Текст книги "The poison daughter"

Автор книги: Sheila Masterson

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Текущая страница: 43 (всего у книги 48 страниц)

One way or another, this madness must end with me.

My anger is too big, the hurt too severe, and there’s nothing that can scrape me out from beneath the weight of them.

“You’re getting worked up over nothing,” my father says. “I told you. Rafe’s time is up as a powerful figure of this community. You’ll be much more valuable married to Stefan Laurence when he takes over Mountain Haven.”

I laugh. “That isn’t going to happen.”

My father narrows his eyes at me. “This isn’t really up to you. If the Laurences approve, it will be done, and it will give those savages some continuity.”

“That man is vile, but I don’t mean it’s not going to happen because I’m already married,” I say. “And Henry isn’t going to die—at least not for a very long time.”

My father balks and stuffs a piece of stew-soaked roll in his mouth. “There are more methods than poison. Even a powerful brute of a man like that can die, Harlow.”

I meet my father’s gaze and smile. “Henry is Deathless.”

My mother frowns in confusion, but my father goes still. He knows what that means.

“Funny thing about the Deathless,” I continue. “When I went looking in our library earlier, I couldn’t find anything about them. Pages were missing from our mythology books. In fact, the entire mythology section of the library was strangely empty. And when I recalled my lessons and the stories through town, I only ever remember hearing Stellaria’s hunter referred to as the first Drained. Never once did I hear the word Deathless.” I take a sip of my wine and lick my lips. “It got me wondering why someone might want to bury the fact that the Drained didn’t start off corrupted—that they tried to steal too much power.”

He lifts his hands to point at me, but I note that the movement is sluggish. “You unite a people with a common enemy and they stay united. You tell them that there’s more power to be gained and they will claim it.”

I cock my head to the side. “Instead of you getting it.” I click my tongue. “I can only imagine how disappointed you are to hear that your plan won’t work out. You sacrificed Mountain Haven to the first Breeders for nothing.”

“I made a choice to save this city!” Spittle flies out of his mouth and lands on the table.

“Calm down. You’re being so dramatic,” I taunt. “You also let the Breeders into North Hold to steal those women. I’m guessing you thought the people would blame Rafe for his failure to secure them. You must have been so disappointed when that backfired.”

He slaps his hand on the table. “You can’t comprehend the hard choices that I’ve made. You think you’re so much better than us!”

I lean back in my chair and wave my hand in dismissal. “Divine deliver us. I don’t think I’m better than you. I’m just no longer afraid I can’t survive you.”

He tries to lift his glass, and it clatters to the table, spilling dregs of the amber liquid across the dark wood tabletop.

Both of my parents struggle helplessly in their seats, and I watch the recognition dawn in their eyes. My father reaches for the bell to ring the servants, but he’s slow and clumsy and he just knocks it onto the floor with a loud clang.

I fake a pout. “It’s no matter anyway. The staff have all left for the evening to enjoy the festival. Or did you not notice they didn’t return to refill your cups?”

“What the fuck did you do?” My father’s body is slow, but his words are only a little bit slurred.

“I was always curious if you two would see me as enough of a threat that you’d condition yourselves to poisons.” I lean forward on my elbow and push my bottom lip out farther. “I’m a little offended that you didn’t. But the good news is that I learned about Stellarium Blossoms while I was in Mountain Haven. I never knew they had a paralytic effect.”

They both begin to struggle harder.

“Want to know something fun I’ve never told you about my magic?” I ask. “I can help direct what the poisons do. Isn’t that interesting? I can direct it to prevent your magic, legs, and arms from working so that you can still breathe, but you’ll remain a captive audience.” I take a long sip of my wine and watch them both struggle to summon their magic. “Oh, silly me. I also channeled some Polm’s Opus. It allows me to influence you. I just don’t want you to use your power—at least not right now.”

Some dark part of me enjoys watching them struggle in earnest.

“How can you be so disloyal?” my father barks.

“You dare to speak to me about loyalty?” My laughter crackles, brittle. “The only person I have been disloyal to is myself. I have lied and fought and fucked for this family, and I still lost the only one of you who actually cared about me. I owe you nothing.”

I keep waiting to reach the bottom of my anger, but it only grows. I thought that this would be enough, but I still feel a cavernous emptiness in my chest. Making them suffer won’t bring Aidia back, and it won’t heal the parts of me still haunted by their violence, but I hoped at least in this moment that I would feel some sense of satisfaction.

