"You're insane," she breathes, tears of pure horror pooling in her eyes.
"I am yours," I correct, my bloody fingers tangling in her wet, dark hair, pulling her face down until our lips are a breath apart. "And now, you have absolutely no one else. There is no escape, Sybil. You just saved the monster. You are bound to me in blood forever."
Before she can pull away, the heavy, overwhelming darkness finally consumes me, dragging me down into a black, dreamless void.
CHAPTER 13 THE ASHES OF MY RUIN POV: SYBIL
The heavy, suffocating silence of the rotting hunting cabin is infinitely louder than the explosion that just buried us alive.
It rings in my ears, a high-pitched, agonizing frequency that completely drowns out the violent roar of the storm lashing against the thin wooden walls. I sit on my heels on the dusty floorboards, my hands hovering uselessly in the freezing air. They are completely coated in thick, dark crimson blood. His blood. It is already beginning to dry, turning sticky and tight against my skin, turning my fingers into the grotesque appendages of a butcher.
“I burned your entire life to the ground, little bird, just so I could be the only one standing in the ashes with you.”
Thayer’s final, psychotic confession loops through my shattered mind, a dark, venomous snake coiling tighter and tighter around my throat until I can barely drag a breath into my burning lungs.
I stare down at him. The Devil of Chicago. The untouchable Don of the Thorne Syndicate.
He is lying entirely motionless on the floor, his massive, battered frame completely slack. The pale, glacial gray of his eyes is hidden beneath heavy, bruised eyelids. The rise and fallof his chest is terribly shallow, a jagged, rattling rhythm that sounds like grinding glass. The pool of blood beneath his torn shoulder has stopped expanding, thanks to the chemical gauze I ruthlessly shoved into his torn flesh, but the damage is already catastrophic. His skin, usually radiating an overwhelming, furnace-like heat, is rapidly turning a translucent, terrifying shade of ashen gray.
He is dying.
And he is the architect of my complete and utter destruction.
I push myself backward, my boots scraping against the rough, splintered wood. I scramble away from his unconscious body, crab-walking until my spine hits the opposite wall of the cabin. The impact sends a jolt of pain up my back, but I welcome it. I welcome anything that grounds me in this horrific, twisted reality.
My chest heaves violently. A ragged, fractured sob tears its way up my throat, but I clamp my bloody hands over my mouth to completely smother the sound.
He knew.The realization is battery acid in my veins, burning away the last, fragile illusions I had desperately clung to. I thought I was a casualty of war. I thought my father’s desperate greed had accidentally thrown me into the path of a monster. But there were no accidents. There was no desperate, last-minute deal.
Thayer orchestrated every single agonizing second of my current existence.
He watched me for six years. He cataloged my traumas, my fears, my desperate need to disappear into the background. And then, he deliberately, methodically removed every single exit door. He allowed my father to betray the Syndicate.He gave Arthur Vance the rope, knowing perfectly well the greedy coward would hang himself with it. Thayer invited the Commission’s assassins into our lives, sacrificing his own warehouses, his own men, and almost his own life, just to manufacture the absolute, undeniable necessity of locking me in a subterranean vault where no one else could ever touch me.
He didn't just buy me. He engineered my isolation so flawlessly that I actually begged him not to leave me alone in the dark.
I pull my knees tightly to my chest, wrapping my arms around my legs, rocking back and forth in the freezing, drafty cabin.
I should run.
The thought materializes in the dark, frantic chaos of my brain, sharp and blindingly clear.
The door is less than ten feet away. Thayer is unconscious. He cannot stop me. The spare 9mm Glock he brought from the bunker is sitting in the heavy, waterproof tactical duffel bag on the floor. I could take the gun. I could take the flashlight. I could walk out into the freezing, torrential rain and disappear into the dense, endless expanse of the northern woods.
If I run now, I am free. I am no longer a pawn. I am no longer a captive. I can leave the monster to bleed out on the floor of a forgotten cabin, the absolute, poetic justice for the psychological warfare he waged against me.
I slowly lower my hands from my mouth. I force my shaking legs to unbend. I push myself up from the wall, my muscles screaming in protest, completely exhausted from the adrenaline crash and the brutal trek through the mud.
I take a step toward the heavy wooden door.
The wind howls violently outside, rattling the rusted hinges, a terrifying reminder of the frozen hell waiting beyond the threshold. But the cold doesn't scare me. The darkness doesn't scare me.
I take another step. I am standing directly over the duffel bag. I look down. The matte-black grip of the spare Glock is visible beneath a fold of waterproof canvas.
I kneel. I reach out, my bloody, trembling fingers brushing against the cold steel of the weapon.
“You protected yourself. I have never been more fucking proud of anything in my entire life.”
His words, spoken just moments after he waded through a literal warzone to get back to me, echo in the silence of the cabin.
