Page 86 of Kat Bethel

“My Dandelion. I can’t ruin you, because you are already ruined.”

Don’t say that.

There was hope for me. I wasn’t so broken that I was decayed beyond repair.

I opened my mouth to argue, but the words wouldn’t come out. Instead the silence lingered between us for long painful seconds as his words really sunk in and clicked into place.

There it was.

The truth that I’d been running from all this time. That no matter how good I was, no matter how much I tried, no matter how far backwards I bent, this was who I really was beneath the mask.

He could have shot me in the heart, and it would have hurt less. The brutal truth I didn’t want to hear. Especially not from him.

A sob broke from my chest.

I wanted to get angry. To tell him to go fuck himself. That I refused to be talked to like that by him, but he was right.

I wasn’t immune to him because I was special. It was because there was nothing left of me to ruin.

I hated that I couldn’t deny it anymore.

“And you can’t destroy me, because I’m already destroyed,” he rumbled.

My eyes snapped up to his face and my breathing stopped.

What?

No, I’d break him.

But he was broken long before I walked into that forest.

“That’s why you're perfect for me.” His teeth snapped together loudly, as if to dare me to argue, making me tremble in his deadly grasp.

Years of crushing expectations lifted off my shoulders. The relief was instantaneous. For the first time in years, breathing came easier. I felt lighter even with blood oozing from his claws where his grip was on the edge of too tight.

He knew what I was.

I knew what he was.

Neither of us were going to change.

Facing the brutal truth wasn’t so bad, when the other person never expected perfection from me. He was okay with what I was. He didn’t expect anything else from me.

This was a horrible idea for the rest of the world.

We’d ruin everything in our wake.

It went against everything I once stood for.

It meant sacrificing everything.

Willow might dismiss me for good. Aunt Jackie would roll in her grave. I’d prove to my mother that she was right to abandon me.

A lifetime of good deeds tarnished as I walked down the same road I said I never would.

What would I turn into? It didn’t matter.

I chose us anyway.