With the cruel pressure building against my abdomen, I realized I had no choice. My jaw quivered as my teeth sank down into the organ.
A squelch echoed and a foul, metallic taste hit my tongue.
I gagged again, tears pouring down my cheeks. My throat tightened, but before I could swallow it, a violent shudder wracked my body. The pressure coiled in my chest and churned in my gut until I doubled over the bed, retching.
The sound echoed far louder than it should have. Wet, broken, and animalistic. The piece of the heart hit the floor with a dull, obscene sound, sloppy, slimy, and unholy.
A series of coughs echoed right after. And then nothing for a moment stretched too long. Nothing but my dry-heaving and pounding heart echoed in the room.
I heard nothing from Zaghan. No breaths. No movements. No voice. Just his silence that locked my spine in place, the fear withholding me from looking at him, and seeing the disappointment in his stormy eyes.
Then all of a sudden, I heard it. The sound low in his throat. It wasn’t a laugh, not a sob. His breathing turned uneven, sharp pulls of air like his lungs were scraping for oxygen. The calm and calculated thing earlier, like he had control over his emotion, fractured completely.
I felt it when he rose to his feet, his shadow suffocating, pressing in as he paced about in the room. And the more he covered the length of the room in repeated strides, the louder and sharper his breaths.
My gaze remained cast down, too afraid to look up, too terrified to see the way the frown on his face had twisted into an expression too grotesque to withstand, too monstrous to not give me a heart attack.
“Are you–” he was saying but stopped, his voice breaking. Then he tried again. “Are you fucking serious right now?”
Afraid of what he would do next, I shifted on the bed, pushing myself into a corner, willing my body to vanish into the old wooden headboard.
A sharp gasp broke out of my lips when something suddenly slammed into the wall far away from me, glass shattering and raining onto the floor like glass. I didn’t know what it was, the light wasn’t bright enough to see what was left of it.
Another object whizzed through the air, hitting the wooden door so hard it rebounded and cracked. My body shook as fear enveloped me, chest tight while my broken sobs echoed amidst the chaos around me.
He paced like a caged thing, hands buried in his white hair, fingers fisting, pulling.
“You couldn’t–” he laughed, a loud, wild thing that didn’t sound like it should belong to a human being. “You couldn’t even swallow it? You could–” His voice broke again, long fingers dragging across his face, eyes blown wide, shining with something feral. And his breath was fast, too fast.
He took long and wild strides toward the bed, and I whimpered, pressing my body further against the creaking wood.
“I carved him open for you.” His voice rose, sharp and accusing as he stood by the side of the bed, gaze lethal. “I ripped out his fucking heart with my bare hands because he touched you. I set him on fire and watched him burn. Brought his precious, little heart for you, and you chose to be an ingrate?”
Fire. It wasn’t enough that he killed him. He set him on fire. A fat roll of tears tracked down my cheeks, hot, burning.
“You let him inside you,” he snarled. “So why can’t you fucking keep his heart inside your stomach?”
My hand tightened around my body, like if I did it religiously, hold myself tight enough, I would not fall apart. I would not break.
“You made me do this,” he accused, his voice hoarse as he paced again, fingers twitching, breath ragged and sharp. “This happened all because of you. I just wanted–” He took a sharp breath in, almost dry-heaving. “I just wanted to fix it. I just wanted to erase it all. Erase him, so you wouldn’t choose him over me.”
He stopped moving and the room went quiet again. It was all too fast, too sudden, it made me even more terrified.
Then he walked around the bed, toward the side I had moved to. My heart leapt to my throat, expecting him to do something…violent. Maybe wrap his fingers around my throat and end me for good.
But he knelt before me instead, the action slow and deliberate. His hands trembled as he reached out, brushing my hair back with a tenderness that made my stomach twist.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he murmured, his voice soft, almost soothing. “I shouldn’t have gotten angry like that. You’re too overwhelmed. And I–I pushed too hard.”
My throat closed as his thumb traced my jaw. “We just did it wrong.”
I shook my head. “No, please, no.”
“We need to fix it,” he noted, voice certain.
His eyes searched my face, not for consent, but for compliance, for surrender.
“I’ll be calmer, baby,” he promised. “I’ll be gentle this time. I’ll show you how to make it right, okay?”
