Page 77 of Love's Ace

Could a human kill a cupid if they filled them full of enough holes?

I’d spent so long paralyzed with fear at the thought of seeing Erin again, at the merementionof ever being inside that house… but it didn’t matter.

Itcouldn’tmatter.

Not when I didn’t know if Wren was okay.

Not when I reached out along that line, andallI could feel was pain and anger.

All I could feel was a reflection of the person I’d been when Wren first found me.

Fuck, that couldn’t be him.

Icouldn’tdo that to him.

I got dressed in a rush, pulling on the jacket he’d left behind and running out the door. There wasn’t time to worry about who might see me, or what might happen. I didn’t careif I saw two people connected with a red thread, because my thread—our thread—was slowly turning black.

I couldn’t see the end of it, so all I could do was chase it down and hope I found it before it completely consumed Wren. Icouldn’tlet this happen to him.

Not because of me.

“Wren!” I was shouting his name as I turned down the street. At least Erin didn’t live far away, and the line that I chased led me straight to the gate I’d promised myself a thousand times I’d never step through again.

I was doing it now without thinking, slamming into a door that was already splintered open and shoving into the house without stopping to think of all the memories associated with it.

But I was already too late. I could tell by the smell of blood in the air, sharp and coppery, thick on the back of my tongue.

I could tell by the sickly scent of perforated bowels.

I could tell, because Wren stood in the bedroom door with Erin in his grip, and when he looked up at me, his eyes were a solid black, framed and spattered in blood.

“Wren?”

“F-fuck. Theo,” Erin gurgled my name, and when he reached out for me I realized that there was just a stub where his hand had been. “Theo,please.”

Even though I was too stunned to process what I was seeing, I had enough mind to shut the door behind me so no one outside could see the bloodbath that was in front of me.

Erin was the last, like Wren had made sure he’d had to watch what was happening, everything he’d earned through every hurt he’d ever caused.

Erin might have come last, but there were too many body parts skewed around the living room for me to tell how many people had come before him. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep.

I just knew an asshole like him wasn’t worth losing Wren.

“Fuck you, Erin.” It should have felt cathartic to say, his pain should have been a balm to my soul. But all I could see was the way Wren’s entire body trembled with rage, the way the red line between us pulsed with black.

In the end, Erin didn’t matter at all.

“Theo, I—” His plea cut off in a gurgle, and my eyes snapped back to him as Wren took him by the jaw and tore his head from his body like a paper doll.

Only… paper dolls didn’t bleed. Paper dolls didn’t spray a wash of blood over the chest of their killer, leaving them paintedin crimson that didn’t do a damn thing to get rid of the black that trailed along the line between us.

Paper dolls didn’t have a heart… but Erin did, and I saw it when Wren tore his fist through his ribcage and ripped it out, tossing the broken body to the side when he was done.

Those black eyes fixated on me, and I realized that I couldn’t seehimin their depths. Whatever part of him usually existed, whatever warmth and heat and anger and arrogance that made up Wren, it wasn’t there.

It was just a mirror of who I’d been, of what I’d almost become.

“Wren?”

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