To Flame a Wild Flower (Crystal Bloom, #3)

by Sarah A. Parker

The cold inside my chest is so big and heavy. But I like this cold—it feels slow and quiet. Better than my dreams that are hot and hurting. This cold feels like it has an end. Somewhere.

My memories … they’re a splat of black. A scribbled drawing that makes no sense.

I’m someone else. Someone happy … I think. But I don’t know where my giggles went. What is this big blackness I can’t stop slipping into?

“I know the hurt is loud, but it won’t always be.” He holds my hands, like they’re butterflies caught in a warm hug. “One day it’ll stop screaming at you. It’ll become nothing more than a whisper.”

It’s the whispers that scare me most. There’s so many of them, and they’re always there, speaking to each other. Speaking to me.

Maybe I should let that huge hole in my chest gobble them up. Maybe the horrible dreams would stop. The ones where I hear those same voices but from real people that always end up b...

I don’t know why he’s telling me not to cry when he has tears on his cheeks, too. “I’ll be here for you.” His voice is rougher than it was before, and his smile loses shape. “Always.”

My voice is broken glass. It’s a tree splintered at the base, now strewn across the ground with flames licking its spindly branches. It’s regret. Sorrow. Grief.

A nightmare. A terrible, devastating nightmare where I heard terrible truths and did terrible things.

This horrid reality doesn’t dissolve. I don’t wake in sweaty sheets with a scream splintering my throat.

The voice that tears up my throat is not my own, but a hundred others wrestling free with the force of shattered glass. It’s anger, fear, sorrow. It’s all my heartache and hurt honed into sharp bits that cut.

I don’t want to hurt anymore. To feel. I want nothing—blissful, empty nothing that doesn’t coax me to think about the horrible thing I did. Because this isn’t a nightmare at all.

I blink, freeing the warm tears that had gathered in my eyes, feeling heavy but light. Hollow but full. Broken but whole. Nothing.

Nothing is everything I never knew I needed.

Rescue this life. Make her safe. A task. A tiny, quivering task. Something for me to focus on. A faint beacon in this shadowy pall.

She should be back by now, on her knees, begging for my forgiveness. She’ll see how easy it can be once she gives herself to me completely. I’ll prove to her that I’m better than him—that I’m everything she’s ever dreamed of—and she will love me for it. Truly love me.

Ew.

Orlaith is more than just a political pawn to me. I don’t want to let her go. If the Gods find her unworthy of being my High Mistress, I’ll have her in a different way. Any way.

Probably, but I want Orlaith. Want the fire she ignites in me. The fearless gleam in her eyes. Want her to look at me the way she looks at him. For her to fall in love with the way I fucking consume her.

Big feelings can wound. They can stab you in the chest while you’re sleeping.

He’s a lightning bolt of life—electrifying my heart and forcing it to beat faster.

He may have been a monster hewn from a dark and bloody era, he may have been a murderer once upon a time, but he was my monster. Mine.

He saw the worst parts of me. My weakness. My ugly secret. He saw the full, unguarded horror of my monstrous mistake. My horrendous confession—unwittingly given from a guilty subconscious that was overflowing with all the lives I’d taken. He saw me … yet he still came to Bahari. Stood before me and absorbed my blows. Tried to sponge my pain and stop me from hurting myself. Me? I took one look at his monster and murdered him.

buckle, fold around the hurt, scramble to collect those thorny vines with torn and bloody hands, a feeble attempt to contain their sawing rampage. It’s useless. There’s too many broken bits. Too many cutting thorns. Too many mistakes and unsaid words sitting on my chest like a jagged, unscalable mountain.

I’ll never be able to go back to that terrible, terrible moment and make a different choice. We’ll never experience the beauty without all the pain. I’ll never be able to look him in the eye and tell him I hear his silent words.

I don’t want to run anymore. To push him away. Hurt him, or myself. I want to pull him so close that all sense loses shape, our mistakes a bony battlefield to build our castle upon. One that’s not pretty or extravagant, but deep and dark and a little bit broken. Too late.

I’m without anguish, sorrow, regret. I’m without the shades of right and wrong and the gray smudge in between. Without the warm dawn of hope or the cold drop of fear. I’m without fingers to tangle with truths that no longer matter. Without hands that hold and caress and hurt. Without the substance left to snap. I’m without breath to fill lungs that no longer exist. Without tight skin to keep me contained. Without blood to drip. To spill or drain or splat or stain. To gift. I’m without … Him.

“I don’t want to feel.” The words flow without shape or heart or the will to sink their roots into soil. Without the petals of hope, happiness, sadness, grief … Empty as my empty heart—confirmed by a mighty, unfathomable entity. Cawed words that call me now.

“I k-killed … your … promised …” “And now you’re stuck with me,” she murmurs. “Hopefully my superior communication skills will save me from getting stabbed in the heart.”

I’ve never felt so raw. So vulnerable. So fucking lost.

Rhordyn showed me what I really am. Kissed me like I was his salvation. Told me he would try harder. Too late.

Revenge is a meal I’m determined to feast on—the only thing powerful enough to keep my mind occupied.

It was in the casual way he’d dressed, like he was paring back one of his many hard layers, giving me a glimpse of a softer side. He was trying.

Just roll like a tumbleweed until I find somewhere to ground myself. To ease this restless energy. Dirt makes everything better.

I close my eyes, biting down on a scream threatening to charge through my teeth as my thorny emotions spike, slash, and saw. I reach for the sheath wrapped around my thigh—hating myself. Hating the fact that Cainon’s my voice of reason in this fucked-up moment.

My wild, unruly emotions … they’re just as savage as my caustic blackness. Just as deadly.

You’re not on top unless you’re a God, and even they can fall.

Perhaps, like me, she spins circles to escape the noise in her own head.

Nobody stirs as I drift past, their dreams perhaps a better place to be than the horrors of their reality.

I’ll be a monster—for her. For them.

Despite the prickly ache deep inside my chest, I find myself sadistically proud of her perfect shot. Nice try.

The cold, carnal violence inside me roars, and my fangs slide down, murderous rage crackling through my veins … He. Fucking. Bit her.

I don’t hate you at all … The whispered echo of her words are the breath of air I can’t pull. They’re sun on my face, and the smell of spring crushed against me. They’re a warm, comforting hand escorting me into the eternal shadow of a bitterly cold oblivion I’ve grown too familiar with.

Another raindrop strikes my lips with a splash of cold that shivers through me. The sky is crying. I want to scream. Tell it to stop. To not waste its tears on me. Tell it I deserve this burden.

I would be relieved if I could feel anything at all, but my mind’s a graveyard littered with the bones of too many people I knew and loved. Lost.

I uncork each jar and sprinkle the contents upon the wooden trestle tables—a pretty, morbid offering to the only God I worship. The only God who has the power to bring justice to this fucked-up, unbalanced world. Death.

“Without an end, loss stacks upon your chest like stones. The loss of your home, your loved ones, your mind. I have watched both the making and breaking of my kind, and through it all, I have come to realize that mortality is a gift. Those with endless life end up destroying themselves,” he says, face etched with sorrow. “Or others.”

I can’t afford another mistake. Another weakness. There’s too much on the line.

I step from tragedy to tragedy, toting death like tombstones collecting beneath my ribs. And I realize with heartbreaking finality that I got the wrong monster in that jungle. I got the wrong one.

I tighten my grip on the talon as the world begins to blur, Orlaith’s past words grating across my heart. My soul. I just love you so much it hurts.

You’re the happily ever after I don’t deserve.