Page 10 of Hellebore

“No—don’t let it touch me!”

His body convulses harder, the straps cutting deeper into his wrists as he thrashes. I keep my voice soft, almost intimate against the stone walls that swallow every sound. “It is getting closer. Look at it. Let it come.”

His scream dissolves into a raw, animal howl that echoes through the basement. “It’s on me!” The words break into sobbing gasps. “Tearing. Tearing me open. Get it out! Get it out!”

His back arches violently off the table, every muscle locking tight. “It’s eating! Eating my heart!”

No more coherent words come. Only broken, wet sounds spill from him as his body shakes uncontrollably. His eyes roll back until only the whites show, tears and snot streaming down his face while the hellebore tears his mind apart from within.

I smile as the sounds wash over me, beautiful in their desperation against the cold stone. Vomit surges up from his stomach and spills down his chin, mixing with fresh blood from where he has bitten his tongue. The serum is peeling his sanity away layer by layer while his body begins to fail beneath the straps.

I reach for the scalpel. The blade catches the flickering torchlight as I turn it slowly in my hand.

“You put your hands on her breast.” I say quietly, pressing the edge to the palm of his left hand. The same hand that groped her against the wall. I draw the blade across his flesh in a slow, deep line. Blood wells up immediately, dark and warm, spilling over his skin and dripping onto the oak table below.

He howls, the sound raw and guttural. In the nightmare unfolding inside his skull, the cut becomes something far worse. He sobs about black flowers blooming inside the wound, petals forcing their way through his veins, pushing into his lungs until he struggles for every breath.

I cut him again. And again. One deliberate slice for every second his hands were on her. One for every laugh he gave while ignoring her quiet protest. One for every time he called her “bunny” as if she were something disposable instead of my entire fucking reason for existing.

The basement fills with the wet sounds of his suffering and the steady drip of blood onto stone. I work methodically, letting the hellebore and the blade speak together, carving away every trace of the man who dared touch what has always belonged to me.

His voice grows hoarse, scraping raw from his throat. The vein at the side of his neck pulses visibly, his heart stuttering beneath the skin as the hellebore tightens its hold, slowing everything while turning each fresh cut into fire that blooms into deep, spreading ice.

I set the scalpel aside on the table and wrap my hands around his throat. Not quickly. I want him to feel every single heartbeat fade.

“You used her when you were bored,” I whisper, tightening my grip finger by finger. “You put your filthy mouth on her delicate skin. You will never touch her again.”

His eyes bulge wider, the final hallucinations flickering across them—Hellebore’s walls closing in like a living grave, my face stretching into something demonic and eternal in his fracturing mind. He tries to speak, but nothing emerges except a wet, choking gurgle that bubbles past my thumbs.

I squeeze harder. His body jerks once, twice, legs kicking weakly against the straps before everything goes slack beneath me. I keep my hands locked around his throat long after his pulse stops fluttering under my fingers, long after his eyes turn dull and empty, staring at nothing.

The basement falls into complete silence, broken only by the distant roar of rain hammering the stone far above us.

I finally release him. My hands come away stained dark with blood and hellebore residue, the wetness cool and sticky against my palms. I stare down at what used to be Luke and feel nothing but pure, holy relief.

He will never touch her again.

Tomorrow I will carry what remains into the hellebore garden and let the roots drink him dry. Tonight the flower has done its job—weapon and protection, exactly as my mother promised long ago.

I climb the cold stone stairs, seal the heavy basement door behind me with a solid thud, and walk through the dark, creaking halls of Hellebore Mansion. The ancient building feels alive tonight, approving of the work done in its depths.

I head to our bedroom and open the small top drawer of the nightstand. It is my shrine. My secret.

Inside rest the pieces I have collected over the years, small, ordinary things that meant nothing to anyone else, but everything to me. A single golden hair I took from her brush at her dorm when she was eighteen, preserved in a tiny glass vial. A coin she was playing with while waiting for exam results, the one that rolled under a table at a coffee shop while she laughed nervously trying to retrieve it. A straw she used during a late-night movie, still faintly stained with her lipstick. A crumpled receipt with her handwriting on the back, a hurried note reminding herself to buy bread. A button from the coat she wore almost every day that winter.

I place the three new black strands I took from her pillow next to the golden one in a fresh vial. The contrast sits there in the drawer, jarring and perfect, the old her and the new her, side by side.

I close the drawer slowly and let the obsession settle deeper into my bones, warm and inevitable.

Soon she will be here, sleeping in this bed, breathing the same air as these fragments of her life.

I move to the office where the twelve camera feeds bloom across the screens in cool light.

There she is.

Briar sleeps in her bed, sheets tangled around her legs, that black hair fanned across the pillow I once pressed my face into. She looks peaceful. Innocent. Utterly unaware that the man who dared touch her no longer exists.

I lean back in the leather chair, heart still racing with dark satisfaction, and let a slow, unhinged smile spread across my face.