Page 4 of Wretched Thorns

“Why must you be unpleasant?” Marcus’s lip curled. “Forget him. There’s just you and me. As it should be.”

I warred with terror as I fought for some sense of control.

“Let me go.” I hated how small my voice sounded. How scared. “Whatever you want, you can have it. Just let me go.”

Marcus laughed. It was a gentle sound, almost tender, and it made my skin crawl.

“Oh, sweetheart.” He sat on the edge of the bed, close enough that I could smell him. That same cologne he’d always worn, sandalwood and musk, but beneath it now I caught something else. Something organic and wrong. Like flowers rotting in a vase. “I already have what I want. I’ve always had it. You just didn’t know.”

He raised his hand. A small motion at his hip. His fingers spread, closed, tilted in a way I couldn’t have copied, and his lips moved around words I didn’t catch.

White rose petals fell across the bed.

They came from above me, soft and slow, dropping onto the coverlet until the dark fabric disappeared under them. The smell reached me a beat after. That overripe, cultivated sweetness I had known for nearly half of my adult life.

The same scent on my pillow in Atlanta the morning I woke to a white rose I had not put there.

The same scent on my windowsill at the rental house in Magnolia Creek.

Every time. Every place I had ever lived.

Had he ever broken in?

I thought back to it all. The locks I had changed. The deadbolts. Six months of looking over my shoulder, certain he was picking my locks at night and slipping past my alarms. Had he done any of it? Or had he stood somewhere far from me and made the gesture I had just watched him make, and a rose had appeared on my pillow while I slept.

Was this how he had always found me? If werewolves exist then obviously, it stood to reason that other things existed. Other things, like Marcus. I felt sick.

He reached out and touched my face.

The pulling started immediately.

A hook somewhere in my chest, dragging something vital out of me through every point of contact between his skin and mine. Cold flooded my veins, and with it came a terrible emptiness. A hollowing.

It did not hurt the way a cut hurts. It hurt the way low tide hurts a thing that needs the water, a slow ebbing grief of being made less while I lay there and let it happen, because there was nothing in my bound hands to stop it with. I could track the places he reached. Behind my eyes. The soft hinge of my jaw. The back of my throat where words got made. He helped himself from all of them at once, and I went thinner everywhere at once, a candle eating itself down from the inside of the wick.

I knew this cold.

I had known it for years.

In the kitchen of our apartment in Atlanta on the nights I came home wrung out and told myself it was deadlines. After the bad fights, when I told myself that the fights had cost me sleep. The slow Sundays when I told myself I was just hormonal. The empty mornings after dreams I couldn’t remember when I told myself I’d slept badly. Three years of this exact cold, sitting in the bottom of my ribs after every night I had spent in his bed.

He had been doing this to me the whole time.

Every tired morning. Every Sunday I had lost staring at a wall I kept promising myself I would paint. Every time I had looked in the mirror and not found myself in it and blamed the flat, scraped woman looking back, blamed her for being weak, blamed her for not being grateful, when the whole time it had been his hand in the dark, helping himself to more of me. The grief came half a heartbeat behind the cold, and the grief was worse. The cold was only theft. The grief was every year I had spent apologizing to him for the things he was stealing.

I tried to pull away, but his hand clamped down, holding me in place. His eyes drifted half-closed, and a sound escaped him. Low, satisfied. Hungry.

“God, I’ve missed this.” His voice had gone thick, drugged-sounding. “Those damn wolves kept me away too long. Do you have any idea how hard it was watching you from a distance? Knowing you were there, all that untapped potential, and not being able to touch you? To taste you?”

I couldn’t speak. The pulling was getting worse, that cold emptiness spreading through my limbs, my chest, my mind. I felt myself fading. Becoming less.

His hand moved.

Off my face. Onto my throat. His palm warm against my pulse. Then lower. Across my collarbone, down the front of my blouse. He stopped over my heart and held his palm flat against me, the way a man rests his hand on something he means to keep. Then lower again. Across my ribs. Across my stomach. The pull deepened in time with his hand. His fingers found the dip of my hip and the cold spiked. His palm slid down the front of my thigh and back up on the inside.

His mouth came to the line of my throat.

“This,” he said, against my pulse.