Page 92 of The Blood we Crave: Part Two

There is a male body resting on the wooden island in the center of the kitchen. I can only tell it’s male due to the height and build. I don’t know who he was—might as well have been a stranger—but I doubt any of his closest loved ones could identify him in this state.

His legs dangle off the edge. Barely any material of pants remains. The muscles of the thighs are ribbons, strips of disconnected flesh, as if a wild animal had clawed through the tissue to gnaw at the bone beneath.

Shredded hands, mauled and split from aggressive slicing, lie next to his side, barely hanging on to the arm. The torso is a constellation of gashes from short, narrow whacks to harrowing carved lacerations. He’d been cut so many times in the gut that pieces of yellow fat were left flayed open, oozing.

This body had become a pincushion. Stabbed, cut, and sliced no less than two hundred times, if not more. Do you know how difficult it is to stab someone that many times? How physically exhausting it is?

A dozen murder weapons are scattered across the kitchen. The object responsible for this person’s indistinguishable face is sitting in the sink. A meat tenderizer had been slung into this man’s skull enough times that it had lost its shape, a concave mixture of blood, tissue, and bone congealed together like soup.

The pure, raw rage in this room was palpable.

“It’s Godfrey,” Rook announces from behind me somewhere.

“The Imitator doesn’t kill men.” I look at the ceiling, watching clumps drop onto the floor, before turning to look at him and Alistair in the doorway.

“No.” He shakes his head, grimacing at the scene before pointing at the body. “That’s Conner Godfrey, or what’s left of him. I found his car parked in the backyard.”

I glance back at the distorted body, and suddenly, this makes much more sense. The rage, the emotion, the disregard for human life. Conner had come for her, and I hadn’t been here.

I can only assume she found out about him and what he’d done.

Of course she would slay her own monsters. My girl is a knife; brutal, unforgiving, beautiful.

Lyra is an emotional killer, attacking when provoked with no remorse afterwards. She is a trip-wire assailant, fragile and deadly in the way bombs are. Once you pull the clip, there is no stopping her.

It makes her dangerous. Far more than I have ever been.

“Where the hell is Lyra?” Alistair grunts. “Did she run?”

I look around the kitchen, spinning in a circle until I spot the closed door to the pantry. Now that I have an image of what occurred tonight, I don’t need to question where Lyra is.

“Can you three get rid of the body?” I roll my sleeves up to my elbows, walking towards the pantry.

“Yeah,” Silas answers me, and I nod in silent thanks.

I have a decent idea of what I’ll find on the other side of this door, but I still don’t think I’m prepared for it. The single lightbulb illuminating the tiny cupboard is enough to show me what sits on the floor.

My darling phantom.

Lyra rests against the shelves, her arms dangling by her sides weakly, legs outstretched, and face depleted of energy. Her curls are matted against her head from the blood. It still looks wet on her clothes, but I spot a few dried stains on her face and arms.

She looks so…pure, delicate, this tender, caring little thing. How is it possible for such a feral beast to lurk beneath the surface of a body so unsuspecting?

I hate the world for what it had done to her.

Fate had gifted Lyra with a bleeding heart. A beautiful, tortured, bleeding heart that feels everything a little too much. The world had abused it until it became a weapon, forcing her to become this version of death reincarnate to cope with feeling too much. The look in her eyes is ghastly.

But a little carnage never scared me. Nothing about Lyra Abbott would ever make me fear her.

She doesn’t move when I come inside, crouching down so that she can see my eyes. There is no expression, no recognition in her void gaze. Just total unfeeling, lost in her own mind. Trapped inside the forgotten place inside of her.

The closet.

The place where she shuts the world out.

But she’d promised me, swore that I’d never be locked out. She would always keep me inside, no matter how badly she needed to disappear. I run my tongue across the front of my teeth, cautiously reaching out a hand.

“Lyra, baby,” I purr, voice soft like honey. “Look at me.”

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