It’s a while longer before we leave, heading out into the darkness again.
And all my mind can settle on is—
Not what happened with Samick in the bathroom.
Not how he homed in on me like a whole other kind of prey.
Not how he stayed with me on that bed, until I plummeted into a deeper sleep than any I’ve had since the blackout started.
Not even all the ways he confessed parts of himself to me while he bathed.
I can only think of how close we are getting to the unit. Each step takes us closer to the other fae, and I hate that.
I don’t want to go back.
I wish Samick would finish the last two weeks of the journey without the unit.
I dread the thought of the camp. The kuris. The sloppy food. The constant walking with no breaks.
And the silence.
I don’t speak at camp. I don’t speak much around the others. I doubt I’m allowed to, really.
It’s strange that, with the unit, the silence feels oppressive. But now, as we walk through the blackout, it feels instinctual—just as it did when I was with Bee, Ramona and Emily, moving through the dark.
That’s a memory I can’t fight off.
Maybe I have too many in the vault, or cracks are fracturing the steel walls in my mind, but I’m suddenly swept back to the pavement, my legs tangled in a toppled bike, watching Ramona’s torchlight wisp over the fae invading our world.
I remember him.
Proud and bleeding on his steed—the steed I had no idea that he would kill later. Just like I never could have guessed that he would be responsible for my life months later, that his hand,his cock, would be—
I shut my eyes, tight.
Too much goes to war within me, and I force it all behind the steel door.
The darkness around me is so thick, so pure that I can’t tell if Samick notices—if he considers me, the way he usually does when my mind goes to battle with itself.
But then, he’s hardly acknowledged me since I came downstairs.
The few times he has looked at me since, it’s come without words, and it’s cold.
Good.
It’s better this way.
I hope he suffers the same self-loathing as I do.
I hope it turns on him, the way he was disgusted by humans, the way the idea of lusting after us produced a rage in him like cracks skittering over ice.
Now, he lusts after me.
And it beats him.
Twice, now.
I hope it’s killing him inside, deep in his proud self.
