She isn’t a loved one that Milus speaks of. I haven’t thought about her in easily fifteen years, but there has never been anyone else that cared about me.
That’s why it’s her.
I’m frowning when I look at Billy, a deep carved divot between my brows, distress in the lines as I realise, he could be the only one who knew. Who she was. What she meant. Even though my time with her was brief. She’s the only thing in thisworld that ever offered me a kindness. I’ve never spoken about her to anyone though. Not even him. But surely no one else would have any idea how to find someone like this from my past.
The question is formed on my lips, thehow,why, but no sound leaves my mouth when I look into his glacial blue eyes and realise what he’s silently saying.
Trust me.
Trust your devotion to me.
Trust yourself.
It’s never steered you wrong before, I know it won’t now.
“This is how you prove devotion,” Milus starts. “Not through suffering, but through sacrifice. Something you cherish. Something The Obsidian cannot take from you unless you give it freely.”
He reaches out towards my face, his fingers brushing my chin, tilting my face up towards the blackened emblem above us. A pentagram with a thorned ‘O’ in its centre, a serpent curled around it.
“Do this,” he whispers, placing a long silver dagger in my hand, thorny rose vines carved into the handle, a roman numeral two etched into the base of the blade where it meets the hilt, “And you will rise among us. Fail…” he pinches my chin between his thumb and finger hard, drawing my face back down to meet his. “And you willboth,” he says, glancing between Billy and I, “wish you had taken Billy up on his offering of ‘getting you out’.” He finishes with a smile, a threat in the way his lips part, his final knowing words only loud enough just for us.
Billy looks completely neutral, but I can feel it, in the way his fingers clasp mine just a little tighter, that he wasn’t aware someone had been watching us quite that intimately either. And if I fail this, it won’t just be me that suffers for it.
Milus retakes his place beside the altar, and then Balor is there, kicking a bound Clara down the stairs, her body tumblingright into Billy’s legs. She’s wailing and crying, the noises muffled behind the gag, and Billy’s stepping back, stepping down, joining the front row to stand with his family, leaving me alone.
With Clara.
With the dagger.
With a choice, but really, with no choice at all.
Torches around the room all roar and flame at once, as if consuming the last of my hesitation. The last of my soul. Because I already know what I’m going to do.
I am not a good person.
Even when I’ve tried to be.
And as I drive the dagger into the hollow of Clara’s throat, carving it down through the centre of her chest, straddling her, my knees pinning her beneath me. My hands plunging into her chest cavity, fingers curling around the hot slippery organ that’s still trying to pump blood around her lifeless body.
It only proves what I fear.
What I already know.
I will choose Billy every time.
In this life and the next.
I am a monster.
And I like it.
Chapter 27
BILLY
Penelope places the heart down on the altar with a squelching slap, blood up to her elbows, crimson beads dripping off of her fingertips.
She didn’t hesitate.
