Master of Salt & Bones

by Keri Lake

“That the man is madder than a hatter. Why else would they call him The Mad Son.”

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.”

“You’re mine. And I would never hurt what’s mine.”

“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.”

“Because divorce is messy. And expensive. 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?”

Thoughts of her story from earlier come to mind, the way my body reacted to her distress, tense and shaking with anger. There’s more to what happened that night, something she’s leaving out, but I didn’t push it. I wanted to punish those who put the panic and fear in her eyes, while she spoke through detached words, trying to convince me that she left that party unscathed. I know better than that. A girl doesn’t sleep with a blade under her pillow and cut up her arms in the name of a friend. I don’t care how close they were. Those boys hurt her, too, and in turn, I wanted to hurt them—still do.

“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.” A quote from the book. He turns his eyes to mine, and I swear there’s a flickering flame in them. “The light of all lights.” He leans into me. “For the record, I read quite a bit.”

“I think I’m in love with you, Lucian Blackthorne. And you don’t have to say it back to me.”

“As fucked as I’ll be for saying this, I do love you, Isa.”