“Don’t lie,” he warned. “I told you a truth. A truth that leaves me more vulnerable than anything that whack job of a doctor could do to me.”
“Okay.”
She inhaled deeply and released a shaky exhale before rolling up the thin white sleeves of the cotton shirt under her scrubs.
“I have a lot of scars, Brooks, and they all have a story to tell.”
She held out her arms with the palms facing up to reveal matching ragged scars across either wrist.
“Christ, Lytta,” he breathed.
But she wasn’t done yet.
Lytta lifted her scrub top to an array of scars of all different sizes and shapes. Some were short and thin like a healed stab wound while others resembled sloppy cuts or death-dealing slices.
“I’ve been running all of my life.”
She turned her back to him and lifted the scrub top further to reveal a pattern of small, horizontal scars tucked between each rib. They were meticulously placed. Methodical, even.
“I’m not good, Brooks.”
Lytta turned back to face him with guilt and shame written over her features.
“I’ve done terrible things. My darkness would take over and I made people suffer. I toyed with them for my own entertainment and slaughtered them in bloodlust. When I came down from the high, I looked upon the destruction I wrought and nearly drowned in my misery every time. I tried to end it. Gods, Brooks, I tried a million times to rid the world of my taint, but every time I thought I succeeded…hecame to save me.”
Brooks was speechless. His chest ached at the rawness in her voice.
“He would pull me back from the edge of oblivion and the first thing I saw every time were those amber eyes full of hate and menace.”
“It’s time for you to repent and pay your penance. I gave you one mission– to carry my darkness and keep it hidden. Instead you wreak havoc. You’re a fucking blight on this world and I’m tired of cleaning up the wreckage you leave behind.”
“Just let me die,” she screamed. Begged. “Please!”
“Whores like you don’t get to die.”
Brooks stared at her with absolute horror churning his stomach
“He would make me live, and then he would make me pay. This,” she pointed to the scar on her neck, “was just the first of many. He did this to me when I was a little girl. An innocent who knew nothing of the world or the evil it held.”
Tears fell relentlessly, but her face stayed stoic.
“The little girl died that day clutching her throat, and from her ashes rose a phoenix of death and fury.”
Xiawokethenextmorning riding an absolute high.
The taste of him was still on her lips and the words he spoke played on repeat through her mind.
His presence had been unyielding and dominant in that darkened room, and yet the way he let her take control… It sparked a craving so desperate in her blood that she shivered.
Xia had never known a man so willing to relinquish control when so much power lay vibrating beneath his skin.
Flashes of blue eyes and inky fingers crossed her mind. Curiosity sparked in the moment, but she was too enraptured with the man before her to ask any questions. Those eyes, so navy and depthless to start, burned a blazing cerulean so bright they nearly lit up the dark.
The blackness covering his hands and bleeding up his arms was something Xia had never seen before and, the more it rose, the more suffocating his power became.
She didn’t know who or what Brooks was, and she wasn’t sure he did either. If he knew that kind of power radiated beneath his skin, surely he wouldn’t be tethered to that god awful place she found him in.
He was not human, and yet assumed he lived among them. Or maybe he just never questioned it?
