Kindle Notes & Highlights
My chest cracks. I see her and all I can think is mine.
My face is smeared in blood—mine, theirs, doesn’t matter, but my eyes are locked on hers. They always have been. Always fucking will be. Nobody touches what’s mine. Nobody takes her from me.
Time to walk straight into whatever the night’s waiting to feed me to.
Watched her breathe, eat, exist—mine, even when she thought she was free.
And I was content to let her. To let her live the life I bled to give her. Until him.
I was always going to come back. Always. The second she let another man’s hands, and mouth, anywhere near what’s mine, hell itself shoved the door open and begged me to walk through.
And with the veil split thin for the first time since that night, there’s not a single fucking thing that can stop me. Not God. Not Devil. Not her tears or her lies. She’s mine, and I’m going to make her remember it.
The air is thick with her—decay made pretty, death made soft. Everything in here whispers the same thing I already know—she was never meant to smell clean. She was meant to smell like me.
The teeth of the mask glint in the moonlight. Something about the curve of the bone, the shape of the jaw, it hits me like a punch. My stomach twists. My knees threaten to buckle. Nathan. The skull on his face isn’t just some relic. It’s Nathan’s.
His laughter follows—ragged, wrecked, echoing through the corn. “Run harder, bonepetal! I want that little body shaking when I pin you. I’ll lick the sweat off your spine while you cry out for a god that isn’t watching. Only I am. Only I ever was.”
“You forgot who you belong to,” he whispers. “You forgot who bled for you. Who died for you.”
“What came back isn’t Finn. Not the boy you loved. What came back is a monster, a man who burned and rotted, who screamed through fire while you let another put his hands where only I ever should’ve been. A man who clawed his way out of the grave to drag you back where you belong—under me.”
“Say it. My name. Again. Louder. I don’t want the living to hear you, Salem, I want the dead clawing in their graves for what’s mine.”
