A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood, #1)

by S.T. Gibson

I wonder if you would have wanted me if you found me like that: vibrant and loved and alive.

If I had refused you, would you have left me there? Or was I already marked for you, my cooperation merely a bit of formality?

You pushed me to the brink of death but refused to let me slip over the edge. Slowly, slowly bleeding me dry with the restraint only centuries taught.

“Vengeance?” I whispered, the word harsh and electrifying on my tongue. It sounded biblical, apocalyptic, beyond the grasp of human experience.

I knew then I would chase your tiny moments of weakness all the way into hell and back. What is more lovely, after all, than a monster undone with wanting?

There wasn’t any room to examine the past or the future; there was only the eternal now.

And the best way to survive, I believed, was to surrender myself to you with total abandon and adoration.

I think I could have loved her, if I was given a chance.

I realized with shattering terror that I had no idea who I was if you were not at my side.

Whenever we were apart, you left your essence caught in my hair, in my clothes. I scented the taste of it on the wind, I shivered and ached for it. I could think of nothing but you the entire time you were gone, until you returned to me.

Just another one of the many details of your life you guarded jealously, forbidding me the indecency of a simple inquiry.

Lying with her made me feel so vibrantly alive. It was almost enough to make me forget that I was already dead.

I had never so much as seen the inside of this box, but I knew it was cherished by you, because I was forbidden from going near it.

The force of your love nearly drove me to my knees. I was no woman; I was merely a supplicant, a pilgrim who had stumbled across your dark altar and was doomed to worship at it for ever.

It always amazed me how you could play victim and aggressor at the same time.

Love is violence, my darling; it is a thunderstorm that tears apart your world. More often than not, love ends in tragedy, but we go on loving in the hope that this time, it will be different.

I had a weakness for weakness, just like you.

In that moment, a thin fracture ran through my heart that has never been repaired. It was a wound in the shape of Alexi’s name, and I scarcely knew how to hold all that feeling inside me.

All the enthusiasm of youth with none of the wisdom and caution of age.

We were witnessing a rebirth, after all, a dark baptism into a new and unending life.

“We cannot exist only for each other!”

I was tired of the circumference of the whole universe living in your circled arms, of the spark of life hiding in your kiss, of the power of death lying in wait in your teeth.

Nothing existed beyond the range of your exacting gaze, not even me. I was simply a non-entity when you weren’t looking at me, an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the sweet water of your attention.