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“You’re gorgeous when you’re unhinged,”
She stares at me like I’m her lifeline. Like I’m her only hope of not being torn to shreds. But I will always ground her. I will always remind her of who she is. Because I see her. I always fucking have.
“Good fucking girl.”
That’s the thing with trauma to the body—it shows up instantly. In breaks and bruises, in burns and in blood. But the trauma on the inside, that’s harder to see. It creeps around your mind, poisons you with disquiet. It can hit you out of nowhere, debilitating and ruinous. There are no marks visible for those. None, save the shadows in your eyes.
When you hit rock bottom, you feel it. You break down, walls crumbling until you’re free-falling. The feelings that you tried to run from suddenly rush up around you in an unstoppable force, the gravity of your thoughts now nothing but a punishing plunge.
I can choose to stay stagnant here, at the bottom of the cliff, broken and unmoving. I can rage, I can wallow, I can blame, I can hide. I can let the severed parts of me sever all the rest. Or I can get up, dust myself off, and look back up. I can find a path that ensures I’ll never fall again, ensures that I don’t lose any more parts of myself. All I have to do is turn and follow my feet, one step at a time.
Perhaps things are born from trauma. An anger. A clarity. A beast.
Maybe none of us truly know our own strength. Not until the world has hacked away at us. But the point is, we aren’t strong because of our trauma. We were always strong to begin with. We just needed to figure it out for ourselves.
You never notice what’s keeping you balanced until you realize you’re not standing straight anymore.
“No longer live the king.”
“Oh, Goldfinch, I’d follow you to the end of the world and tip right off the edge, all because of a crook of your finger.”
“You are priceless. You are worth more than gold. And the world owes you so much more than what you’ve been given.”
How can I deny him? He’s here. He’s not walking away, no matter how hard I’ve pushed. No matter how little I deserve him. From the very beginning, he’s always seen every part of me.
“If you’re a villain...then I’ll be a villain with you.”
“I’m finally going to tell you why they really call me Rip.”
“Oh, Goldfinch. I would’ve found you in whatever world you were in. In whatever life.”
With the right person, there is power when you kneel. There is adoration with submission. There is balance with control.
“That’s what you are, you know that? Fucking perfect.”
“Maybe I need to remind them of why no one fucks with King Rot.”
“One person’s pain doesn’t negate another’s. Our heartaches are not competition, but the bridge to empathy. So that we can look at one another and know that on some level, we understand. That’s one beautiful thing about grief, I think. That sometimes, we can find someone in the world to look at from the other side of the bridge of our torments and know that we are not alone.”
But my song of home doesn’t come from the sun. Mine comes from her.
But maybe that’s just what home is. A feeling.
“Women in this world have to be more careful. Perceived reputations can be life or death.”
“But remember, Auren. Your body—your pleasure—you gave it to me. So I will be there, wherever you decide you need to be. At a pub. In a sea. On a bed. I’ll be there with you. Watching you. Joining you. You are mine, and I am yours, and whatever pleasure you seek, I will be there to watch you get it, and I will feed it to you tenfold afterward because you are mine, and I will see that you get what you need.”
“Did you forget about him?” I ask with a smirk. “Because when he gets here, not even your gods will be able to save you.”
I’ll be the villain for you. He is the epitome of death and revenge. The personification of rage.
