Marrow

by Trisha Wolfe

To anyone who dreamt of someone who would burn the world for them, who loved the villain, who rooted for the dark souls in their fairy tales… We hope Jack and Kyrie ignite your beautiful black hearts. “Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.” — Alice Hoffman “I would die for her. I would kill for her. Either way, what bliss.” — Gomez, The Addams Family

By the time we’re standing at the gates of damnation, Jack Sorensen will beg me to throw him to the Devil. I will paint our path to Hell with his blood. With his dreams. His aspirations. His failures, each one rendered by my hand. I will leave a trail of his destruction behind us that will shine for all eternity. And I will enjoy every fucking second of his torturous journey…

am the sun whose light reflects on his cold, remote mask. And I am the celestial fire that will destroy him.

“Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they’re in the game.”

I find it difficult to believe I’d simply forget someone as memorable as Kyrie.

My gaze settles on the vase of flowers across the steel room. The Himalayan blue poppies frozen in time, the color of the petals preserved at the exact beautiful shade of her eyes.

This entire time, she wasn’t dead. She’s not the dead one at all. She’s been what’s sustained me here. She’s the marrow. She’s my marrow. Kyrie didn’t start as a killer—she was made. And I helped make her.

I should fight back against this magnetic force. But it’s like trying to think your way free of gravity, or to stand unmoving in the swell of a tsunami.

He wants to find my weaknesses and crush me with them. And what better way to destroy a person than to fill their heart and then crack it in half.

Like he’s taking something forbidden. Like he craves me.

I will keep coming back, forever the unquenchable fire that clashes with his indestructible darkness.

three souls claimed on the twenty-fifth floor.

The exact opposite of me, actually. She’s the light to my dark.” I trace the pad of my finger along the shaded curve of her cheek. “And I don’t think I can do any of this without her now.”

But the decisive difference is that I wouldn’t just kill for Kyrie—I would give my life. Hell, I’d even let her take it.

“Not to say he won’t come to peep in your windows.” The black door closes behind me and locks. “If he does, I’ll fucking flay the skin from his face and feed it to him,” Jack says. “And they claim romance is dead.”

Lol

“You are a bright and blinding light in the dark. Luminous. And I’m sorry I made you feel like anything less than that.”

I was made what I am in one night and the days of pain that followed. I wasn’t born and raised this way. I’ve loved and been loved, and lost it all.

When I couldn’t get her blue eyes out of my head, I bred my Himalayan blue poppies to match the exact shade of her striking irises, my entire greenhouse a shrine to her beauty.