Rot

by Candace Wondrak

I was eight years old when I watched a classmate drown at my birthday party.

Charles Bovine, the Bedlam Butcher. He liked to break into people’s houses and kill them when they slept.

The rot was a curious thing. Unable to be seen, one could only feel it. Some days I sat in school, daydreaming, picturing it bubbling up inside of me. When my anger snapped and I lashed out, I imagined it was the rot doing it, not me. The rot. The decay. The blackening of my soul.

“You’re a small girl, Sloane. You’d be so easy to break, I wouldn’t even have to try.”

did miss all the extra space, the extra items of clothing I’d never wear in a million years but still had anyway. The waste. The gluttony. The greed.

“You don’t know me well yet, but here’s your first lesson: I always get what I want.”

Oh, Elias. You’re making it too easy. Come on, be a challenge. Show me what you got.

If you spoke to my grandmother, you’d know that the rot was the worst thing in this world, the thing that made empires crumble and men and women alike turn to sin and depravity.

That’s all I was there for; to learn how they acted so I, in turn, knew how to act.

Be a chameleon. Change myself however I needed to. I wasn’t good at it when I was younger, but I was better now.

If I had someone on my side, it was better than no one, and guys were a lot easier to manipulate—or so I’d been told.

“I don’t try to be.” In all my life, the one thing I didn’t care to be was funny.

We’d all die eventually. There was no point in being scared of it. There was nothing more natural, nothing more magnificently beautiful than the cold, unflinching embrace of death itself.

What was the point in pretending not to? So much in life would be so much simpler if everyone cut through the bullshit and said what they meant.

Strangers should be worried about talking to me.

Or was it a memento for a choice he’d made when he was out hunting, alone, with his father?

You couldn’t get worse than me. My soul had been born black, and it had only served to taint everything around it until now.

Someone like me wasn’t destined for fairytales and a boring life. I wasn’t meant for the sweet or the sugary. No. I was at home in the darkness, with the rot in me, so it was only natural that I’d be drawn to it in someone else, regardless of who it was.

I dreamed someone was watching me, and that someone was Elias.

“You’re poison, aren’t you?”

I think, maybe, little Sloane had gotten her first crush on something that wasn’t death.

Maybe I wanted him to care more than he did. Maybe he really did just find me annoying, a poison.

I could move to the middle of nowhere and exist however nature intended me to.

Silly boy. The rot didn’t let you plan out your life with meticulous detail. It made you live in the now, in the current moment, and it made you do things that would jeopardize any hope of a future.

Those were things the rot wondered, not normal girls. Sometimes, though, the rot won. The rot came out the victor. Try and pretend as I may, I was no normal girl. I never would be. That fact had set in quite early in my youth, separated me from my peers.

Crying meant you felt pain or guilt or remorse, and the rot made sure I felt none of that.

“Did you fuck him? Did you let that asshole between your legs?” The words were practically growled out, as if he was some kind of animal. “Did you give him all of your firsts?”

Then again, weeks were long enough to change everything.

“You’re not going to see Jordan again,”

“Because I said so. Because that’s what I want. Because—”

“—you don’t get to come here, interrupt my life, act like you own the fucking place, and do whatever you want. No.”

Fine, but when you’re here, you’re mine.”

“You’re mine until I say you’re not. Every single part of you.”

I’d given my first kiss to an idiot while trying to make a god jealous.

fucked me like he needed me, like I was the answer to all the prayers he hadn’t even spoken yet.

“You wanted me to go fucking crazy watching you with Jordan Vito? Because I did. I watched. I lost my shit. I listened to you come upstairs and go to bed, like you did nothing wrong. I paced my fucking room while imagining my hands wrapping around Jordan’s neck and squeezing the life out of him,” Elias murmured. “And then I imagined doing the same to you.”

“Is that what you want? Is that what you do? Get into someone’s head and make them go insane? Because that’s what you’re doing to me, Sloane. That’s what you’re doing to me.”

It was pointless to wonder these things, because you could never change the rot in you. Once it had infected you and found a home inside you, you were nothing but a slave to it.

A feeling I understood. Hate and love were two sides of the same coin. You never had one without the other.

“The next time I’m inside you,” he murmured, “I’m not pulling out.”

I’d tell him he had no right to tell Sloane Karnagy what to do. No one did.

I’d get what I wanted, mark my words.

Looks really were one of the most important weapons a girl had at her disposal.

Being underestimated was good, because then your enemies could never predict your next move.

You either swam or you sank; there was no in between.

They’d find out I didn’t play like that. I never had.

I can’t even think about Dana now that I know the sounds you make.”

“So tight. I want you to look at me when I’m fucking you, Sloane.”

“You’re mine, Sloane,” Elias groaned out, his eyelids narrowed into slits as he watched me take his cock like a good girl. “Mine. No one else gets to wet their dick in you. Not Jordan. No one.”

“Such a desperate little slut for me. It’s like you can’t control yourself. Fuck yourself on my fingers, Sloane. Come for me again like the good little slut you are.”