Page 25 of Love Her Ruin
"Yes. For that moment, I control everything. Her body. Her fear. Her silence. I decide what happens to her."
"And Sera?"
"She fought," he spits.
My blood needles through my veins at the look he throws Sera, and I immediately block his line of sight with my body. “Eyes on me.”
"She fought like she had nothing to lose. Like she'd rather die than give me what I wanted… what I deserved. And that…" He stops, breathing hard. "That made me want her more."
"So you raped her. Are you having second thoughts about that now?"
His jaw tightens.
I stand, looking down at him, at his lack of an answer even now, broken and bound in Sera’s basement.
This motherfucker.
"Here's the truth, Vincent. You're not a god. You're not even a monster. You're just a man who couldn't stand the thought of being so small, so you made everyone around you smaller. But it didn't work because here you are, answering for everything you've done, and we’re only getting started. Are you really too stupid to realize that?"
Again, he doesn’t answer. He just glares at me with the vindictiveness of someone used to blaming others for all their troubles.
I turn to Sera. Her eyes meet mine.
"He doesn’t know how to bow," I say.
She smiles. “So we’ll teach him.”
Chapter 13
Azhrael
Thismanhasbeenhere for nearly two days.
I count the hours in the rhythm of his heart. The slow, stubborn thump of a muscle that wants to stop but cannot. Not while I hold it.
The others leave and come back, leave and come back. The house settles. Sera wraps her arms around my form before she goes to work, a gesture of faith, and I feel the ghost of her warmth for hours after. James's boots thump up the stairs. Eddie's footsteps are softer, measured, a man who moves like the shadows inside him. The door closes behind him.
And then there is only Vincent and me.
He hangs from the shadows I've grown from the ceiling and wound around his wrists and ankles and throat. He dangles like a puppet whose strings have been cut but whose master refuses to let him fall.
His feet are a memory of structure. James's work, beautiful in its thoroughness. The bones no longer remember theirarrangement. They float in the soft meat of his soles, fragments of a foundation that will never bear weight again. His kneecaps angle sharply away from each other.
He is awake now. I make sure of it, and I stave off enough of his pain to keep him conscious for as long as possible. Sera wants him to suffer on her terms, not his body’s.
His eyes track me when I move. They are the only part of him that still has any fight, and even that is fading. The fear has eaten the rest. It sits in his chest like a second heart, beating in time with the first, and I feed on it.
"Hell…awaits," I rasp, and that’s the only promise I’ll ever give him, one I remind him of every time we’re alone.
His throat works. A sound escapes him, half question, half sob.
"Not…finished." I drift closer. "She."
He tries to speak. His throat is dry, cracked, the words scraping out like stones. "What…what are you?"
"Cold," I say. "Shadow."
I lean closer, my face inches from his. He cannot look away. I will not let him.
