A Deadly Vow (Fate of Vengeance, #1)

by J.D. Ronan

The dark did not fear what had come for me in the sun’s place—it bowed to it.

I was finely broken already. Death was not the relief I thought it would be, but life was still far too excruciating to bear. Not everyone had the strength to live with what haunted them. All I needed was one final push, and I could make it all go away—the voices, the pain.

I ached to feel what settled beneath my heart; a quietness against the rush of my mind. It searched for every opportunity to take the pain away, even if it was my life. It was so loud, even when I was entirely still. A melody that followed even when I did not know how to dance to the music. Emotions I had, but felt foreign to, because I did not feel like I deserved them.

It told me I could come home without grief. It did not matter what sins caused me to drown as the storm coupled with the sea.

My body had not been mine. The sunken realization my enemies knew it, too, that not even the core of my magic had ever been mine to possess. It was taken from me before I had the chance to fully mold it for my own.

Power was not synonymous with invincibility. I gave myself away like my body was dismantled, because it was the only thing I knew how to do. To give away my magic so I did not hurt anyone else but me and yet somehow, I had failed at that, too.

but right now I only cared about one thing. I had nothing else to lose when I never had anything to give. I only needed to survive long enough to take it, and I was going to keep taking until I got what I wanted.

“Wrath is what fuels me, but you will find it has a range that you are only beginning to discover.

“It feels almost forbidden, doesn’t it? How something so divine is hidden underneath, and that is what others will see when they look at us.”

There was no hesitation, no spark of fear when I sensed my power unfurl awake inside of me. At first it had been a gentle warmth, blooming in my core with its own hint of disbelief, tentatively exploring the boundaries of its broken cage, drawn out of exile. It reached for the base of its home it had been trapped within, but it was not enough. It had starved.

I had forgotten what it felt like to be in control. It was brief, and it made me feel alive. I would not let go of that this time.

“Fear,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “It is a wicked power, cunning in the sense that it drives us to control things we do not understand. We mold it until we cage it in the form of something we can accept, that we can look at every day and make peace with.

It was not the dark that I feared, but what I became as I wrapped myself within it. The light that was still left within me cowered as the whispers sang to me in the dark. It flooded my veins as it rattled the cage, challenging me to escape the careful mold I struggled to contain it in. It was too much.

It was the stars who believed in the dark when the earth had feared it, but it was darkness that made the stars shine the brightest—together they found a home in each other’s orbit.

She radiated with a humored bliss that I did not want to disturb with my presence. I wanted to fall into the shadows so I could continue to hear her laugh, even if it was at my expense.

I would not take this part of her, and I longed to see her detain it until it became solely hers, this bright part of her soul that exuded a foreign sensation within my own. As it washed over me, I closed my eyes and prayed that one day I would feel it again. Even just for a moment.

because someone like me could not hold such a breakable thing as happiness. I shattered it, every time.

The absence I sensed in the places he had authored within my soul terrified me; I had not known it was being written.

The empty feeling it caused tunneled deeper, turning me into the hollow weapon I had once told myself I would not be. It hurt too much; I felt too much.

I hoped to never encounter whatever evil that made him produce such a sadistic grin.

I wanted to believe there was good in her, but what good was there to return to if I did not remember who I had been? Deprivation of the soul was its own form of poison, the only source I had to drink from, and it starved me anyway. So, I became what they had caged me for, but they never expected me to get out.

It was not anger that had fueled the darkness I had hid myself within, but soul shattering grief as I accepted my fate.

A life where I was not bound to fear but conquered it daily on the tightline. Each step was scarier than the first, hell beneath my feet.

I have never feared death, but I have always feared living. Living meant I had hope, and hope has always been a far heavier burden than death. There would be nothing for me to regret if I never allowed my desire to exist.

“You will not beg anyone, for anything, ever again. You will take what you want, and you will not feel sorry for it.”