Page 78 of Little Blue

My body trembles. I would make to lift the blanket to cover me again, but his hands hold my wrists pinned in place. Then he murmurs darkly, “We’ll sit here with the fire for a while longer before we go to bed.”

“Will you at least release my wrists?”

He concedes with a rueful grin that I can’t help but think is handsome, even though I know the terrible, ugly violence that lurks under the beauty of his skin.

What is wrong with me?

Because I just can’t handle looking at him anymore, I shift so my back is facing his front. I lift my feet onto the footstool and snuggle into the warmth of his chest, wishing he were anything but the man that he is.

My confused heart aches. I can’t help but wonder if he would have been different if he’d been born to a normal family, or if he’d always been destined to become this—this dark thing that stalks the world, tearing hearts from chests in his quest to possess mine.

My eyes well with new tears I refuse to let fall. It’s as though Ilya senses I’m struggling with my emotions, on the brink of cracking open wide and spilling everything I contain inside, because he holds me tighter. It’s like he’s trying to hold the pieces of me together.

But what about his pieces?

“I’m afraid of you.” When he sighs, I hurry to continue, “But I feel so terribly sad for you, too.”

Beneath me, Ilya stiffens. There is a long pause, and then a confused, “Why?”

The very fact he can ask that question with such sincerity speaks to just how fucked up this all is.

“Because you never had a chance to be anything else.”

“I was born like this, Little Blue.”

“I think you were made, like all monsters before you.”

“Not all monsters are made. I certainly wasn’t.”

“Your father?—”

He cuts me off. “My father gave the monster inside me the tools and intelligence to be who I’ve always been, who I was always intended to be. He saw me for the thing I was, and ensured I developed the skillset to not only feed the monster, but to do it in a way that I wouldn’t suffer for it.”

“He taught you to hurt people.”

“He taught me to hurt very bad people.”

“And what about you? What do you deserve?”

“I’ve always expected my end will be gruesome. I am prepared.”

The horror of his words strikes me down to the core. Imagining anyone bestowing him his end, no matter what that end is, fills me with something massive and unsettling. I recognize it for what it is, even though I wish I didn’t feel it for this man. Grief.

The idea of someone hurting him as he’s hurt others, many others, if his word is to be believed—robs the very air from my lungs.

It hurts.

I need to free myself from him. I need to escape him before I’m so far captured, so completely his, that I can’t escape.

How could I live knowing that the man I love is the target of so many deadly men?

“Ilya—”

When I fail to continue, he prompts me, “Hmm?”

“What would happen to me, if you were to meet your gruesome end?”

God, even saying that hurts me.

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