke spread-eagle onto the reinforced oak table. The leather cuffs creak as I tighten them. He groans, eyelids fluttering. When his eyes finally focus and he sees me standing over him, pure terror floods his face.
“What the fuck? Where am I? Let me go!”
I walk slowly around the table, boots echoing on the stone floor.
“You touched Briar.” I say softly.
He actually laughs, a shaky, desperate sound. “Briar? Dude, she’s just a hook-up. I fuck her once in a while when I’m bored. That’s it. She’s nothing.”
Nothing.
The words detonate inside my chest.
Just a hook-up. Bored.
Rage surges through me so violently my vision tunnels. This worthless piece of shit used her like disposable trash. Kissed her neck. Groped her breast. Slid his fingers between her legs while she—
I back-hand him hard. Blood sprays across the oak.
“She is not a hook-up!” I growl, my voice trembling with six years of pure hell and obsession.
“She is my salvation. The only thing that can drag me out of the abyss I was born into. I would carve my own heart out and lay it at her feet if she asked. She has belonged to me since the first second I laid eyes on her… and you will die knowing that she was never yours to touch.”
I turn to the small steel table and pick up the vial of hellebore tincture I distilled from my garden. The liquid is dark as old blood, thick with the concentrated poison of roots, leaves, and black petals. My mother was right. This flower protects what is mine.
I pinch Luke’s nose shut and pour the bitter dose down his throat. He chokes and thrashes, but I clamp my hand over his mouth until he swallows every drop.
“What the fuck did you give me?” he gasps, coughing violently.
I sit in the wooden chair beside the table and watch. Calm. Patient. The monster inside me finally fed.
Almost an hour passes before his screams begin to fracture. His breathing shifts, turning shallow and frantic, each inhale a wet rattle in the freezing basement air. Sweat beads across his forehead and runs in thick trails down his temples despite the cold that seeps from the stone walls and floor.
“The walls,” he gasps, voice cracking into a broken sob. “They’re breathing. Moving. No—no, they’re not walls anymore. They’re guts. Wet guts sliding against each other.”
His eyes bulge wide, darting wildly around the dim space. Sweat pours down his face in streams, mixing with the blood already drying at the corners of his mouth.
“Guts dripping. Red. Everything is red.”
I lean closer, my voice low and steady in the heavy silence between his gasps. “Tell me more, Luke. What do you see?”
“They’re opening,” he chokes out, panic sharpening every word. “Teeth. There’s teeth. Eyes—too many eyes, black, watching me.”
His body jerks hard against the thick leather straps holding him to the heavy oak table. The wood groans under the force as a raw scream tears from his throat.
“It’s coming! No—no—get away from me!”
The words tumble over one another, slurred and desperate. “Teeth covered in blood. The walls are moving, reaching. Please—help me!”
His head slams back against the table with a dull crack. Spit flies from his lips as his chest heaves violently. “The beast. It’s here. It sees me. It knows.”
I bring my face inches from his, studying the terror twisting his features. “It knows what you did, does it not?”
“No—don’t let it touch me!”
His body convulses harder, the straps cutting deeper into his wrists as he thrashes. I keep my voice soft, almost intimate against the stone walls that swallow every sound. “It is getting closer. Look at it. Let it come.”
His scream dissolves into a raw, animal howl that echoes through the basement. “It’s on me!” The words break into sobbing gasps. “Tearing. Tearing me open. Get it out! Get it out!”
His back arches violently off the table, every muscle locking tight. “It’s eating! Eating my heart!”
No more coherent words come. Only broken, wet sounds spill from him as his body shakes uncontrollably. His eyes roll back until only the whites show, tears and snot streaming down his face while the hellebore tears his mind apart from within.
I smile as the sounds wash over me, beautiful in their desperation against the cold stone.
Vomit surges up from his stomach and spills down his chin, mixing with fresh blood from where he has bitten his tongue.
The serum is peeling his sanity away layer by layer while his body begins to fail beneath the straps.
I reach for the scalpel. The blade catches the flickering torchlight as I turn it slowly in my hand.
“You put your hands on her breast.” I say quietly, pressing the edge to the palm of his left hand.
The same hand that groped her against the wall.
I draw the blade across his flesh in a slow, deep line.
Blood wells up immediately, dark and warm, spilling over his skin and dripping onto the oak table below.
He howls, the sound raw and guttural. In the nightmare unfolding inside his skull, the cut becomes something far worse. He sobs about black flowers blooming inside the wound, petals forcing their way through his veins, pushing into his lungs until he struggles for every breath.
I cut him again. And again. One deliberate slice for every second his hands were on her. One for every laugh he gave while ignoring her quiet protest. One for every time he called her “bunny” as if she were something disposable instead of my entire fucking reason for existing.
The basement fills with the wet sounds of his suffering and the steady drip of blood onto stone. I work methodically, letting the hellebore and the blade speak together, carving away every trace of the man who dared touch what has always belonged to me.
His voice grows hoarse, scraping raw from his throat. The vein at the side of his neck pulses visibly, his heart stuttering beneath the skin as the hellebore tightens its hold, slowing everything while turning each fresh cut into fire that blooms into deep, spreading ice.
I set the scalpel aside on the table and wrap my hands around his throat. Not quickly. I want him to feel every single heartbeat fade.
“You used her when you were bored,” I whisper, tightening my grip finger by finger. “You put your filthy mouth on her delicate skin. You will never touch her again.”
His eyes bulge wider, the final hallucinations flickering across them—Hellebore’s walls closing in like a living grave, my face stretching into something demonic and eternal in his fracturing mind. He tries to speak, but nothing emerges except a wet, choking gurgle that bubbles past my thumbs.
I squeeze harder. His body jerks once, twice, legs kicking weakly against the straps before everything goes slack beneath me. I keep my hands locked around his throat long after his pulse stops fluttering under my fingers, long after his eyes turn dull and empty, staring at nothing.
The basement falls into complete silence, broken only by the distant roar of rain hammering the stone far above us.
I finally release him. My hands come away stained dark with blood and hellebore residue, the wetness cool and sticky against my palms. I stare down at what used to be Luke and feel nothing but pure, holy relief.
He will never touch her again.
Tomorrow I will carry what remains into the hellebore garden and let the roots drink him dry. Tonight the flower has done its job—weapon and protection, exactly as my mother promised long ago.
I climb the cold stone stairs, seal the heavy basement door behind me with a solid thud, and walk through the dark, creaking halls of Hellebore Mansion. The ancient building feels alive tonight, approving of the work done in its depths.