My blood boiled as old rage surged up from the grave I’d tried to keep sealed.
“He was with her. Behind my back. Said nothing. Lied to my face. And then one day… I found them.”
I laughed—empty, a sound born from the edge of madness.
“I lost control. God, how I loved her. But it didn’t matter. In the end,everythingwas ripped away.”
Silence crashed down like a tombstone.
My words hung between us, heavy as the dead.
And then, from that silence, my voice emerged again—hollow and haunted, shaped by the shadows of the past I could never outrun.
“When I saw Mathias with her,” I said. “I lost control. I shredded every rule he ever imposed. I let the monster inside me rise without restraint.”
I stared through the dim light, vision distant, consumed.
“So, he punished me. Locked me in a cell filled with poisons—vapors that ate at my mind, twisted my thoughts into screaming knots. Madness clung to me like a second skin. And she…” I swallowed hard, my throat burning. “She never came. She never visited. Never comforted me.”
My voice wavered, then flattened.
“Mathias laughed. Called me weak. Mocked me for losing control over something as fragile aslove. Then he said…”
I paused, barely able to force the words out.
“‘I can’t share her either,’ he told me. ‘Because I love her. I must kill her… so we both can be free from her.’”
I closed my eyes.
“I didn’t think he meant it.”
The air thickened, the silence suffocating.
“I was wrong.”
My voice went hollow. Dead.
“He killed her. Took her from me in the most vicious way imaginable. He drove a dagger into her throat… wiped the blade clean with his fingers… then licked the blood from them—while staring me straight in the eye.”
A bitter chuckle escaped me. It was a sound void of humor—just pain, hollowed out and dressed in mockery.
“He didn’t kill her for love. He killed her tocontrolme. To prove he owned me. That I would never be free.”
I glanced at Alina, but I barely saw her. Ghosts clouded my vision.
“I got away with things he never knew,” I added quietly. “But not her. I couldn’t save her.”
Alina’s anguished moans filled the room, but they were distant. Echoes beneath the storm inside me.
Then I saw her expression change—pain warping her features. Through trembling lips, she asked the one question I hoped she wouldn’t?—
“Do you still love her?”
The sting of those words burned more than any poison Mathias ever made.
“How could I forget the woman who gave me everything I’d been denied?” I rasped. “She gave me love. A home. A sense of belonging. I shared everything with her—body, heart, and soul.”
My throat tightened. My chest ached.