The dining room door flies open and slams into the wall. Kellan rushes into the room.

“There’s my favorite brother.” I pat the seat next to me and smile. “Perfect timing. I was worried your soup would get cold.”

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60HARLOW

Kellan eyes me skeptically, his body coiled in tension as he looks at the scene before him. “Why is the house empty?”

“I gave the staff the night off to enjoy the festival, but don’t worry. They’ve laid out all the courses.” I pat the seat beside me again. “Sit.”

He rounds the table slowly, clearly aware that something is wrong but still not sure what.

“We were just discussing how our father had plans to marry me off to Rafe before he found a way to get rid of him,” I say, sipping my wine.

Kellan looks warily from me to our parents.

I shove the spoon into his hand and remove the cover from his bowl. Steam wafts up from the beautiful, delicate bowl, but Kellan just stares at it.

“Now, where was I?” I ask my father. “Oh, that’s right. I was going to ask you why you allowed Rafe to make me kill my sister.”

“That was months ago,” my father slurs.

I bark a loud laugh. “So, naturally, I should be fine with it by now?”

“He wasn’t supposed to make you jump—either of you,” my father says. “He was just supposed to scare you straight, so you would stop interfering in their relationship.”

I throw my soup across the table. It crashes into his chest and spills down his front. “I was checking on my sister, who was regularly being beaten bloody.”

My father looks to Kellan. “Do something.”

My brother remains seated, stirring his spoon around the bowl as he watches me. “I think we should hear her out.”

“I thought about it a lot,” I say. “Aidy and I were out there on that balcony for a long time. You didn’t interfere even though you know enough about this city to have every child with holy fire killed and to give women to the Breeders. Even though there is nothing in Lunameade that happens without your saying so—you allowed a man to throw both of your daughters off of a balcony in your own house after he made them nearly beat each other to death.”

“It was a warning,” my mother mumbles.

I throw my half-empty glass of wine at her, and it slams into her chest. The glass cracks and red wine seeps into her silver gown. “It was a fucking execution, and you did nothing. Not during. Not after. You think you’re powerful, but you let your greatest rival march into your home and kill one of your daughters, maim the other, and go unpunished.”

“What would you have us do? You know how popular he is.” Spittle flies out of my father’s mouth when he speaks. His aura is vibrant blue, but he still can’t summon his magic without me letting him.

I shake my head. “Ah, so that’s the problem. You only know how to punch down. Just answer me this—did you make Gaven stand down?”

As soon as I ask, I realize I’m afraid of the answer, or maybe I already know what it is and I’m afraid of the confirmation.

“Gaven is a practical man who always understood how easily he could be replaced. He cared enough to stay.” My father takes a labored breath. “Of course, I doubt he would have let it go on if he’d realized how far Rafe would take it. It wasn’t sanctioned for either of you.” His speech garbles. I have to move this along soon on the off-chance I used too much Stellarium Blossom.

I lean on my elbow and turn to face Kellan head-on. “Kel, I’m going to need your help with something. I thought it would be nice to test whether our parents really didn’t know that what they were doing is wrong. I thought we could give them a taste of their own medicine, but I’ll need your help.”

His gaze darts from my parents to me.

“I want you to make them whip each other and use their magic on each other,” I say. “Let’s see how they like being compelled to hurt someone else. I would say someone they love, but they both only love themselves, so this is the best I can do.”

I walk to the cabinet on the side wall and retrieve the switch I tucked there before our meal.

My mother stares at me in horror.

“Kellan, this is madness. Throw her in the Cove right now,” my father snaps.

I click my tongue. “Oh, Father, you look nervous. Are you afraid that you’ve made him your son? That he will do as you’ve done and stand by and do nothing while his family is hurt?” I turn to Kellan. “What do you think, Kel? Are you his son, or are you my brother?”

He casts one last look at our parents and snatches the switch from my hand. I brace myself because I want to believe in him, but my faith is at an all-time low.

But he rounds the table, and it’s not until my father rises from his chair that I realize Kellan already had his hooks in them.

Kellan stands behind them as my father pulls his shirt off and bends over the table as my mother unbuttons the back of her dress.

Kellan hands our mother the switch. She holds it awkwardly at first.

