Although I ammanythings, unobservant isn’t one of them. It’s clearly no coincidence that both of us are mangled and she’s irate. I realize I’m the guilty party, and that Ishouldfeel bad about it. Terrible, in fact.
Hell, I should probably be worried that I don’t know what I did. And yet, I feel very little at the moment, other than the urge tobreaksomething.
Including her pretty neck.
“How’s Bibi?” I ask, letting my gaze travel down her form.
“Fine. She won’t forgiveyouany time soon.” Elodie’s left hand flexes and relaxes inside the pocket of her wool skirt. Her inky tresses are twisted into an updo on the back of her head, enhancing the graceful slope of her shoulders.
She’s achingly elegant, and despite everything, part of me is intrigued by her subtle, controlled quiet.
After all, I am so much the opposite.
“Right.” I shift in bed, waiting for more, but it doesn’t come. Somehow, the pain in my bad arm isworsethan yesterday. “So, are we not going to talk about what happened in the greenhouse?”
“Fuck you, Tiss.” Her eyes drop closed. She hasn’t looked at me once since coming in here.
“Please?” The word strains past my lips. Behind my ribs the monster shifts. Something dangerously close to violence prods at me from every angle. “I think I’d really like to talk about it.”
Not only do I need her to say it—to fill me in—I realize, but I want her to show me her teeth. Then I can bring out my claws.
“Would you, now? Well.” Finally landing on me, her eyes blaze amber and emerald in the early morning light. “We had better do whatyouwant. Goddess forbid you don’t get yourwayfor once.”
“And yet, you’rethe one constantly infantilizing me. Withholding from me.Handlingme.”
She gives a dull snort that only rankles me further. “If you could handle yourself better, then I wouldn’t have to, now would I?”
With resentment rising to my eyeballs, I swallow the overwhelming urge to scream—to do something brutal that I can’t quite articulate. “Maybe I could if you weren’t so overprotective and fucking paranoid all the time.”
“Make better decisions,” she grinds out, “and I won’thaveto be.”
That’s all it takes. Throwing the covers aside, I’m on my feet with the cold tiles stinging my naked soles before I know what I’m doing. Before I have a plan.
Startled, she watches me turn and snatch a gleaming letter opener from my nightstand. Whirling around with it, I crave pain and destruction. The predator inside of me is bristling, for once vexed to motion not with hunger, but with anger.
I want to slit myself open. I want to rip my intestines out.
“Goddess, Tiss.” Her swollen mouth twists, her eyes narrowing. “Calm. Down.”
But I’m beyond anything resemblingcalm. I yearn to shove my gore in her face—to spit,“Here. Look. This is what you do to me. This is the monster I’ve become because ofyou!”
Makeshift weapon outstretched, I’m in front of her with my other hand wrapped around her neck before I know how I got here, before I know how things escalated to this point.
“What are youdoing?”
With my bad arm screaming and my stitches tautening like every last one of my frayed nerves, I shove her against the adjacent wall with the blade’s dull point pressed to her neck.
“Something I don’t want to do, but Iwillif you don’t tell me why it feels like there’s a tether connecting us,” I grate through my teeth. “Why it seems like we know each other, and youknowthat we know each other. What that business with the Screamer was all about. Because you sure as hell know more than you’ve been letting on, and you owe mesomething, priestess.”
“I don’t ‘owe’ you anything,Itissa.Anything,” she chokes out. “I’m still in the middle of the last fucking thing you told me to do.”
“Whatthing?”
“Purple. Back the hell off. If you think you can manage.”
An animalistic shriek tears through my mind. Blinding, white-hot rage bubbles up through my skin. It bathes me in anablution of power, thrumming through my blood sweeter than a symphony. It subsumes me entirely.
It’s the loveliest, most purifying thing I can imagine.
