Page 91 of The Blood we Crave: Part Two

“When Rosemary…” He pauses. “When Rosemary died, I never thanked you. You let me hate you so I had a place for all the hate to go.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I say blankly, turning off my car.

“Rook, he mothered me more than my mother. Which, for a time, I needed. Alistair let me be angry, showed me a way to let out the hurt. I also needed that.” He looks up at me in the rearview mirror. “But you, you made me move. You forced me to push forward, even when I hated you for it. Thank you for caring about me more than I cared for myself.”

I swallow roughly, giving him a curt nod in the mirror before grabbing the door handle and pushing it open.

“Well.” I step outside of the car. “You blacked out prison security cameras for me. Let’s call it even.”

“De—”

“Thatcher!”

The sound of Rook’s scream makes my blood run cold. Dread twists in my gut as he bursts through the front door, his face ashen, void of laughter and color. He doesn’t look like himself.

Lyra.

I sprint the rest of the way to the porch, furrowing my eyebrows as I reach him, staring down at his grim expression.

“Where is she?” I demand, rib cage heaving as it tries to gather oxygen.

He lifts his hand, motioning through the door.

“She’s—there is so much—she—I, I—” He can’t finish the sentence. Whatever is at the end of it, he isn’t able to communicate.

My throat constricts. I leave him on the front steps, barreling through the door and into the cabin. I am attacked immediately by a familiar smell.

There is a quality to blood that no one tells you about. It’s simply an experience you must go through to understand it. The older wet blood becomes, the sweeter it smells. Ripe, fruity, almost like pomegranates left out in the sun to blister for too long.

It’s all I can smell.

Sweet, sticky blood.

There is a strain in my chest. The muscles of my heart stretch, tearing. This sinking feeling in my stomach of knowing but not wanting to accept the truth.

She’d begged me this morning not to leave. Told me over and over again that she had a terrible feeling in her gut about me going, but it hadn’t been for me. It was for her. I told her it would be fine. That everything would be okay. We would figure it out, and I’d come back to her.

She begged me to stay, and I left her here.

My strides take me past the living room, a broken coffee table greeting me. The spider enclosure is shattered on the ground. Moving towards the kitchen, I find Alistair standing just outside of it.

“Thatch—” he starts, but I don’t stay to listen to him finish.

I move past him. It’s there that I find what had turned Rook pale.

Lyra’s kitchen used to be a space I’d describe as comforting. A warm room filled with knickknacks and mismatched cutlery.

Tonight, it’s a Jackson Pollock.

The walls are coated in messy strokes of red, the feathered splatter of arterial spray. It stains the cabinets, lingers in the cracks on the floor. Blood leaves no wall untouched, every counter drowned. It drips from the vent hood above the stove into a stagnant, dark puddle.

When I step forward, the ground beneath me makes a sticky squelch noise like water being pressed from a wet sponge. The stench of death and rotten fruit clings to the air as I try to take in the scene in front of me.

I’ve seen carnage. This isn’t that. There’s gory, and then there’s this.

Every swing forward, every time the knife penetrated flesh, was personal. An emotionally charged crime scene that oozed hostility and overpowering resentment. There wasn’t a murder.

It was an annihilation.

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