I moved somewhere further inside myself, somewhere deeper and darker and quieter, where I could not see through my own face, unable to bear the pain of looking at Nicholas and not being able to speak to him or touch him. It was a terrible mercy, like closing one's eyes before the blowlands—it did not stop the pain, but at least I would not have to anticipate it coming.
I sat inside myself in the dark, thinking about our life together, while my companion tapped my toes with restless impatience as Nicholas collected Hawthorne's flower.
He knew I was in here.
He was going to get me out.
I held onto that hope, and I waited in the dark for him tobring me home.
Chapter 25
The secondary greenhouse was transformed as I watched Nicholas and Agnes move about the space, prepping for the surgery.
Tables had been cleared and repositioned, creating a central work area illuminated by multiple oil lamps hung from hooks in the ceiling beams. The warm light cast everything in sharpness, driving away the shadows that usually gathered in the corners and turning every surface amber and gold. Clean white sheets covered the largest table, the fabric pulled smooth and tucked at the edges—a bed prepared for someone who would not be climbing into it voluntarily.
Beside it, smaller surfaces held surgical instruments arranged in glinting silver rows, each one catching the light and making my stomach turn within my gilded prison.
The greenhouse looked more like an operating theater, though the plants surrounding us on all sides gave it an unsettling quality, their leaves pressing toward the lamplight with arboreal hunger, their roots visible through the glass containers that lined the shelves, pale and reaching andentirely too close for my own comfort considering what I now knew about their possible ambitions.
My companion had installed us in the corner with my arms crossed over my chest, wearing my body like a coat it had borrowed with no intention of returning. Its restlessness built with the slow insistence of pressure inside a kettle ready to scream—accumulating and spreading with each passing minute.
"How much longer?" I heard myself say, my voice colored with barely contained annoyance I would never have directed at either of them.
Agnes looked up from the lamp she was adjusting, her gaze sliding sideways to Nicholas before she returned to her work without answering. Her fingers trembled slightly as she smoothed a wrinkle from the sheet.
She knew.
Whether Nicholas had told her everything or she had simply understood something was wrong about me, I could not be sure. But the wariness in her movements when they brought her near me, the extra distance she placed between herself and my hands, how she angled her body away without appearing to, told me he had said enough for her to be afraid of me.
"Soon," Nicholas said, without turning from the instrument tray he was arranging.
My companion exhaled through my nose and fixed my gaze on Agnes, watching her work. I felt it happening before the images arrived—the slow gathering of obscenehunger, the restless energy seeking an outlet and selecting her the way a predator selects from a herd.
The image came all at once, cold and cruel, pressed into my vision—Agnes's skull split cleanly along the crown, the bone folding back to reveal gray matter glistening wet in the lamplight, soft and yielding. How the bone would crack beneath my hands. How I could clear the cavity with my fingers and press dark cemetery soil into the hollowed space. I could push seeds down into the warm wet matter and watch the luminous flowers root there, growing through the gaps where her thoughts had been, beautiful and inevitable.
Copper and earth flooded my tongue and I recoiled from it, forcing myself back from my eyes until her face was distant and blurred.
Stop,I screamed, from somewhere deep inside myself.Please stop.
The vine laughed, the sound reverberating through my skull, contained entirely within me.
Hawthorne appeared in the doorway, his hand closed around something I could not make out from where my body was positioned.
My companion's attention snapped toward him, every other thought abandoned in an instant. My eyes moved without my direction, tracing his path from the threshold to the center of the room, and then beyond him, to the two flower containers sitting on the far workbench.
Panic filled my throat, my pulse quickening, my breathing coming in small, short pants as my gaze tracked his movement toward them.
The white blooms seemed to glow brighter in my vision, their pulse brightening.
The vine inside me responded to their proximity with a yearning so enormous it briefly crowded out every other sensation.
Hawthorne moved closer, his own vine reaching for the flowers, urging him to touch them. My heart ached for him with a tenderness that had no place to go, but the vine inside me did not share the sentiment.
Every muscle in my body tensed as his free hand slowly moved toward the flower, his fingers barely grazing one of the petals before the rage exploded behind my ribs. My vision shifted, a red wash bleeding across everything until the world looked like something burning from the inside. My feet began to move, my body stalking across the greenhouse before I had registered the impulse.
No,I screamed, slamming myself against the glass.No, he is not going to take it, he does not know what it is. He is only looking. Please!
The vine inside me repeated its single thought over and over inside my mind, drowning me out entirely.
