Page 19 of The Blood we Crave: Part Two

I try to imagine Thatcher hiding from the world, and every time I do, it feels wrong. Somehow, I had forgotten that his life had changed that night too. I’d lost my mother, but he’d lost his father. Regardless of the monster he was or what he did to all those women, he was still Thatcher’s father.

It’s weird, odd, to think that he was lonely too. Surrounded by people but so very alone. Just like me.

He stands just in front of me, keeping an inch or two between us, just enough for me to feel him. Just enough to want more.

“She said to me, ‘A child is said to be two parts of a whole. One belonging to the father and the other its mother. But,’” he says, a ghost of a smile on his lips, “‘it’s forgotten and often never mentioned that children are three parts of a whole. There is a large part that belongs to them. This piece, unlike either of their creators, is wholly oneself.’”

I feel his fingers reach for the book in my hands, pulling it from my grip with ease before continuing. “She said that part, the one I own, is what matters. It’s that piece that doesn’t deserve to be hidden from the world’s eyes due to my father’s mistakes.”

He thumbs through the pages absent-mindedly, running his tongue along his dry lips. “I don’t kill people because my father did. I do it because the piece of me, the one that’s all mine, feeds on it, lives for the power. May gave me perspective, strength to no longer care what this town whispered or what they thought. It was my father who made the silent boy, but she made the man.”

My eyebrows furrow, pain lacing my chest. Hurt for the version of Thatcher that was once a little boy. One that didn’t know who he was other than his father’s son. A young mind who believed the sum of all his parts equaled evil.

I hurt for the little boy who hid away because everyone who laid eyes on him after his father’s arrest saw him only as a ticking time bomb. A killer in the making. A future terror.

He never stood a chance at being anything other than jaded.

“Why’d you tell me that?” I ask, unsure if it’s the grief of losing May or nostalgia, but he never just willingly shares things.

Thatcher’s eyes skim the pages. “Because it’s obvious you haven’t shared with your friends the details of our…situation.” His eyes look me up and down, a flash of remembrance from the night his hands had been all over my body, searching with no end. “Now we’re even for secrets.”

Unable to stop myself, I reach out, touching the back of his hand and feeling the cold immediately. “I don’t want to be even. I just want—”

With practiced ease, he pulls away as if I’ve burned him, taking a step back further into the room, book tucked beneath his arm.

“Oh, to answer your earlier question,” he interrupts, looking down his nose at me. “You fuel more than my ego, knowing how far you’d go for me. You’d give me anything. You and that pretty, dark heart.”

That glimpse of vulnerability disappears. The mask of a villain comes slamming down over his face, and he smirks.

“If I asked, you’d die for me, darling phantom. Wouldn’t you?”

I know they call him a psychopath. That he is the darkness that eats the light and nothing about him is remotely human. He can’t feel.

But I’ve felt his heart beneath my hands, committed the steady rhythm to memory, and I know it matches my own. It’s a pair, his and mine, created from the same flesh and muscle, cleaved into two separate bodies.

That’s the thing about love. It doesn’t care if you’re toxic. If their parent murdered yours, or he’s incapable of feeling. Love doesn’t care because it takes you over. It consumes you, eats at you, and leaves you barren.

It does what it wants. It takes what it needs, and it doesn’t care what it does when it leaves.

“Maybe I’d die for you, Thatcher Pierson,” I mumble. “But death is inevitable for us all. It’s what you’d do for me that matters.”

His eyebrow arches in question.

“You’d disappear again, just like you did when you were a little boy, just to keep me safe.” I push off the doorframe, turning to walk down the hallway with his eyes still on my back. “And I didn’t even ask you to.”

ALONE WITH YOU

SIX

Thatcher

Everything smells like her, and I hate it.

It’s difficult to keep my mind focused on the task of shutting her out when my body, my flesh, is so weak.

I am surrounded, and there is no escaping her.

A week I’ve been here. In that week, my sanity has reached an all-time low. The four walls of this room I’ve trapped myself in aren’t enough to keep her out. Book after book, page after page, with hopes of distracting myself from my settings, but I can feel her.

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