Page 57 of Cardinal House

Obsession.

It’s so much more than a need.

It’s blood and bone, secretly shared smiles and love.

‘We’re more than love, Wolf.’

“Yes,” she breathes, “I like to see outside.”

I lift our joined hands up and curl my arm around her shoulders, her forearm coming across her chest to keep our fingers laced as we stare out at the view.

“I like to see outside too.” I tell her, thinking of my mother.

The closed drapes and the shorn scalps, the cleansings and the midnight punishments. I want to tell her I understand her pain, even if I don’t know what it is, even if she doesn’t remember. I think sometimes we can have pain inside of us that doesn’t feel like it has a source. It makes us dismiss the misery as inconsequential, but those dark holes can grow and stretch and swell, and before we know it, we’re consumed by it, and there’s no way of clawing our way out.

That was me.

Right up until I got shot.

When I died.

When some really incredible people massaged my heart and got it beating once more.

It was all an awakening.

So I could have this.

My brother shot me and killed me, but all his bullet really did as it slashed through my heart was bring me to life.

“Luna,” I say, sweat slicking the back of my neck.

Obsession.

It swells and it grows and it consumes.

I don’t think it’s a curse anymore.

Unbelievably, I think, for me, it’s a blessing.

“I’m never going to be able to let you go, Little Moon.”

A sick confession.

Something horrid and rotting and possessive.

I have no regrets.

There’s a part of me that worries, when her memories come back, she’ll have had this whole other life, and there won’t be space in it for me.

And even then, I know, as she tips her face up to mine, her ice-blue eyes stark white in the dark, I will never let her go. Even if she ends up somewhere else, with someone else, I will protect her from the shadows.

Lurk and stalk and creep.

I am a monster.

But I am forever hers.

Thorne is already on the porch when the sun rouses me from sleep.

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