Pulling out the device from my pocket, I checked the name, and the corner of my lips lifted, the flame in my chest cackling.
You just wait, my pretty, little witch. I promise your turn is coming.
“H-hey,” she stuttered, her voice a breathless tremor. I would give anything to see the frustration in her face, the fear in those beady eyes.
“Well, hello.” My voice was like velvet-dipped poison, thick with something rotten as my bloodied hand pressed the phone to my ear, while the other wrenched my dagger from her little boyfriend’s thigh.
The blade exited with a sickening, wet sound, and he fucking whimpered. I wondered if it was the same sound he made when she was riding his little cock.
My jaw tightened at the thought, a flash of red flickering in my vision.
“W-where are you?” she fucking demanded, like she had the right to know my whereabout, like she owned me, and it wasn’t the other way round.
“Good question.” I dragged a chair closer and sank into it, my gloved fingers flexing around the dagger’s handle. Blood slithered down the steel, fat crimson drops hitting the floor in rhythmic succession. “Where are we all? And where are we heading anyway?”
I could almost feel it, taste it, the anger coiling tight in her chest. Yes, Beth Fraser, give me your rage. I would feast on it.
“Zaghan,” she gritted, my name perfect on her tongue. “Where are you? No, what are you doing?”
“Currently or…?” I let the word stretch, teasing.
I pulled out the pack of Marlboro in my pocket, retrieving a cigarette and gently slotting it between my lips.
“Currently.” Her voice sharpened, a bite of anger leaking through. I noticed her tone. Too snarky. Too fucking demanding.
She would pay for that.
“I’m,” I exhaled a slow, deliberate breath, eyes drinking in the sight of McRae who had become so pale, shivering, cradling the mangled leg like a kid clutching a broken toy. “I’m home, watching a murder documentary.”
“A murder documentary?” She didn’t entirely believe me, judging from the way her voice dropped a pitch.
“Mhmm.” I dug around my pocket for my zippo, pulling it out when I finally found it, and lighting the end of my cigarette. Sinking back into the wooden chair, I crossed my legs, then tooka long and satisfying drag, letting the burn in my lungs last for far too long.
“I know you are angry, okay?” She forced persuasion into her voice, though, it wobbled like a leaf in a storm. “I know, but please, don’t hurt Rowan.”
I stilled, my jaw tightening. My fingers flexed, something dark and festering crawling up my throat, thick and suffocating.
“Can you hear me?” she pressed when silence seemed to stretch too long.
My grip on the phone tightened, the bitter taste of jealousy seeping into my mouth like bile, while my breath turned low and heavy, each one an ember feeding a growing inferno.
“Yes.”
“It’s not him,” she persuaded. “It’s me. If you want to punish anyone, it’s me. Please just leave Rowan alone. Don’t do anything to him. Don’t hurt him, please don’t, I’m begging you, Zaghan, please.”
A sound bubbled in my chest. A grotesque hybrid of laughter and rage. My free hand trembled, a foreign sensation, as my fury thickened into something unbearable.
How dare she? How dare she beg for mercy on his behalf? How dare she mention his name…repeatedly?
The fire in my chest ignited into an unholy blaze, my vision blurring, tinting red, black, then red again. First she didn’t let me exist in her mind. She wrote everyone’s name but mine. And then she went ahead and fucked another man. Let him touch her, let him whisper her name, when she belonged to only me.
This was her fault. She let another man’s hand wander where only mine should touch. She let another taste what only belonged to me.
Beth Fraser was mine, no one else’s. Mine. But another man touched her. And she dared to command me? Tell me what to do? How to handle my rage?
My fingers dug into the dagger’s hilt until my knuckles turned white. My lips curled, vision deadened by something bottomless and bleak.
“Zaghan,” she whispered, her voice cracking under the weight of my silence. I could hear the tears clinging to her throat, and I could almost taste her despair. I wanted to swallow it all, her tears, her terror, the pain I would eventually inflict on her when I was done here.
