Page 100 of Wretched Thorns

Marcus’s face blanched. And I took some measure of joy that he understood what was about to happen.

The shadows in the corners of the room hit him all at once.

They came off the walls and up off the floor. They came down from the ceiling and wrapped around him from every direction at once, like they had been waiting since the first night he had entered my life. The sound that came out of him perhaps should have been justice enough, but I needed more. Every woman who came before me needed more, deserved more.

He went to his knees on the cypress floor.

The shadows held him there.

I walked across the room.

I put my right fist against his chest and watched as it became one with the shadow. Then I plunged it home.

#

The first string of essence came home in a rush.

It rose through me the way tidewater rises beneath a rock left too long on dry sand.

The rock was me.

The tide was three years of lost time.

The piece settled deep in my chest, finding the hollow Marcus had carved out and fitting itself there as if it had never belonged anywhere else.

I straightened a quarter inch.

My ribs held together a little better than they had a breath ago. The shadows bracing my legs eased with them, because the leg I was leaning on no longer needed quite so much help to stay under me.

I understood Celie’s lesson then.

I had been waiting for the dark to lift me.

The dark was never going to lift me.

It was going to return me to myself, a piece at a time, and every piece it returned was another place to stand.

I pulled the next piece.

It came faster.

The cold from the dark wood-paneled room slammed back into me and locked into place somewhere behind my heartbeat. My legs took more of their own weight. The gold thread at my chest eased a fraction because Jasper no longer had to force so much of himself through it.

Somewhere, at the edge of the bond, Jasper made a sound I felt more than heard. It was more of a roar than a howl, and it echoed to the very tenets of my soul.

I pulled the next piece.

And the next.

The shadows around my body stopped behaving like scaffolding. They no longer held me upright. They gathered and shifted with a different purpose now, feeding the pull itself, because the pulls were feeding each other.

The hunger in my fist widened.

Marcus’s chest grew harder to keep solid beneath my hand.

I want to tell you I thought about mercy. I did not. I had read somewhere, in the life I used to have, that the truest test of a person is what they do with someone who is finally, completely in their power, and I had always imagined I would be the kind of person who found something like grace in that moment. I was not. What I found was Celie’s warning, and I held onto it, not because I wanted to spare him but because I did not want to become him on my way out of that room. There is a version of this where I took my time. Where I made him carry a hundredth of what he had spent three years feeding on, in me, in those women, in everyone he had ever dropped a rose on. The dark would have let me. The darkness would have happily let me stand there and savor it. I did not let myself, and the not-letting was the hardest thing I did that whole long night, harder than ‌fighting with a broken rib, harder than inhaling a toxic winter smoke. I took back what was stolen, and I let the rest of him go to ash, and I did not make a single second of it last longer than it had to. That was the line. I walked right up to it. I did not cross it.

What was mine came home.