“I’m here now,” I choke out, my own tears hot against her shoulder. “I’m here, and I’m never leaving again. I’ll be the monster that keeps the rest away. I’ll be your cage if I have to, Wendy, but I’m never letting the door open again.”
She doesn’t pull away. She just sags against me, a broken bird in a predator’s grip, as the first light of agrey, unforgiving dawn begins to creep through the cracks in the shutters.
She stays slumped against me, her weight a ghost of what it used to be. The racking sobs have slowed to a wet, jagged tremor, but the air between us is still thick with the things she hasn’t said yet. I try to pull her closer, but she pushes back—not with strength, but with a cold, hard finality that stops my heart.
“Don’t,” she whispers. She pulls back just far enough to look me in the eye, and the look there isn’t love. It’s a autopsy. “You didn’t save me, Peter. You didn’t walk in there and pull the girl you knew out of the fire. You just waited until the fire burned everything away and then picked up the ash.”
“Wendy, I?—”
“No! Let me say it.” Her voice is a sharp, serrated edge. “You took me. You reclaimed me like I was a piece of property that got stolen and dented. But you weren’t there when I was dying. You weren’t there when I had to become something else just to keep my heart beating. You’re holding a body, Peter. The girl who used to look at you and see the sun? She died in that booth. She died every time the needle hit. You didn’t save her. You were just the man who showed up to the funeral with a gun.”
Every word is a bullet. I sit there and take them, letting them tear through the muscle and bone of the man I thought I was. I want to argue. I want to tell her about the bodies I piled up to reach her, but I look at the hollows under her eyes and the track marks on her arms, and I realise she’s right. I was a saviour who arrived at a crime scene after the murder was already done.
But then, her hand—clumsy and shaking—reaches up. She cups my jaw, her thumb brushing the dried blood on my cheek. Her expression shifts, the hatred melting into something so tender, so desperately agonising, it’s worse than the anger.
“And God help me,” she chokes out, her voice breaking into a thousand pieces. “I love you so much it makes me want to rip my own heart out. I love you more than the drug. I love you more than the air. Even when I was screaming for you to be dead, I was only saying it because the thought of you breathing while I was being ruined was the only thing that hurt worse than the needle.”
She leans her forehead against mine, her breath warm and smelling of copper and sorrow.
“I love you in a way that’s broken, Peter. I love you with the part of me that’s black and rotted and addicted. I love you because you’re the only person who’s ever seen me this ugly and didn’t turn away. You’re my heaven, and you’re my haunting. You’re the only thing I have left in a world that took everything else.”
She looks at me, really looks at me, for one final, shimmering second. It’s a look that rips me in two, shattering the last of my resolve, leaving me raw and bleeding in the dark.
“Don’t let me go,” she whispers, her voice fading, her eyelids fluttering as the sheer exhaustion of the trauma finally wins. “Even if I tell you to. Even if I scream. Don’t… don’t let me be alone again.”
Her body goes suddenly, terrifyingly limp. The tension drains out of her all at once, and she collapses into my arms, her head lulling against my chest.Her breathing slows, turning deep and rhythmic—the first real sleep she’s had since the world ended.
I sit there in the grey light of the safe house, holding her, listening to the rain and the sound of her fragile heart. I’m a murderer, a thief, and a monster. And I am the only thing she has left to love.
Wendy
The silence is the first thing I notice. It isn’t the heavy, drug-thickened silence of Felix’s house, and it isn’t the screaming white noise of the withdrawal. It’s just… quiet.
I open my eyes to a room bathed in the weak, grey light of dawn. My skin feels hyper-sensitive, like the nerve endings are finally firing without a chemical filter. I’m wearing one of Peter’s shirts—the cotton is rough and smells of cedar and gun oil—and beneath it, my body feels like a live wire.
The comedown has left me hollow, but in that emptiness, a different kind of ache has started to bloom. It’s a desperate, pulsing heat between my thighs that I haven’t felt in a lifetime. For months, I was numb. For months, I was a doll. Now, the blood is flowing again, and it’s angry.
I’m soaking. The friction of the heavy silk sheets against my skin makes me hiss, a sharp intake of breath that catches in my bruised throat.
I slide my hand down, my fingers trembling as they slip beneath the hem of the shirt. I find myself—swollen, wet, and vibrating with a need so intense it feels like another kind of seizure. I start to touch myself, my movements slow and unpracticed, trying to remember what it feels like to be a woman who owns her own pleasure.
“Please,” I whisper to the empty room, my eyes fluttering shut.
I want to feel something that isn’t pain. I want to feel something that isn’t him—Felix’s ghost—or the needle. I arch my back, my fingers working harder, pushing into the soft, slick heat of myself. I spread my legs wider, the cool air hitting my damp skin, and the contrast makes me whimper.
I’m trying to build it, trying to climb that familiar hill, but the pleasure feels just out of reach, teased by the shadows of the trauma. I’m frustrated, my breath coming in jagged, desperate hitches. I need to scream. I need to break. I bite down on my own knuckle, the skin breaking under my teeth as I try to muffle the sound of my own unraveling.
The pleasure spikes, a sharp, white-hot needle of sensation that makes my hips buck off the mattress. I’m so close. I’m right on the edge of the abyss?—
The door clicks open.
The light from the hallway cuts a sharp, yellow rectangle across the bed, and I freeze. My hand is still buried between my legs, my shirt pushed up to my waist, my breath hitching in a half-finished moan.
Peter stands in the doorway. He’s dressed in black, looking like the reaper I prayed for, his eyes dark and shadowed. He sees everything. He sees the way my legs are splayed, the way I’m trembling, the way I’m desperatelytrying to reclaim a body that was stolen from me.
I don’t cover myself. I can’t. I just stare at him, my chest heaving, the scream I was trying to hide dying in my throat.
“Wendy,” he says, his voice a low, rough growl that vibrates in my very marrow.
