Master of Salt & Bones

by Keri Lake

Maybe that’s the reason they call him the Devil. Because the madness that breathes within these walls is as real as the man who feeds it.

“You’re my curse. Staying away from you, is like trying to hold my breath when the tide is rising.” His words dance around my head, the deep timbre of his voice titillating my senses. “I want to drown in you.”

“The way your body responds to my touch. Like the strings of a piano when the hammer strikes it. Every note of a song that I write. A song you keep begging me to play.”

“You said you love the torture. Now you don’t?” “I’m beyond torture. I’m on the brink of madness,” he says, in a voice that sounds like he’s on the verge of cracking.

“You feel that? Weeks of pent-up torment, all for you. Wear it like a fucking crown, because no other woman has made me come so much in my life.”

Besides that, the heart is a dangerous organ that isn’t meant to be free. Why else would God have built a cage for it?”

Perhaps I am a sadist, after all. I would’ve destroyed every last one of them for her. My raven beauty. My Isa bella.

“When you cut yourself with a blade, there’s an open wound, and blood and pain, but the pain comes to an end and the wound seals to a scar. So you cut yourself again and again, because you forget how much it hurt the first time. The heart is a different animal. A caged, lonely scavenger that feeds on its own wounds. Its scars never heal, because you can’t mend the very thing it needs to survive. So the wound continues to fester, until what’s left of the organ is eventually consumed by its own self-mutilation.”

“I’m not the devil they make me out to be. The heartless, callous monster. You can’t do this shit to yourself without feeling something. That’s the problem. I feel everything. I feel it very deeply.”

“There are darknesses in life and there are lights. You are one of the lights.”

“Because this is supposed to be filler, but you’re making me curious about the plot.”

The breath of new life. The steady pulse in my veins. The long-awaited beat of a heart that’s been dead too long. My kindred flame.

For me, the rules have always been simple: Never give into temptation Never show your cards Don’t fall in love With Isa, I broke all three.

“When you feel dead inside, you inevitably reach for things that make you feel alive. Pain. Adrenaline. Drugs. That’s how vices are born. That’s how you became my obsession. You are what makes me feel alive. Like a breath of air after drowning.”

“As fucked as I’ll be for saying this, I do love you, Isa.” My heart flutters in my chest, eyes stinging with tears, and I wrap my arms around his neck. “You are so fucked.”

I went in search of the villain, instead, and found him alone and in pain, living in a castle of bones. A darker version of my mother’s knight, whose armor had dents and cracks, and his hands sullied with blood. A broken man who tasted of salt and depravity, and who took me selfishly, without apology. He’s the curse my mother warned me about. The Devil of Bonesalt, the Mad Son, with whom I’ve fallen irrevocably in love.

Together, we are madness. And there is music in madness, and madness in love. It doesn’t matter what the world thinks of us. Because we’re the composers, the conductors of our own fate, and we write the notes to a beautiful, dark melody that no one else can hear.