Then the bar was gone, and in front of me was the tattooed man, his face snarling. I snapped my fist across his face. The sound of bone snapping. Waves of shadow darkened my vision, made it impossible for me to see anything except in flashes.
My fists. Blood. More blood. Pouring from his nose, his split lip.
Pain, total blackness. My ears ringing.
We were on the ground, me on top of him. The woman was screaming behind me, pulling at my shirt.
“Get off of him! Get off of him!”
The shadow laughing, laughing at me as I swung my fists down over and over again. I did not care about the pain in my knuckles. Gone were the guilt, the uncertainty, the irritation. In their place came pure satisfaction.
Bones shattered. The zygomatic bone under the eyes. The infraorbital—oh, god, it felt good. The crack, the shudder, the bursting blood vessels. Blood everywhere, washing the shadow away. Then somebody pulled me off of him, and before I could fight back I was outside of the bar, panting hard, blood running down my knuckles.
Feeling supremely unfulfilled.
Kat
I tried the door as soon as he left. I had replaced doors before, but he had sealed the pins holding the hinges in place.
In the closet, I scrounged for anything that could help. A hammer, a screwdriver, anything. The shelf at the top of the closet was too high for me to reach. I grabbed the armchair from the side of the bed and dragged it over. On tiptoe, my fingers searched the shelf and hit something hard.
A toolbox? My body tensed as I found a grip on the edge of the box.
I pulled the wood box out and immediately knew it wasn’t what I was looking for. A cherry colored wood, smooth and polished to a shine.
Curious, I sat down in the chair with the box on my lap. Inside, there were a few pairs of earrings, necklaces, rings. And a photo. I picked up the photo and turned it over.
A young boy with dark hair and light eyes, holding the hand of a woman who looked just like him.
My face turned hot and I dropped the photo as quickly as if it had turned to fire. It fluttered back down into the jewelry box. A mistake. I shouldn’t have looked inside here. A sickness gripped my heart.
Although I had been locked up in here for days, now was the first time that I felt I had to escape. The room had turned warm, the air stifling.
Slam!
I jerked my head up. The door had crashed open and Gavriel was standing in the entryway. The jewelry box clattered to the floor as I started up to my feet, and the photo tumbled down after the heavier things. He stared, eyes wide.
His hair was damp with sweat. Blood dripped down his arms to the tips of his fingers. As I watched, a drop of blood fell to the floor. He had cuts along his knuckles, and his skin had taken on a pallor that made him look almost like a vampire. But his eyes were the scariest.
His eyes looked at me completely blankly, as though I was just a ghost. The same way he had looked at me before, when we’d first met. Like he was dead, or I was.
“What happened?” I asked. The question sounded ridiculous to me in the open air.
“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said. He walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at his hands. He flexed his fists, the cuts bleeding freely.
“What… what—”
“You were looking through my things.”
He stared up at me from the bed. He wasn’t accusing me. He wasn’t guilting me. He was simply stating a fact. It disarmed me completely. I fell to my knees and began to scoop up the jewelry. When I got to the photo, he was already there in front of me. His hand reached down and took it before I could.
Kneeling in front of me. Staring, that awful, beautiful stare. He captivated me. His fingers stained the picture with blood as his thumb moved along the edge.
Did you do it? I wanted to ask. I wondered how dark he truly was. I wondered if he was really a monster. But I couldn’t. And then, as though reading my mind, he responded.
“My father killed her.”
If I hadn’t already been sitting on the floor, I would have fallen to my knees in surprise. His eyes shone with tears, and when he blinked they streamed from the corners of his eyes down his cheeks.
“He was like me,” Gav continued. “He lived with a shadow over him. He was full of darkness.”
The words were wrenched from his throat, and he choked on the last, a sob stopping his throat. He bent his head.
“Go to the closet.”
His voice was flat. It would not tolerate disobedience. Shakily, I got to my feet and turned to the closet.
“There’s a smaller cardboard box near the one you found. Have you looked inside it yet?”
I shook my head. I didn’t trust my voice to speak.
“Reach up and find it.”
I stood up on the chair. The hot flush under my skin felt like burning now.
“Do you have it?”
I touched cardboard, pulled it out.
“Yes,” I said. I sat down on the chair, too scared to look at him. He had hurt somebody tonight. Would he hurt me?
“Open it.”
“What’s—”