“Whip him,” I say.

She hesitates a moment, but then Kellan must nudge her because she brings the switch down so sharply and suddenly that I think she must have only been pretending that she didn’t know how to use it.

“Harder,” I say.

My mother brings the switch down with a deafening crack. I thought it would take more convincing, but perhaps she has her own score to settle with him.

“Again.”

I make her do it over and over, harder and harder, until she’s wheezing with the effort of breathing through the competing poisons.

“Your turn,” I say with a grin.

Kellan makes her bend over the table so the top of her dress gaps.

My father stands with great effort. His agony is clear on his face, in his sweat-soaked hairline, and in the blood spatter all over his chair’s upholstery and the table.

Kellan places the switch in his hand. A second later, it cracks against my mother’s back. When she cries out, I feel nothing but relief.

“Harder,” I say. And the cycle starts again.

I’m divided, both viscerally aware of what’s happening as I make them torture each other and oddly disconnected. I can’t fully replicate what I’ve suffered because they don’t love each other the way I loved Aidia. But it’s enough to know that they will understand some part of my pain, even if they have both been too powerful for too long to ever understand true fear and dread.

“That’s enough, Low.” Kellan’s voice cuts through the detached fog of my mind.

I’ve lost track of time. Of how many times I’ve had them beat each other before I moved on to making them burn and electrify each other with their magic. The room smells like blood and burnt hair and flesh, and my parents are crumpled into their chairs, gasping for air.

“It could never be enough,” I snap. But I know what he means. They are dying, and I need to be the one to deliver the killing blow.

I round the table and lean down to be at my father’s level. “Hi, Dad.”

“I will end you for this, you ungrateful little bitch,” he growls.

I look directly into his violet eyes. “All these years and you still haven’t learned. You’ve never stopped trying to break me. But I do not break. I am the breaker.”

I hold up my hand and summon poison to my fingers. Asher’s Anthem—a poison root that grows in damp, shady areas. It kills quickly, but painfully.

My father watches with shocked realization as I cup his face in my dark purple, poison-laced hands and pour all of my rotten hatred into him.

His eyes grow wider and wider as he feels it hit his system.

I make him meet my gaze as he chokes. “I hope Asher never receives your soul. I hope you cannot cross the veil. I hope you’re forever lost and lonely and have an eternity to live with the pain you have caused so that you could feel important. I’ll make sure you are not a villain in this story. I will make sure you are nothing at all so that you are forgotten.”

When his body spasms, I release him and let him crumble to the floor before approaching my mother. I bend down so that I’m at her level and cup her face in my hands. I swear to the Divine she’s aging before my eyes.

She mumbles for mercy, but she’s so vain that if she could see how she looks right now, she would want to die.

“I’ve not met every mother in Lunameade, but I still am certain you are the worst of them. After today, I will never think of you again, and my life and this city will be better without you in it. I hope that Asher does deliver you beyond the veil so that you have to acknowledge all your deeds and the harm you’ve done and stop being ignorant.”

“What will the Divine think of this?” she rasps as her body begins to spasm.

I give her a pitying look. “Oh, Mother. The Divine have always settled scores. To err is human. To avenge is Divine.”

I toss her to the side harder than I need to. When her body hits the floor, a muffled, pathetic yelp rips up her throat, and then she goes still.

I stare at my parents’ empty bodies. The tunnel key around my father’s neck glints in the candlelight.

“I was so close.” My voice sounds so small—so young. I’m talking to myself more than Kellan. “I was going to get her out. We always talked about escaping to somewhere beyond the mountain. It didn’t even matter where, as long as we had each other. I thought I still had time—that I could earn the key by betraying Henry, grab Aidia, and take the tunnel to freedom.”

I turn my attention back to my brother. “What good is the key without her?”

He doesn’t say anything, so I start toward the dining room door.

“Low,” Kellan says. “I will take care of the bodies. But what are you going to do about Able?”

I turn to face him. “Can we defend the walls with well water?”

He nods. “We could also temporarily seal off four of the gates to focus resources if necessary.”

“Did Able know what Rafe did?”

Kellan sighs. “Yes. He knew because he was heir, and Electra knew because she erased the memories of the guards and servants. And obviously I knew because I know everything. But the rest of the family doesn’t know what actually happened. They think she jumped. You know how they all were—afraid of our parents and baffled by Aidia’s resistance.” He looks down at the bowl in front of him. “Was mine poisoned too?”

