Page 133 of The Duplicity of Thieves

I swallow with anticipation and a little bit of fear. Four orgasms is going to tear me in half.

He licks his lips. “You made me bleed, little devil.” His teeth are orange with blood. I see the darkness there, and I shiver. I feel the rage he suppresses inside. There are dark promises dripping from his words like honey.

He flips me off him and smashes me to the ground with his hand around my throat and fingers fisted in my hair. We’re connected in some ethereal place and existing in another dimension.

I’m faintly aware that the floor is trembling, shaking. The light fixture is clanking, and things are falling off of the walls. My scars feel like they are melting off of my skin, pulsing with a life of their own. I open my eyes wide, in a strange mixture of pain and pleasure, only to see a void. The room is gone. Fear creeps into the recesses of my mind. I’m blind. The darkness is consuming me. Drowning me.

I’m in my recurring nightmare. I’m clawing back to the surface of the Lethe begging for the red headed boy to save me. It’s dragging me under.

Down, down, down.

The water roars in my ears and fills my lungs. Blood, so much blood. My fingers sink into the bank, and I drag myself up until I feel the open air on my face.

I open my eyes and see the same woman I’ve seen for years. She’s tugging on tiny braids that have been woven throughout her hair. Her shoulders are hunched over, eyes flicking around the barren clearing. I can feel the presence of something in the surrounding forest. Shadows that flit from trunk to trunk.

I think I should feel afraid. There’s anguish in the atmosphere, but I feel excited instead. A man emerges from a cave, and towers over the anxious woman. In the moonlight, he’s beautiful. Glorious. He’s Aedon.

He looks around with a calculated gaze. Those blue eyes are black voids, and it makes my heart flutter. They land on me long enough for me to feel exposed, before returning to the woman.

“Who the fuck are you?” he says in that velvet voice that ruins me.

“I’m an old friend.” The nerves are apparent in her voice.

Aedon furrows his brows. “I don’t remember. It’s all dark.”

“Sometimes we forget things when they are painful.”

“Have I gone mad?” A menacing smile crosses his face.

Yes. We both have.

The woman straightens her shoulders, gaining confidence. “We all do when we feel grief.”

“What do I grieve?” It’s sad. Confused. Exactly how I felt when a redheaded boy pulled me from the Lethe.

“Everything.”

"Who took it?"

"Me." She says it as if it's so simple.

She's familiar and foreign all at once. Who is she? I scrape my brain trying to recall her in my vacant memory. I feel a tug on my ankle. The red sand slides through my fingers as I try to claw my way back onto the shore. I’m going under, back into the water.

“Aedon!” I want to scream. “I’m here! I’m right here!”

But my screams are silent as my lungs are filling with blood.

Is it the future? Is it the past? I fight the current, begging the Universe to take me back to him.

There’s a voice in my head, saying my name over and over again with desperation. “Josephine. Josie. Jo.”

My body convulses, begging for reprieve while I reach for the surface, my fingers twitching. It becomes murky and confusing. All I can count on is that I’m supposed to wake up. An iridescent shimmer wraps around me, cocooning me. My skin burns, but it hardly matters. Maybe this is finally real, and I’m being given a merciful death, despite all the vicious ones that were carried out by my hands.

I won’t let this be the end. I won’t go quietly.

The woman said he lost everything. So did I. I won’t lose it all again.

Epilogue

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