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

by S.T. Gibson

This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. I suppose both are a sort of gentle violence, putting down in ink what scorches the air when spoken aloud.

It was never my intention to murder you. Not in the beginning, anyway.

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

You did not let me keep my name, so I will strip you of yours. In this world, you are what I say you are, and I say you are a ghost, a long night’s fever dream that I have finally woken up from. I say you are the smoke-wisp memory of a flame, thawing ice suffering under an early spring sun, a chalk ledger of debts being wiped clean. I say you do not have a name.

There are no angels in this world to accompany the dying in their final moments, only pickpockets and carrion birds.

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?

At the time I thought it felt like a womb, nurturing and soft-edged. Now I only remember it as the tomb where we slept through our living death.

think, my lord, that this is when you loved me best. When I was freshly made, and still as malleable as wet clay in your hands.

In my mind, I was God’s lovely angel of judgment, come to unsheathe the sword of divine wrath against those who truly deserved it.

I wouldn’t realize until later that you were irritable precisely because I was in bloom, because there were suddenly so many sources of joy in my life apart from your presence.

I touched you the way I would touch any other man, trying to make my eager presence known and inscribe some sense of intimacy between us. But it was like grasping at a flame. I never penetrated to the burning heart of you, only came away with empty, scorched fingers.

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.

“It would be easier if he hated us,” she said. “But he loves us all terribly. And if we go on letting him love us, that love is going to kill us. That’s what makes him so dangerous.”