I cock my head. “Did you let it all happen that day, like you let us be beaten for years?”

He stands so fast, his chair crashes to the floor behind him. “Divine dammit, Low! I was only two years older than Aidy. What did you want me to do?”

“You have a blessing from Polm. I wanted you to manipulate him!” I shout.

“My position only stayed as it is—I only stayed alive, Harlow, because he thought I was loyal to him!” Kellan’s voice is shrill. “I had to be strategic and pick my spots. It’s almost impossible for me to use my blessing on any of you without you seeing me do it. When exactly did you want me to risk manipulating him and becoming his next target?” He points at our mother’s bloody body. “Do you know what our mother said to me the day my blessing manifested?” he asks. “She saw my excitement and she said, ‘You better never disagree with your father or he will kill you.’ I have always had to be careful, and I have protected you in the moments I could—or did you think I really didn’t know you were the Poison Vixen?”

I lean my hands against the table, and the tension in my shoulders starts to unravel. “What gave me away?”

“I admit it took a bit. When everyone kept describing the suspect with different features, I thought it was a group of women. But then there was the timing of it. It all started when you finally began leaving your room again after Aidia died. And one night I ran into Gaven while he was out searching for you after hours.”

“Fucking Gaven blew my cover.” I shake my head, but I want to cry, both because I miss him and because I’m disappointed that he lived up to my expectations.

“I protected that secret because I swear to the Divine, if our parents had known, they would have drugged you every night like Able.” He looks down at his bowl. “Did you poison my soup, Low?”

I meet his lilac eyes. “Are you telling the truth? Were you the captain of the city watch, or were you my brother?”

“I was both, Low. You’re not the only one who loved her—who lost her. You’ve been hoarding it for months. You were alone with your grief and you left me alone with mine, too. I know you can’t understand now when you’re this angry, but that day changed everything for me.”

Kellan looks wrecked. I’ve never seen him look so devastated. I turn away to ease the burn of tears in my eyes.

I can’t shoulder his grief when my own is already too heavy.

“Did you know they were going to let Rafe do that?” I ask.

“No. If I had known, I would have been there, and there hasn’t been a day in the last six months that I haven’t woken up wishing I had been. Libby had—” His voice breaks, and I turn to look at him.

His eyes are glassy with unshed tears. “Libby had a feeling something was off that whole morning, but you know how her magic is. Harvain’s whims, as she likes to say. She doesn’t always know what the foresight feelings mean or what they pertain to. She couldn’t place it until right before it happened.”

He blows out a shuddering sigh and looks away. “Low, I ran. I got here as fast as I could, but I was too late. I found you in the bushes and I thought you were gone, too.”

It’s not his fault. I’ve always known deep down that he is as much a product of my father’s violence as Aidia and I are. There’s no way he escaped the things we bore. But my parents are dead, and this fury remains, and there is no one else to rage at.

I want to break things. I want somewhere else to channel my anger, but I know that he’s telling the truth. My sister-in-law has a blessing of foresight, but it’s a tricky kind of magic to understand. The lack of clarity makes me want to curse the Divine who blessed us both. How tragic to give you glimpses of the future but not allow you to save the people you love. How heartless to make you want affection but never allow you to kiss anyone without killing them.

It’s all just a cruel Divine joke. Maybe someday I’ll be able to laugh about it, but right now, true laughter seems a distant memory.

I stand and look into Kellan’s pleading eyes. This is the most emotion I’ve seen out of him since childhood, and I’m not ready to forgive him—or maybe I just don’t know how. Maybe I never will.

“Low—” His voice is a rasp. “Did you poison my soup?”

My hands shake, and I shudder out a ragged breath as I turn away from my brother. I walk to the dining room door and pause in the threshold.

I don’t look at him as I whisper, “I did what I thought would bring me peace.”

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61HARLOW

Sitting on the boarding house window seat, I don’t feel a shred of guilt for what I’ve done. I feel more cleansed from my anger than I did from my bath.

Ever since my magic showed up twenty-five years ago, I’ve stuffed my rage down and allowed it to rot away at me.

Now that my violence is spent, and I’m alone in the quiet waiting for Henry to return to our room, all I feel is soul-deep sorrow.

Grief is not an absence. It’s a presence. I feel it in every silence, in every breath.

