For She Is Wrath

by Emily Varga

Or perhaps I needn’t have done anything. Perhaps he always had the capacity to do this to me, and I was too in love with him to see it.

The weak feed from fear.

The problem when someone you loved betrayed you was that you had a lifetime of good memories with them that you had to examine in a different light. What was once a safe place to be—beside him, engulfed in his arms, inhaling the smell of rainstorms and pine—was actually the most dangerous place of all.

“You know I’d follow you anywhere, Dani.” Something twisted in my heart, and I was suddenly robbed of breath in a way that had nothing to do with the battle.

“It’s hotter than Thohfsa’s asshole out here. Why are we wearing so many layers?”

He’d finally become the villain he’d been so eager to destroy. The man who crushed down desperate people, who betrayed the girl who loved him for power, who became a cold monster, incapable of compassion.

“You live in a palace, not a prison. You have the world at your fingertips.” I smiled, hoping it wasn’t too brittle. “It’s your own fault if you choose to feel confined.”

You told me to tell you something true, but the only lie I could ever tell is how much you matter to me. Because it scares me too much to tell you that.”

He leaned toward me, his face now serious. I breathed him in, the crispness of a mountain forest in the morning, the comfort of a thick quilt while waiting out a storm.

would read you like a novel. From cover to cover, learning everything about you.” He tilted his head. “Leisurely, only taking me out when you felt like it?” I snorted. “Is that how you read your novels, Mazin? How uninspiring. No, I mean in a fierce frenzy, by candlelight, devouring you until I finished every page and committed it to memory, and then I’d flip right back to the front and start again from the beginning.”

“I’d read you like scripture, a prayer. And all the worship I felt, I’d heap at your feet.”

“A knife goes with every outfit.”

A history of women and girls being wronged by men who never had any consequences. Now I would be the consequences. “I choose vengeance. I choose death. And in the end, that’s what you chose too.”

“What is your revenge costing you?”

“Did you think I wouldn’t know you? I’d know you with any face. Any skin. Any hair. A thousand djinn could disguise you from me and I’d still be able to find you just by the sound of your breath.”

“You are like me and your mother. You were forged in the fires of hatred too, made new by your revenge.

Was this who I would have become? Was this the future that awaited me? A woman wretched and shriveled with her need for vengeance? No. Not anymore. You had to choose to become this, to forsake all joy in favor of destruction.

“Winning the battle isn’t about skill, Dania. It’s about heart.”

You may have given him forgiveness, but that doesn’t mean you owe him kindness.”