Page 118 of A Sin So Pure

When I finally burst through the metal door to the mountaintop, I scream.

I pull my gun from its holster at my side, and direct all that burning fire inside of me at the snow-covered targets. White puffs explode with each bullet, and far too soon, I’m pulling an empty trigger.

I throw the gun down, the hot metal melting the snow underneath it, and storm to the storage closet. I hold my hand out, staring at the little lock.

“Key, please,” I grind out.

But instead of a physical key landing in my palm, shadows curl around the lock, breaking it. The pieces fall into the snow.

The jerking of the rifle into my shoulder each time I pull the trigger steadies my heart, gives it a rhythm to follow.

When there are no bullets left in the gun, and no ammunition left in me to keep going, I collapse in the snow. The cold wet seeps into my hair and my clothes, but I don’t care. It’s a salve on my burning soul.

Snow crunches next to me, and out of my periphery, Silas copies me, making an angel in the white fluff. He lies there, unspeaking, both of us sinking deeper into the mountaintop.

If I stay here, let my body freeze in the snow, will time stop with my heart?

“I need to kill him, Silas,” I say. “It’s not a want anymore.”

“You will,” he promises.

“When?”

“I’m calling a meeting with the Sins in two days. Your doctor said Lust should be recovered by then,” he answers me plainly, which I’m thankful for. “We’ll get our revenge soon enough.”

“Good.”

The finality of the word echoes between the white-dusted cliffsides that tower around us. We lay there for who knows how long—until the clouds have finished their trek across the sky and our bones have gone numb from the cold.

“Tell me, Nora, when is a king not a king?”

My head turns to him, my cheek pressing into the icy ground. Silas stares off into the snowy peaks around us, searching for something we cannot see. My breath curls around me, floating into the sky.

“I don’t know. When?”

“Even when he’s dead, a king is still a king,” he says. “But when he is alone, he is simply himself.”

Silas’s head turns to me.

I’m sucked into his eyes; the twin black holes are an endless abyss holding everything and nothing at the same time. In them, I find myself, something not completely whole, but not empty either—a kindred spirit.

“When I am here, I am just Silas. And it seems that when you are here, you are just Nora.”

When I am with you, I am just Silas,the shadows that curl at our backs whisper.

His unrelenting gaze bores into me.

The hair on my neck stands on end, and my chest caves in on itself. Because I think the Unseelie King may be my friend.

I turn back to the sky.

“If you ever need this escape, it’s here for you,” Silas says. “But right now, you need to get back to your lover.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”

And when he reaches his hand out, I take it.

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