I’ve lived six months without the other half of my heart—so bereft that my mind fractured and summoned a world where she was still with me. Remembering is like losing her all over again.

I don’t know how to survive without this. Saving her has been my singular purpose—the last thread of hope I clung to for the last year. Without it, I’m nothing but a woman with a mind as shattered as her heart.

Killing my parents didn’t change the fact that I’ll never see Aidia’s face again. That I’ll never hear her say my name in the annoyed tone that used to make me feel triumphant. I’ll never fall asleep with her playing with my hair. And I’ll never see who she could have been living somewhere beyond the mountains, far from my parents’ control.

I’m not just mourning who she was. I’m mourning her potential. I wanted to get to know Aidia unburdened from the life that broke both of us.

And still, I know I’ll continue as I always have, putting one foot in front of the other.

To know you will always be okay alone should be comforting, but really, it’s just terribly lonely. I am so unbelievably weary.

The bedroom door swings open, and Henry walks in. He stills when he sees me, studies me for a long moment, but he does not ask me how I am. He locks the door and removes his jacket, tie, and vest.

“I can’t apologize enough for today. I grossly miscalculated and I’m sorry,” he says. He looks genuinely contrite.

“You didn’t know. How could you? I didn’t know,” I say.

He studies me for a long moment before he speaks. “It’s the shock when you realize you cannot quite picture their face perfectly, when you can’t remember the pitch of their laugh, when you see something beautiful and all you want is to run home and tell them all about it, but instead, you’re left to whisper it to the wind.”

I swallow thickly. “We spent our whole lives wanting to leave the city walls. Now she’s gone and I finally left and all I want to do is tell her about the way the stars look over the fort at night.” I don’t know what possessed me to share it. It’s just comforting that he knows what I mean.

He crosses the room and sits down on the window seat beside me. “Holly was an early riser. No matter how early I woke up, she always managed to beat me and she loved to gloat about it. She slipped a note under my door every morning. After the attack, we were stuck in the caves for a while, but when I was finally able to move back into my room after a year, I woke up every morning looking for it. It took me almost two years to stop. I still do it sometimes.” He rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “Waking is the worst. For a few blessed moments, you don’t remember, and then you do and it’s like reliving it. I don’t blame you for seeing her everywhere. This world can be cruel. You were just trying to survive.”

I stare into his dark blue eyes. “I’m so tired and this is such a Divine-damned mess. I think I could lie down and sleep for a year.”

“Is your grief so gentle?” he whispers.

I clench my hands in my robe, afraid and exhilarated that he can see me so clearly.

“No,” I rasp. “It’s not. I am sick with rage. My grief is monstrous.”

He reaches out, tentative at first. When I don’t flinch, he tucks my hair behind my ear and cups my cheek. “What do you need, Harlow?”

I can’t remember the last time someone asked me that and meant it. I’ve been asked so infrequently, I’m unpracticed at even assessing my own needs.

The temptation to let go and fall into this—lose myself, my purpose, my desire for vengeance—is so strong. And all for what? Some good sex and sweet words. Men lie. It’s what they do.

It would be nice to trust him with this—with me—but I’ve never just had fun. I’ve always had to think about consequences.

Maybe I could this one time, as a treat for surviving this day and every other one that came before it.

I kiss my husband. Not to shut him up, or to try to kill him, or even to taunt him. I kiss him because I want to.

Henry tastes like whiskey and cherries and a hint of sugar, and it’s all I want to taste.

He wastes no time. He breaks the kiss for a moment, pulling me to my feet and then down to straddle his lap. Then, he kisses me again more urgently.

His fingers tangle in my hair, and he tilts my head back, and even though I have never kissed anyone else for longer than a second, I know it doesn’t get better than this.

I feel myself plunging into some deep dark water.

I’m afraid of the ways we are alike—Henry and I. It’s terrifying to be understood. He knows what it means to turn a grave into a home—to live inside this hollow like a hermit—to fumble in the dark, but still crawl out the other side of the pit and rise to demand blood for your blood. I’m afraid of the way he understands the empty places in me like halls he’s been haunting for years instead of weeks.

In the deepest, darkest corner of my heart, I have always wanted to be known. But now that he knows me, I want to run.

