Page 67 of The Blood we Crave: Part Two

When she reaches the door, I watch in admiration as she rises onto her tippy-toes and grabs the key from the top of the frame. With wobbly fingers, she stuffs the key into the lock until it clicks into place.

I can feel her erratic heartbeat. Whatever lies beyond this door is not something she’s shared with anyone else. For two seconds, I think that I’m about to find a slew of dead bodies in here.

“I’m scared,” she whispers, twisting the doorknob but not moving to open it.

I step until my chest presses into her back, my mouth declining so that it rests just next to her ear. I’m captivated by the way she immediately falls into me, completely trusting me to catch her.

“Nothing about you could ever scare me, Lyra Abbott,” I mutter. “All your darkness is my own. We’re the same.”

I don’t need to see her face to know she’s smiling. I can feel it in the way her shoulders relax. The door creaks loudly as it opens, the shrieking sound echoing through the halls.

Lyra takes a breath before walking across the threshold, and I watch as darkness engulfs her body. I follow her blindly, the door shutting behind us until we become fully submerged in the dark.

A dull flick echoes before the walls are plunged into an ominous red hue. Pits of darkness contour along nooks and tables. It takes my eyes several seconds to adjust, but when they do, I find myself looking at, well, me.

I’m occupying every inch of this room, my presence tangible in the stillness.

Hundreds of photos of me in various stages of life strung up along threads that are bannered from wall to wall. Developed photographs are plastered against the walls, more dispersed on the floor.

I reach up, plucking one of them from the clothespin that kept it fastened to the thread. I’m walking out of a downtown coffee shop, my head down and sunglasses shielding my eyes.

There is one of me inside the art museum, another of me jogging, several of me with the guys in various places. I notice a few of them are of me in the high school pool after hours. They span years back, and I’d be surprised if there were no less than five hundred pictures altogether.

It’s a shrine of my existence, all documented through Lyra’s artistic eye. I was the only person in every photograph she’d watched and devoted time to. My ego purrs beneath my skin, and I don’t care if it’s strange to admit that this is attractive.

I like that she’s infatuated with me, that she only has eyes for me—haunts, exists, breathes just for me.

She is my obsessed angel, and I am her possessive god.

“What is it you see?” I break the silence as my fingers flutter across the rows of pictures. “When you look at these, at me.”

Lyra is pressed against the wall, her feet clicking together as she tries to shrink from embarrassment, not fully understanding how thrilling it is to know I’ve always been the only one on her mind.

No one else stood a chance.

She is solely captivated by me, and I refuse to let her stop.

“A boy who was turned into a weapon before he knew what it meant,” she hums, pulling a photo down of me when I was maybe fifteen. “I never understood how they called you a monster when you were always so beautiful. This was how I kept you close when I couldn’t be near you.”

I don’t think I’ll ever understand Lyra’s perception of me. How she so easily saw past all the terror I inflicted to see the man I could be for her. Or maybe she never had a different impression. Maybe she had accepted me for the wicked man I was and wanted me, regardless.

Looking at Lyra feels a lot like looking into a mirror.

I flick the picture in my hand to the ground, walking towards her small figure. The hard red light contours the edges of her face, but she feels just as soft when I cup her cheek with my large hand.

“Do you know why I wanted to kill you, Lyra?” I ask, dragging my tongue across my bottom lip.

“Because you hated how I followed you around?” she offers, unsure of her answer.

I huff out a laugh, tracing the seam of her lips with my thumb. The plush skin is smooth against my finger. I try to remember a time when I wanted her dead because of how much I hated what she represented.

How could I have ever wanted her anything but alive and mine?

“My father told me when I was young that if I ever felt, I had to kill it. That was how I remained perfect.” My other hand snakes around her waist, hauling her from the wall and into my body. “I wanted to kill what you stood for, what you did to me.”

Lyra licks at my thumb. The velvet sensation of her tongue almost makes me groan. I remember the way it felt wrapped around my cock, rubbing against my shaft, making me come.

I draw my grip from her face to her neck, enclosing my fingers around her throat. My nose brushes against hers, and I can feel every single pant expelled from her lungs.

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