Page 84 of Captive Souls

“Nothing about you is silly.” Knox circled my hand holding the card. “Nothing you hold dear. Nothing important to you.” He looked down at the card then back at me. “It’s you, Petal. You can’t just see a Devil card. You make it more.” He paused, dragging his thumb along the thick veins in my wrist. “You make me more. And that scares the fuck out of me.”

It was as if I’d been punched in the stomach, all the air bursting from me. I knew what an admission that was for him.

Knox.

Afraid. Of me.

“You’re not going to break my heart, are you?” I asked, fear of my own clawing up my throat with barbed talons.

“I want to say no.” Knox regarded me with a calculating gaze. “But I can’t. My nature is to destroy things. Bury things. I’ll promise you that if I do break anything in you, I’ll be the one to put it back together.”

I sucked in a deep, ragged breath.

No promises.

He could hurt me. More completely than any man would or could.

But I’d risk the prospect of being broken, ruined by him, for the complicated joy of being his. Of him being mine.

Knox and I were a couple.

The ground shifted from underneath me. The air changed around me. My heart seemed to beat at a different rhythm.

Knox was a force of nature. He had the power to destroy. That much was evident right off the bat. Just glancing at him on the street, you’d get the inkling he had that power.

But he also had the ability to make things grow.

Makemegrow.

His presence had always been intense, but the weight of it had become something else. Every inch of my skin felt Knox’s attention. He watched me in a different way. As if a hole in the ground might open at any moment to swallow me up.

His hands were almost always on me. Possessive to the point of pain. Not just bordering on toxic.

I knew his attention might’ve stifled and suffocated anyone else, but not me. I liked it.

We were in a bubble. Stretched to its limit. I could feel it. The tautness of every moment, balancing on a sword, wondering what would puncture it. I could feel the tick of the metaphorical clock that was counting down our time there.

A whole other world was thriving below us. One that included Stone, my sister—who I worried about constantly and who I considered myself having betrayed for being so happy.

Thoughhappywas far too simple and pedestrian a word for what I was with Knox. It wasn’t exactly true happiness. The dynamics between us were far too gnarled and complicated and threaded with trauma to make our relationship happy.

But those dynamics were the very things that tangled into the core of me, making me understand that no matter whatinevitably happened when the world rushed in, I would always be Knox’s.

Though it couldn’t be that simple below this mountain. Even without the pressing threat of Stone—which was pretty hard to think of a solution to—I was a kindergarten teacher with a normal life. Knox was a killer and a man who I knew would be unable to fundamentally operate in the normal world. What would introducing him to my friends look like? Dinners? Takeout and Netflix? Could he be satisfied with a life free of what fed the darkest sides of him?

And though I ached to heal him so that he didn’t need to feed himself pain and suffering—I hadn’t missed two new lines of scabbing over cuts that had appeared on his body—I had to admit that I didn’t fall in love with the sides of him that were normal. I fell for him because of his depravity.

It was all much too complicated, and I wasn’t brave enough to face it. Instead, I chose to drown in Knox. For however long I had him.

“What would you have done?” I’d asked the night before, tangled in bed, staring at the ceiling, my body aching from the attention of his licentiousness, which was near insatiable.

He’d been denying himself pleasure for years, so he had a lot to catch up on. Not that I was complaining.

“If you had been given the opportunity to pursue your passions, have whatever passes for a normal life?” I continued my question. He always waited patiently in the silences that I put between sentences, a quirk of mine that annoyed previous boyfriends to no end. Not Knox. He gave the impression that he’d wait in the valleys of my words for a lifetime.

“If someone hadn’t stolen that future from you,” I added through my teeth. I still breathed in venom when I thought of how Knox had been abused. Though I was an expert in knowingno amount of vehemence could change the actions of monsters, especially not dead ones.

It was maybe an unfair question, akin to someone asking me who I’d be if I hadn’t had a father who’d murdered my mother. But I wanted to know Knox beneath his layers of coldness, his bloodthirstiness. I understood there was more to him, a never-ending depth.

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