This is something uncharted. I stopped wanting to be understood so long ago—made myself into a tight bud that only Aidia could coax open. But the more Henry challenges me, the more I feel myself unfurling into something new and more natural.

This will end poorly. I’ll be forced back into the old version of myself, and it will feel like trying to squeeze back into skin I’ve shed.

I can’t forgive myself for the weakness of irrevocably changing.

I know the way Kellan scours the entire city to bring Libby a new book every week, then takes the children out for a full day so she has time to read it. I’ve watched the way Bea and Josie sit behind the counter at the end of the night, heads bent together as they laugh and kiss in the empty pub.

I’ve seen good examples of love, but I’ve never seen a good example of someone loving me.

Not like that. Until now.

For so long, I felt certain I wouldn’t recognize love even if it slapped me across the face. Then, I worried that was the only way I’d recognize it.

But now I see that love is not letting the person you care for be caught with their guard down. Love is someone who helps you put your armor on, who knows how and when to help you take it off.

I told myself I was trying to avenge Aidia’s hurts, but I think I was trying to remind myself how easy it was to become one of those women I protected. As long as I didn’t let someone close, I couldn’t become one of them.

Until now, men’s wanting has never been something that could sate me. It always felt a meal devoid of substance. No matter how much I consumed, it left me feeling empty.

For the first time, I feel how Henry’s desire could fill me up, scatter shadows from my aching hollows, and thaw my frozen heart. I see how staying could heal me as much as ruin me.

I’ll never forgive Henry for this. I can’t afford a weakness.

When I finally pull away, I’m breathless and shaking.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he whispers against my lips.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re forgetting to hate me.”

I can hardly breathe around the lump in my throat. Because I don’t hate him at all.

“I do hate you,” I rasp.

Henry tilts my chin up and brushes his lips to mine so gently. “No, lovely. I don’t think you do.” He kisses the corners of my mouth so tenderly. “It’s scary, isn’t it?”

“Scary?” I laugh bitterly. “Scary is too small a word. This is world-rending.”

I don’t want this. I want to toss the revelation in the nearest well and watch it get swept away in the current.

“Beautiful, wretched wife. You will be my undoing.”

That was always the plan, but I didn’t expect to wreck myself in the process.

He kisses me again, and I want my robe off. I want his shirt off. I want nothing between us.

Henry slides his hands under my ass. He lifts me as he stands, crosses the room, and sits down on the edge of the bed with me straddling his lap.

I unbutton his shirt as he yanks on the sash of my robe. There’s too much between us. I don’t want to talk or even think about how I feel. I just want him inside me.

But Henry doesn’t want to go fast. When I reach for the button on his pants, he grabs my hands.

“I will let you do a lot of things, Harlow, but rushing me when I’ve waited so long to take my time is not one of them.”

He twists to lay me on the bed beneath him. He kisses me slowly, his hands tenderly stroking my hair.

I don’t know why my heart is racing like this. We’re only kissing, but I can hardly breathe. He brushes his lips along my jaw and down my neck. His teeth skim down my neck, and I have never trusted someone like this—enough to bare my throat without a hint of hesitation—enough to be hurt beyond repair.

Some part of me is forever braced for pain. I keep waiting for the sharp slice of his teeth, but it never comes.

Henry places kisses along my collarbones and down the valley between my breasts. This is homage. It feels like he’s trying to make up for the lack of touch in my life. He cups my breasts, chasing each caress with his mouth.

So often, I’ve felt fractured between who I am and who I pretend to be. But this is the first time I feel whole again—with him touching me.

He works his way lower, down the lines of my stomach and over my hips. Then, he lowers himself to kneel on the floor, wraps his hands around my thighs, and yanks me to the edge of the bed.

The first brush of his tongue has me arching up off the mattress. I’m already so sensitive, every nerve in my body feels lit up.

It’s clear he was holding back before. With no audience, he is ravenous. Not like he’s trying to prove something to me, but more like he’s trying to prove something to himself. When I start to squirm, he pins my hips to the bed. He’s merciless, plunging his tongue in deep, sucking my clit into his mouth until my thighs are trembling and my hands are fisted in his hair and I’m so mindless with pleasure I can’t stop saying his name.

The climax breaks over me, and it feels like I’ve been cracked wide open. I don’t recognize the hoarse cry that escapes me. My aura is spread out wide, throwing off little golden sparks in all directions. I have never felt more out of control, and I like it.