The Blood We Crave: Part Two (The Hollow Boys, #4)

by Monty Jay

Despite all the evil I’ve committed, how wicked I am, maybe I deserve to have one thing. This one good thing in all the bad. Her.

My lack of a soul wasn’t because of the evil that had infested my mother’s womb or my father’s corrupt DNA. No, I didn’t have one because it belonged to her. I think when we were created, instead of splitting our spirits in half, they gave both of them to her in order to keep them safe.

To remind me, when the time was right, that all I am is hers to carry.

“I can’t stay away from you, even when I know I should. It would be the only good thing I could do for you, Scarlett.” Lyra rubs her nose against mine, nibbling at my bottom lip before breathing. “Don’t be good. Don’t stay away. Just be with me.”

“My grandfather, Edmond, knew what my father turned me into. What I could do. They tried, both him and May, for a long time to love me back to normal. Give me a steady life in hopes it would change the inevitable, but there was too much damage done. Henry had shown me too much, trained me too well. So–” He lets out a heavy breath, as if blowing the dust off an old record that hasn’t been played in years.

How much I love him. How I would shred the world with my teeth to have him. Would lie, steal, and cheat for his safety.

“I’ve never had a home-cooked meal before,” I say abruptly, which may not be what I was thinking of, but it’s not a lie. “It’s a first for me.” Thatcher rests his hands on the edge of the island just in front of me, a smirk on his lips. “You can add it to the list of firsts I’ve stolen from you, then.”

“My firsts. I saved them for you.”

“I think…” He trails off for a moment, as if to search for the right words. “I think I saved all my firsts for you, too.”

“Knowing all these hands have done, what they will continue to do—” He squeezes me as if to remind me. “—you aren’t afraid of them?” I should be. It would be normal to be afraid. “I can’t change for you, Lyra. This thing between us won’t change who I am.”

“But,” his chest expands as he releases a sigh, reaching the box towards me, “Valentine’s Day is your favorite holiday. So, consider this a thank-you.”

I’ve waited all my life for this. For him. For him to see me not as the girl who hid in the closet or the ghost he demanded I become but as a woman capable of standing at his side. A person who would weather storm after storm if it meant we came out of it together. His equal.

“What will I do?” “You’ll be just as you are right now,” he begins, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear. “Haunting me. Existing for me.”

Those three words dance on my tongue.

I never expected that I’d want to be hers, though. That I wanted to belong to her just as much as she belonged to me.

“Nothing about you could ever scare me, Lyra Abbott,” I mutter. “All your darkness is my own. We’re the same.”

“My father told me when I was young that if I ever felt, I had to kill it. That was how I remained perfect.” My other hand snakes around her waist, hauling her from the wall and into my body. “I wanted to kill what you stood for, what you did to me.”

“Every single time I saw you, I’d stare at this pretty little throat and think about the bruises I’d wanted to leave just so everyone would know who owned you. I wanted to hold you so tightly your ribs cracked. When you spoke to anyone else, I was half tempted to rip them apart. I wanted to ruin you, end you, just because I knew I could never fucking have you.”

“I don’t want to be perfect if it means I have to live without you.”

It’s primal, the way I dig the sharp edge into her flesh, carving the letter T into the softness of her back. She screams, pushing her ass into me as blood seeps from the mark.

“Your heart is racing,” she whispers, placing a hand over my chest as if to steady the thrumming in my chest. I laugh, pieces of my damp hair falling in front of my face. “No one told you? I don’t have one.” She smiles, bright and blinding. All Lyra and all mine. Her lips kiss the hickeys on my neck, and she preens beneath me, so proud of her claim on me, admiring the dried bloody hearts still staining my skin. My chest aches uncomfortably when she speaks again. “You can take mine.”

Maybe because I knew the only person who could explain what was happening to me would be May. I might’ve been able to

tell her about this sudden onset of what feels like the worst case of heartburn I’ve ever experienced, and she’d have an answer for how to treat it.

This one time, for May, I will do what I should have done while she was alive. “I wish you’d ask me to play something that tells you how I’ve been.” I trace the grooves of her name in the stone. “I’d play ‘Clair de lune’ ‘cause I know it was your favorite, and I would hope it would tell you that I miss you.”

But if anyone deserved more time, maybe even immortality, it would’ve been May. “I’ll find who did this to you, May. I was not the perfect grandson, but this? This I can promise you.”

“I just—” I pause, not sure how to say this, feeling a little crazy. “I just got you. Finally, after all these years, I have you. I’ve peeled layer after layer. And now I’ve made it inside here.”

Instead, I poke at his chest, just above his heart. “I’m in here now, and I’m scared of who you’ll be when you come out of there, Thatcher.”

“Henry Pierson does not control who I am anymore,” he replies, his tone adamant, as if he’s trying to make himself believe it.

I’m not sure who needs more convincing, me or himself. “Who I am, who I become, that has nothing to do with him anymore.” “He is the reason I lost everything. I will not lose you to him.”

“I swear, Thatcher, if he is the reason I lose you, I will kill him. Do you understand that?” I urge, pleading with him to comprehend what I’m capable of doing if something happens to him. “I will, do you hear me? I will⁠—”

“Don’t do this to me, please,” I beg.

“I’m doing this for you, Lyra,” he mutters, hands sliding down until he’s grabbing my ass with both hands. “If we want to make it out of this, I don’t have another choice.”

“If you forget who you are in there,” I whisper, swirling my hips against the bulge in his boxers, “remember what it feels like to be with me.” The left side of his mouth tilts up. “How could I ever forget?”

For him, I’d bleed. For him, it’s worth it.

“I think I knew you in a past life. Do you think that’s crazy?” My fingertips trace the lines of his collarbone. “No.” I can hear the smile in his voice. “But me wanting to know you in every life after this one might be.”

But I see her when we’re alone and how the fire burning within her is shivering to embers, withering away by the second,

and it’s fucking killing me. Her eyes are sad, and they don’t burn as bright. At night? She clings to me like it’s the last time she’ll ever touch me, every single night.

“I leave and you let Rook take the lead?” His voice is smoke, quiet, lingering. “You’ve lost your edge, Caldwell.” Welcome home, Silas.

My mother, my sweet, kind mother. You are in control, I repeat to myself. Inhaling through my nose, I tighten my jaw. You are in control. He does not own you. He did not make you.

“Did you do all of that for the sweet little Abbott girl?”

“There it is,” he breathes. “My beautiful, perfect monster. This is your birthright, Alexander. You can’t run from it. You and I are the same.” “We are nothing alike.”

“Careful, son. It looks like you’ve given her the power to end you.” He scoffs. “Lyra Abbott cannot fix what you were born to

become. She will run from it like they all do. No one will ever be able to love wha...

And if she is the reason for my downfall? So be it. I’d let her do it. Hand her the knife myself and let her finish this legacy. The Pierson line could die with me.

It could only ever be her that gave me my ending, because it had been me that gave Lyra her beginning.

“You were born this way. I only nurtured what was already there. I tried to make you into something great. It’s not my fault you failed.” He wipes the blood on his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Do you know how I repay you for all that nurturing you did, Dad? All your rules? All the cleaning?” I grab his face in my hand, squeezing his jaw between my fingers. “I kill men who are just like you. Sad. Pathetic. Weak-minded scum. I outsmart them, overpower them, I butcher them. Every single time I watch the light drain from their eyes, it’s always you on the table. When I skin them, remove their organs, it is always you dying at my hand.”

“You did not train a protégé. You created your demise.”

He knows the bonds that tied us together have collapsed, that I’m walking away and will never return. This is his final opportunity to lure me back in.

“Conner Godfrey.”