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

by Monty Jay

I don’t miss him, the way you miss a pair of shoes that you grew out of, a memory of a glowing summer, or even a pet you’d lost. I do not miss him. He is missing from me.

My heart and soul were never mine. They had always been his, and now they belong to no one. They are lost, forgotten, alone.

I warned them what I would become if they took him from me. Now there is no need to fear the reaper. They should fear the woman who loves him.

That’s the thing about love. It doesn’t care if you’re toxic. If their parent murdered yours, or he’s incapable of feeling. Love doesn’t care because it takes you over. It consumes you, eats at you, and leaves you barren. It does what it wants. It takes what it needs, and it doesn’t care what it does when it leaves.

It’s easy to stand out amongst the world of the living, but Lyra, sweet Scarlett, she is life that spins through graveyards. A face that echoes across the dead. Beauty so divine death can’t bring himself to touch her.

Do you know what it’s like to go your entire life and never know gentle? How to be kind? Then you meet someone who is overflowing with it, and suddenly, you can’t be anything but soft just for them?

You were a reminder of what my father wanted me to become,” I tell her candidly. “Until one day, you weren’t.” “And now? What am I a reminder of now?” “All the things I can never have.”

“Darling.” He traces the front of his white teeth with his tongue, a starved animal ready to feast. “I’d rid the world of men who breathe the same air as you.”

Lyra likes to believe she is nothing but death and darkness, but inside her is a soul made to love people.

I’m trying, to no avail, to keep her at a distance so I don’t have to admit that she scares me. A man who fears nothing is afraid of all she is. All she makes me want. All she makes me feel.

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.

When you live your life in black and white, it’s impossible to not be tainted by someone who exists in full color.

If it makes me weak to crave her, then let me be weak. Being strong means nothing if I can’t have her.

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

“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.”

There isn’t a thing in the world I wouldn’t risk for her, including myself. I would blaze through hell to get back to her if they tried to take her.

ugh rook the man you are

I’d always been comfortable in the darkness; I’d been born in it. But now? I don’t know how to live in a world without the light she gives.

and alistair too, ugh 🥹

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.

We are two halves of a broken hole. Two mangled people trying to find solace in all the darkness we’d been given.

“I guess you’re not interested in playing the good guy? The hero?” she snips. I laugh, cold and distant. “Not when morally gray looks this good on me.”

If she wanted my heart, I’d give it to her. She could keep it on a shelf in one of her jars—it was never mine to begin with. Not when it’s always been hers.

“Death is trivial. He can’t keep you from me. I’ll follow you to the grave every time and find you in each life after.”