“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, theotherbody, 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.
