“I want you alive. Since you came here, I have been doing my best to keep you that way. From the tour of the grounds, to the bite on your neck, I have been looking out for you. So tell me, little sparrow—if I truly am the heartless hunter you think I am, why am I the one who’s caught?”
This was more than she could process in her current state. On some level, she understood that he had just said something incredibly important, but all she could think about was her sister’s body being consumed by flames before an audience of skinless deer corpses. She collapsed against him and cried.
“I don’t want tobea sparrow!”
Cal wrapped his arms around her and let her cry.Monster, she thought, feeling desolate. How could someone so cold-hearted be so fucking warm?
“I don’t want to die,” she whispered against his shirt.
“I don’t want you to, either,” he responded.
She forced herself to release him, despising herself for her weakness even as she already found herself yearning to give in to it again. “I want to leave.”
“I did warn you,” he muttered. “But yes. Let’s get out of here—or my father might punish me for yet another transgression.”
The boards creaked beneath their feet as they ascended the staircase. It felt as if her lungs were being cleared of some terrible miasma; she could breathe better, the closer they got to the light. Away from the dead. Away from the remains of her—
She hastily pushed that thought away from her, to the dark recesses of her subconscious, where it would fester and bubble up later, in dreams.
“What transgressions?”
Cal made a bitter noise. “When I was seventeen, I fell for a deer.”
“A girl, you mean?” Her voice was sharp.
“Yes, a girl. A human girl. Father found out and put a stop to it. He had Ben kill her in front of me. To show me how little value they held for us. And I pretended to feel nothing but I think they both knew that for the lie it was.”
“They . . . killed her? In front of you?”
“It’s the betrayal in her eyes that I really remember. You looked at me that way, too. When I was inside of you. When you realized that it was me who held you down in that mine.”
(You poor fucking thing. You beautiful little misery.)
There was just enough light filtering down through the darkness to illuminate half of his face: that Roman nose and chiseled jaw, and the single glint of a copper-studded eye when it flicked towards her beneath one single, slashing brow the color of ink.
“Can a monster feel regret?”
It was as if he’d shot her in the heart.No, she wanted to tell him.That’s why they’re monsters. You haven’t got a heart, and that’s what makes it safe to hate you.
That’s what makes it bearable not to give in to what you ask.
She opened her mouth—to say what, she wasn’t sure. Part of her sought to wound, even as the other half craved reassurance. Because the same things that made him safe to hate also made him dangerous to be around. But her next words were drowned out when the cellar door abruptly closed with a loud, reverberating bang.
And then bolted.
C H A P T E R
S E V E N T E E N
? eat you up ?
Nothing living belongs in darkness likes this.
Nadine could feel a scream building up to her lips when Cal grabbed her arm and yanked her close to him, which was when she realized with a vertiginous frisson of awareness just how dangerously close she had swayed to the edge of the top step.
“Don’t scream,” he said. “Go get one of those wine bottles I showed you earlier and bring it here.”
“B-but—”
