Sanford sighs. “Please keep your voice down.”
But Karia doesn’t. “There is blood on a knife in my bag that got thrown at us in a creepy forest behind this serial killer horror hotel by a person wearing a plague mask, my entire body is sore from throwing myself against a locked dungeon door, and now you’re telling me our destination of rest tonightscaresyou?”
I frown at the part about her soreness. It physicallyhurt,hearing her throw herself against the wall that separated us down in the basement.
But Sanford only blows out a breath and mutters quietly, “I didn’t say it scared me.”
I can practically hear Karia rolling her eyes beside me. But after a moment, she decides to ignore Sanford and asks, her voice low, “Who was wearing the mask, Sullen?”
Chapter 16
Sullen
The words on my chest are hot. Searing, baking,hellishwounds. They itch, too, but Stein has bound my hands behind my back and so I can only arch my chest into my mattress and attempt to get some relief.
Pathetic.I am pathetic.
It’s true, what he carved into my flesh. Right now, like this, in the dark of my bedroom with curtains drawn while Karia loops Ritual Drive with her friends and I essentially hump my own bed to stop the insanity of prickling irritation along my flesh, Iampathetic.
Tears burn behind my eyes and I am grateful for the night. For the hoodie I’m wearing, the black sweats, the new moon—no tendrils of light to filter inside my room and illuminate my shame.
I collapse face first into my pillow, inhaling the scent of my own sweat as it pricks across my scalp, down my spine. It is always so frigid here, and part of me is trembling from the constant cold, but another is warm, flaring to life with heat.
Nausea swirls in my belly, the itching along my skin worsens from rest, and I want to scream at the top of my lungs.
I have been so close to infection so very many times under Stein’s desire to carve through my flesh. I have watched wounds turn to the start of rot, full of cloudy pus and heat and the decaying, brilliant redness of decomposition.
Each time, Stein has seen, too soon.
Every occasion, he has called in a proper doctor or a nurse, someone to heal me with antibiotics.
I wonder, though, if I could hide just this once.
Cover up the stench and sting and sourness until the infection has infiltrated my bloodstream and taken me so very far from here.
For a moment, I float up toward the ceiling, if only in my mind, even as my face is buried in my pillow.
A brief reprieve, I exist in nothingness. Able to tune out the sensations of my body, along my chest. The words Stein has permanently marked me with, adding to his unintentional insurance that I will never let anyone see me this way.
Cerulean eyes flash in my reverie.
Blonde hair.
Pink lips, tugging upward into a smile as she reaches out a manicured hand to me.
Dressed in black, pink ribbons in her hair.
“Sullen?” she asks quietly, but her voice is firm as I stare at her, unmoving, unreaching. “Won’t you come with me?”
Anger fills my chest cavity, ballooning into darkness, blotting me out along with it.
I can’t,I want to scream.You are not mine.
She cocks her head, light hair snaking over one shoulder as she continues reaching out for me. “I could be,” she lies.
But I am broken.I don’t say it out loud, but it is as if she knows my thoughts, even when I can’t speak.
A frown mars her brow, wrinkling her perfect skin. “And so what?” she questions, like she is truly confused. “Without you, I am not whole myself.”
