Fuck.
I try to tell myself it’s survival instinct. That I’m clinging to the first scrap of warmth I’ve found in years because everything else is arctic. That it’s just hunger. A normal, human thing.
But then her hands press harder, and she looks at me like my life’s actually worth saving. And the lie cracks. It’s not hunger. It’sgreed.
I want more.
I always want more.
This time, it’s her warmth, her defiance, her stupid, fearless goodness.
“Yeah,” I mutter finally, voice shredded. “Alright. Take me to your apartment.”
Rhea exhales through her nose, that sharp, controlled kind of breath you give before doing something catastrophically dumb.Her hair’s fallen out of its knot, strands sticking to her cheeks. She looks like chaos and holiness all at once.
She nods once, and half-drags, half-hauls me down the alley.
Her flat’s not far. Two blocks, maybe three. But every step feels like walking toward a cliff with my name carved on it.
You’re a bastard, Talon, I tell myself.Everything you touch burns down eventually.
But I’m fading, and the self-loathing goes fuzzy around the edges. The greed takes over again, patient and inevitable.
She kicks open the door with her hip, drags me inside, and lowers me onto the couch like I don’t outweigh her by half. Her hands are shaking. Her voice isn’t.
“Stay awake. Don’t pass out on me.”
Her face hovers above mine, pale in the weak light. Sweat, blood, and something unbreakable in her eyes. She’s fire and stubbornness, too bright for the filth I drag behind me.
And I know,know, I’ll lose her too. That’s just how the world cashes its debts.
Still, I manage a whisper. “You’re brighter than me, Rhea.”
She scowls, mutters, “Don’t talk anymore,” and presses harder on the wound.
It hurts like hell.
It also kind of feels like home.
So I let her take care of me.
The trickiest part about breaking Mark isn’t the plan itself. It’s the feathered surveillance state parked outside the hospital.
The crows.
We can’t move until we get past them.
And honestly? I don’t think the universe is ever going to hand me something this cinematic again—an entire town’s worth of crows flocking to my whereabouts at any cost. I would be an absolute clown not to weaponize it.
I want those fucked-up little zealots to crown the willow tree like harbingers of divine malpractice. I want them to rattle the branches like a war drum and croak doomsday into the clouds and shit on Mark’s porch until his very ancestors feel it.
I want them to peel himopen.
But there’s a flaw.
I can’t exactly tell them what to do.
I have no power.
