“I’m your monster,” I said as he pulled back, the words quietly torn from the depths of me and an echo of what he’d once said to me. It felt like an admission—like telling him my deepest secret of the creature who lingered there. I’d tried not to look too closely at her, at the mix of scales and darkness and flesh that comprised her very being. She wasn’t human, but she wasn’t an animal either. And though her eyes were larger and gleamed with golden light … Her face was mine.
