I swallow hard. “You made yourself that all on your own.”
He walks back into the living room, carrying his glass with him. He gestures around the room, like he’s giving a TED Talk. “This place is for people who refuse to heal. Who cling to disease like a badge. On the outside, you don’t look like the kind of woman who needs this space. But it’s there, inside you. A different kind of disease. A different kind of rot.”
There’s no rage in his tone. That’s what makes it worse. He believes this. Every syllable is fact in his mind.
“You may think this is about revenge,” he says. “About retribution for what you’ve done to me. But it’s not. It’s about correction. You attacked something divine, and now I have to show you what that costs.”
I stare at him, heart thudding. “You’re not divine. You’re a fraud with good lighting.”
He smiles. Slow. Pitying. He walks toward me again, voice lowering. “Do you know what it’s like to have hundreds of people look at you like you’re salvation? To feel their pain crawl under your skin until you can’t tell where they end and you begin?”
He stops inches away, tone sharpening into something venomous. “You tried to take that from me.”
It lands like a confession, and suddenly I understand: this isn’t about power, or justice, or even survival. It’s about ego. About humiliation.
“How dare you,” he whispers, “think you could touch me?”
He dumps that glass of water over my head. I gasp in surprise, blinking through the droplets falling into my eyes. I try to wipe it away, but my hands are still secured to the chair.
“You motherfucker,” I gasp, trying not to inhale the water plastering my hair to my head.
“This is humility, Willow. You’ve lived too long without it.”
He steps back, rolling his shoulders, centering himself like he’s about to align his chakras.
“Fear is the body’s way of purging pride,” he says, almost gently. “You’ll thank me when it’s over.”
And then—he flips on a small speaker. His own damn voice hums softly through it, whispering affirmations:you are safe, you are becoming whole, you are surrendering to peace.
It’s grotesque. The soundtrack of a murder wrapped in spa ambiance.
Phoenix grips the arms of my chair and drags it around to face the kitchen. Before I think quick enough to headbutt the bastard, he steps away, back into the kitchen. He opens the fridge and pulls out ingredients. “Do you know what happens when you detox pride?”
I watch him as he works. He pulls out the expected ingredients. Kale. Ginger. Strawberries. But there’s this powder in a bottle that has no label. “You end up alone in a cabin, surrounded by corpses?” I snarl.
He grins. It’s slow. Genuine. Terrifying.
“You end up pure.”
He turns and pulls open a drawer behind him. Metal clangs as he digs through what I assume is silverware. When he turns back around, he holds a knife and meets my gaze.
My pulse spikes.
I’ve been around death plenty. I’ve known its aura, its impending prophecy. So, for the first time ever, I know with absolute certainty:
I am not getting out of this one.
But instead of charging at me and plunging the blade into my chest, he turns to his ingredients. He simply chops them and then dumps them all into a blender. He rinses the knife in the sink, and my heart rate spikes again when he turns back around, knife still in his hand, at the ready.
But it’s his own hand he presses the blade into.
The knife pierces the fleshy part of his left palm. Disgust fills my expression as I watch him hold his hand over the blender, and he makes a fist. Phoenix’s own blood pours over the top of the kale, the ginger, the strawberries, staining them dark red.
“Pure,” Phoenix says with a maniacal grin. He gives his hand one last shake over the blender before he washes his hand and bandages it like it’s nothing. He shovels a heaping mound of that powder on top, splashes in some water, puts the lid in place, and turns the blades on.
The noise of it fills the air as I watch his blood instantly whip around the clear container for a fraction of a second before it mixes with everything else.
And I realize what’s coming the moment the blender turns off.
