I pressed myself closer to the inside of my eyes and watched Nicholas work, his brow furrowed in concentration, the shears in his coat pocket glinting faintly in the moonlight.
Your flower is right there,I said, measuring each word with the gentle patience of someone negotiating with something that could hear every inflection.I will make sure you have it. But you have to let me out. I need to tell him how to graft it.
A silence moved through me that had texture and consideration in it.
I can tell him,the vine snapped.Be quiet.
Nicholas pulled the shears from his pocket, the metal catching the cold light. My body lurched forward before I could brace for the motion, one hand shooting out.
"Do not cut her!"
His hands stilled. He turned to look at me over his shoulder, and I watched his face from behind my eyes, searching his expression for any sign that he understood what was looking back at him, whether he could see me in here—whether the wrong arrangement of my features had told him something my companion had not intended to reveal.
"I have to cut away some of the vine," he said, his voice measured, a single thread of tension wound through the steadiness of it. "The roots are tangled."
I stared into his amber eyes and my heart broke for the second time.
My companion moved my feet, gesturing toward the vine with a brisk impatience that was nothing like me. "Fine. Do as you must. But do not cut my flower."
The first cut of the shears sent a shock through my nervous system that arrived before I understood what it was. Sharp pain stabbed behind my ribs, gripping my nerves as though the vine inside my throat felt the blade parting the roots in the cemetery soil. My companion sucked a breath in through my teeth and drove my nails into my palms, and I felt the bite of them from somewhere muffled and distant.
Anger flooded through me, and I recognized it as the vine's and tried to hold myself separate from it, desperate to keep the distinction clear between my emotions and the thing currently controlling them.
Violent images pressed against my mind—the shears turned, the blades finding softer material, Nicholas’s skin opened to see what lay beneath, his organs carved apart.
I recoiled from the images with everything I had.
You feel it,I said, watching him make the second cut, the answering pain lancing through me again.Every cut he makes on the vine out there, you feel it in here. You are doing to that vine what I did to you—separating it from its companion.
The vine stretched my fingers until the skin pulled taut across my knuckles, then let the cruel smile resurface.Wrong, as always.The laughter that moved through my chest belonged to nothing I would claim.I do not care what happens to it. I only want my flower.
He made another cut. The pain came again, and with it the rage—a tide of it, rising through me with a force I had to press back against with every resource I possessed, shoving it down from behind the glass while the vine strained at every seam.
I had the urge to scream and did, inside my own skull, where the sound went nowhere.
Stop,I pleaded, unable to look away from the images the vine kept pressing at me—Nicholas's chest opened, each rib separated, his heart pulled free and still beating to show him what it was like to have the one thing sustaining you taken away by careless hands.Do not hurt him. It is me you should be angry with—I am the one who separated you from the flower, not him. He did not know.
The vine pressed its own grief somewhere inside me too deep for me to reach, and said nothing.
Nicholas cursed quietly, bringing his finger to his mouth, a small trickle of blood running down his hand from where the thorns had caught him. From behind the glass, I pressed forward until my forehead was nearly against the inside of my own pupils, watching the blood on his hand with a helpless desperation that had no outlet.
He made the final cut.
The flower slipped free.
My companion shuffled my feet forward, barely contained, sending a cascade of images through me that I refused to follow to their conclusions—skin peeled back, the flower's roots pressed into the wet landscape of my exposed tissue, burrowing down through blood and muscle until its tendrils found the vine inside me and the two of them completed each other in an ecstasy I wanted no part of imagining.
Nicholas stood and turned, and the vine tunneled my vision to the flower in his hand, moving my body forward with a speed I did not naturally possess. My hand swiped outward, and he stepped back, holding it just out of reach with the ease of someone who had anticipated the movement.
"You will have your flower," he said. "But I will be the one to perform the surgery."
My jaw clenched. My eyes narrowed until Nicholas was a blur at the center of my vision. "Give it to me."
"Mellie—"
"Your precious wife is not here." The words came from my mouth with a flatness that made my stomach turn.
His brows drew together. He searched my face, looking for something specific, something beneath the surface presentation. "Then where is she?"
