day seems like a strange time to die, but that’s when the horrible sound of her breathing stops.
When she’s so relaxed she leaves me completely alone, as if it had been so much effort to stay with me as long as she did. Every piece of art I’ve ever made flashes in front of me—empty, empty. There’s nothing to explain the hollowness of this room.
The hollowness of my heart.
All that protesting did not accomplish anything—I couldn’t save the library. I couldn’t save my mother. I hold her hand where it rests on the bed, and it’s still warm. A lie, because she’s gone. Her body is still. Her chest does not rise and fall.
Eventually the nurse comes and makes the machine stop beeping. She puts her hands on my shoulder, but she doesn’t insist that I leave. That must be part of the Death Plan, which suddenly strikes me as funny.
I start laughing, and then Christopher is there. “Harper,” he says.
“You’re a dream. You aren’t real.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and it sounds like he means it. Like he’s really sorry that I’m alone, even though he’s the one who made me this way.
“Why didn’t you come?” I say, my words garbled by the grief in my throat, the tears in my eyes. The black in my heart. “You should have come. She asked you to. She wanted you to.”
“She didn’t,” he says with a sigh that is a thousand years old.
I hit his chest with my fists, but he may as well be made of granite. Granite like his eyes. Black and hard and cold. “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”
He lets me hit him until I collapse. His arms are around me, and I shatter.
The house is dark when Christopher’s car pulls into the drive. How many times have I come here after working late in the library? I shouldn’t have been in the library, though. It wasn’t safe, which feels ridiculous right now. Who cares about safety? Death is inevitable.
I’m Scarlett come home after the war, the place a husk of its former self. The walls aren’t blackened with fire, but they might as well be. The house rings hollow.
Christopher puts me to bed with gentle insistence, undressing me like I’m a child. I press my face into his chest and breathe deep, taking comfort I don’t deserve from his scent. My mouth opens to taste him, to bite him. I would swallow him whole if I could, but he sets me back an inch. “Not tonight,” he says, and I hiss at him like an animal.
“Yes, tonight.” This is when I need him—rough and animalistic. If he won’t hurt me then I’ll hurt him. It’s the only thing that makes sense in this topsy turvy night. It’s the only thing I can trust.
I grasp his shirt and press myself against him, my lips mashing his. It’s isn’t graceful or seductive. There’s a violence inside me that needs to get out. I bite at his lips, but it seems to work. It seems to work because his breath catches. His body goes stock still—not in the way where he’s fighting me.
He’s still in the way where he’s fighting himself.
I give him a rough shove, and he lets himself step back. “Fight me,” I say, panting.
A low growl. “You don’t want this.”
I want it to stop hurting inside me, and maybe if he hits me, maybe if he hurts me, I won’t be able to feel the ache on the inside anymore. All I need is one minute of relief. All I need is one minute to forget. I step forward and raise my hand—he catches my wrist.
His face is in an inch from mine. “You don’t want this,” he says again, but this time it doesn’t sound like concern for me. It sounds like a threat, and my body responds with a rush of adrenaline. My heart pounds ten thousand seconds in the time it takes him to let me go.
And then I’m on him, climbing his body, knocking him to the floor. He cushions my fall with his body, his grunt half pain, half pleasure. I scratch my nails down his chest, and even through the fabric of his shirt I know I’ve drawn blood. A sound escapes me—something angry and grieving and wild.
He should be scared of me right now. I’m a little scared of this. God knows Sutton would be; he only ever treated me like a lady. Skittish like his beautiful