Page 41 of Psycho Obsession
He reaches down and flicks the buckle.
The chest strap snaps open with a sound like a gunshot. The pressure on my lungs vanishes, and for the first time in two hundred and fifteen days, I can take a full breath. It tastes like peppermint and carnage.
“One down,” he purrs, his eyes locked on mine as he moves his hand toward my pinned right wrist. “Three to go. But remember, Hallow… once I take these off, you don’t belong to Aris anymore. You don’t belong to the state. You belong to the madness.”
I look at him, my lips pulling back into a jagged, lopsided mirror of his own grin. The little girl in the tutuis dead, and the dancer is buried. But the thing that’s left? She’s hungry.
“Then stop talking,” I snarl, my voice finding its edge. “And finish the job.”
He doesn’t move for the next buckle. He just watches the way my chest heaves, the way my skin flushes under the sudden rush of oxygen. He’s savouring the sight of me unravelling, a dark connoisseur of my desperation.
“You’re in such a rush, sweetheart,” he murmurs, his fingers tracing the silver-white scars on my inner arm, lingering right where the needles used to go. “But we haven’t even been properly introduced. I’ve spent months reading the poetry of your pain, and you haven’t even given me a thank you.”
“I don’t owe you shit,” I spit, my voice trembling with the effort of not collapsing. “You killed the man who kept me in a cage. That just makes you the new locksmith.”
His eyes flash—a sudden, violent emerald spark that makes my blood turn to liquid fire. He leans over me, his weight pressing into the slab, trapping me between the vinyl and his heat. He’s so close now that the world is nothing but his pale skin and the jagged red of his mouth.
“I’m not a locksmith, Hallow. I’m the fire that melts the key.” He reaches down, his hand sliding behind my neck, his leather glove cold against my burning skin. “You want the rest of these straps off? You want to walk out of this tomb on your own two feet? Then pay the toll.”
He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t wait. He just hovers there, his breath ghosting over my lips, waiting for me to bridge thegap.
“Kiss me,” he whispers. It’s a command disguised as an invitation. “Show me there’s still a heartbeat under all that trauma. Show me the girl who bit the world back.”
I stare at him, my breath coming in short, jagged hitches. I hate him. I hate the way he looks at me like I’m a prize. I hate that he’s the only thing standing between me and the dark. I lunge forward, not to kiss him, but to sink my teeth into his lower lip.
I want to taste his blood. I want to remind him that I’m not a doll.
But he’s faster. He catches my chin in a grip of iron, his thumb pressing into the hinge of my jaw until my mouth drops open. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t pull back. He just laughs—that low, terrifying sound that vibrates in my own chest—and slams his mouth against mine.
It isn’t a kiss. It’s a collision.
It tastes like copper, peppermint, and madness. I fight him, my head thrashing against the slab, my pinned wrists straining until I feel the skin tear again. I want to scream, to curse him, to tear the velvet off his back.
But then, the green gas in my lungs begins to hum.
The spark he ignited when he walked in turns into a goddamn inferno. My body, starved of touch for two hundred days, betrays me. The anger turns into an obsessive, sickening heat. I stop fighting and start biting back, my tongue meeting his in a frantic, desperate war. I’m clawing at the air with my bound hands, trying to reach him, trying to pull him down into the black hole of my existence.
He groans into my mouth, a jagged, primal soundof victory. He tastes like the end of the world, and God help me, I want to swallow every drop of it.
He pulls back just an inch, his lips wet, his eyes wide and shimmering with a terrifying, beautiful insanity. He looks at me, and for the first time, I see myself reflected in his pupils—not as a victim, but as a mirror.
“There she is,” he rasps, his voice thick with a hunger that makes my knees weak. “There’s the Queen of the Gutter.”
He reaches down, his movements fluid and fast, and flicks the remaining three buckles. Snap. Snap. Snap.
The weight is gone. The leather falls away.
I don’t fall into his arms. I scramble off the slab, my legs buckling as they hit the cold tile for the first time in months. I collapse, my hands skidding in the green-tinted shadows, my breath coming in sobbing gasps. I’m free. I’m freezing. I’m covered in my own blood and his peppermint scent.
He stands over me, silhouetted against the blood in the hallway, looking down at me like I’m the sun rising over a graveyard. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his serrated blade, tossing it onto the floor in front of me. The steel rings against the tile.
“Aris is still breathing out there, Hallow,” he says, his voice flat and cold. “He’s an artist now. He’s pinned to the wall like one of his ‘projects.’ Why don’t you go out there and tell him what you think of his latest work?”
I look at the knife. I look at the man in the purple coat. Then I look at the door.
The dancer is gone. The ghost is dead.
I pick up the knife.
