In the darkness between waking moments, I dreamed of definitions.
Insanity:doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.
But what if you didn't want different results? What if the repetition was the point—the knotting, the filling, the claiming, again and again until your cells forgot they'd ever existed without it?
Love:a temporary madness, curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which they succumbed.
I almost laughed in my sleep.
There would be no cure for this.
No removal.
Rook had infected me at a cellular level, and the disease had become indistinguishable from my immune system.
To remove him now would be to remove myself.
Stockholm Syndrome:psychological response wherein a hostage develops positive feelings toward their captor.
The clinical part of my brain—the part that was dying, drowning, dissolving—tried to assert this diagnosis. Tried to remind me that what I felt wasn't real, wasn't healthy, wasn't love.
But the rest of me knew better.
Stockholm syndrome required a hostage who wanted to escape. I had stopped wanting that the moment his tongue touched my clit.
Maybe before.
Maybe I had stopped wanting escape the moment I saw his photograph five years ago and felt my soul lurch toward a stranger like it recognized what my mind couldn't name.
"Soul bond," Rook had called it.
"Madness," I would have called it once.
Now I understood they were synonyms.
♠ ♥ ♦ ♣
"It's time to go." Rook's voice cut through the darkness, and I opened my eyes to find him standing beside the operating table where we'd spent. . .hours?
Days?
Time had lost all meaning in this room of broken minds and rebuilt souls.
He'd put on clothes too. Black tactical pants that hugged his thighs. A fitted black shirt that stretched across his shoulders,the fabric thin enough that I could see the shadows of his tattoos beneath. Combat boots, laced tight.
He looked like what he was—a predator preparing for violence.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.
His long curly hair was even wilder and untamed from the sex.
There was dried blood beneath his fingernails.
I didn't question it.
Where he goes, I go now.
The thought should have disturbed me. Should have triggered some final surge of resistance from the woman I used to be.
