Page 190 of House of Lilith

“Oh I’ll be getting both,” he tells me as he throws me a weird smile, “don’t you worry.”

Blood curdles in my veins even before he makes a sudden move to my right, swinging his arm back as he lunges at her with her own knife.

I hear her let out a groan and I see the knife finally release itself from Ricky’s grip and fly back to her, slicing his palm so badly, it makes blood spurt out.

But I’m already slamming him into the wall, my entire body burning up with rage. “Don’t you dare,” I snarl at him, “not if you don’t want me to rip your fucking throat out.”

For a second, he just lets me choke him. Then he gives me a smile, making my eyebrows pull down, and the next thing I know, he’s taking something out of his pocket and throwing it into the air behind me.

There’s this explosion, just like the ones I remember from the First Game, and all my muscles stiffen even before I hear a scream and my head snaps back to see the impact sending her flying back.

And for a second, it feels as if my mind has shut down, permanently.

Then fear floods me and I let go of Ricky, only to sense him shift behind my back and see his hyena charging at her.

Fear and rage consume me and I let my fox out despite the confines of the hallway and I don’t waste a split second in leaping after him. Before he can get to her, I open my mouth and I snap my teeth shut around his neck, lifting him up into the air like a rag doll just as my paws land on the floor.

And I shake him, growling, until I feel his blood fill my mouth and his body go limp in it.

I drop him to the floor and I come to hover over her, scanning her frantically. She has these burns all over her body, but what’s making panic and desperation flood me is the gaping hole in her stomach and the delirious look in her eyes.

“I don’t want your help,” she squeezes out as she lets her head fall to the side.

Forcing myself to snap out of it, I shift back and I rush to lift her up, as quickly and gently as possible, all the while shoving all my raging emotions aside.

“Get away from me,” I hear her mutter as I start running out of the hallway.

And her words, they hurt so much more than that look I thought hurt more than anything else before.

But right now, I can’t let myself think about anything other than getting help. Because shewon’tdie. Even if it meant me having to die instead.

*

I find myself waiting in front of her door, unable to do anything but keep trying to gauge what’s going behind it. There are so many people around me, occupying the couches, armchairs and plain chairs of the common space of her floor in House of Lilith.

But I barely register any of them, my forearms resting on my knees, my head hung low and my eyes fixed on the floor before me. And it’s not because my entire body is in pain or because my head is swimming like never before in my life. It’s because it feels as if I’d just started waking from the worst nightmare of my life only to get flung into something much, much worse.

It shakes me out of my haze, when I see a tall, proud woman enter the common space and march straight up to her door.

And the woman is taller than Nyx, much colder and more uptight, but for some reason, as I watch her get in the room and close the door behind her, I know it’s her mother I’m looking at.

It makes me fume, knowing it’s only now she’s come to visit. I haven’t left Nyx’s side since it happened, for the last four hours at least, and I know the woman has a son they’re currently keeping in the dungeon, but her daughter is here in mortal danger and she’s only now deigning to show her fucking face.

I have to fight the urge to go over there and strangle her with my own two hands. And sure, at least Hilde has shown some sense of devotion and loyalty, not letting that fucking Aalders past the staircase into the common space, let alone her room.

But right now, I hate them all, I hate them all with a burning passion for having the right to be there with her, while I have to stay out here, wondering if she’s even going to make it as her words keep echoing in my head.Get away from me.

I let my head hang low again, the flood of rage making way for desperation once again, leaving me even more bone-tired and numb than I was a moment ago.

My fault, it’s all my fault and no one else’s, I think with bitterness in my mouth. How long have I had feelings for her? How long had she been single before she went back to him? And how have I behaved this past month?

I have to fight not to get up and start smashing the place up. Despicable — using those two girls to make her jealous and tossing them aside as soon as she was no longer there, letting my fox’s anger come pouring out of me, taking it out on everyone around me…

But worst of all, I’ve had so many chances to tell her how I feel, before it all turned to shit like this. To tell her that she’s the one for me and that I only wish to be with her.

It’s at that exact moment that I sense my fox stir within me again. And I let all my sadness rush to the surface as I turn my focus onto him.

I see him lying in the deepest corner of my mind, his front paws tucked under his chin, looking barely alive. And it makes this memory flood me — strangely vivid — of the thirteen-year-old me in the woods, awakening my animal for the very first time.

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