Page 66 of The Beautiful Dead

The elevator dinged, and the doors slid open, swallowing him whole. The last thing I saw before they snapped shut was his gaze, locked on mine.

A challenge. A plea. A silent fucking war.

I reached for my phone. For my app. The live feed flickered to life. I watched him step onto the street. Watched the way he inhaled deeply, like he was freeing himself. Like I wasn’t still wrapped around his ribs, pressing against his lungs, making it impossible for him to breathe without me.

I let him have the illusion.

For now.

CHAPTER 14

REMI

Something pulled me from a restless sleep—a shift in the air, a sixth sense that curled cold fingers around my throat. Sweat slicked my skin, making the silk sheets cling to me, wrapping me in the echoes of last night. My limbs were heavy, drugged with exhaustion, but I reached for him anyway, my arm stretching across the mattress, fingers brushing nothing but emptiness.

The bed was cold.

I was alone.

A dull ache pulsed beneath my ribs, slow and insidious, twisting deep inside me. My body knew before my mind did—something in me had fractured in his absence.

Shafts of sunlight cut through the darkness of Domino’s room, catching the abandoned switchblade on the nightstand and glinting off the steel like a silent reminder. The sheets still smelled like him, a potent mix of smoke, leather, and something darker, something uniquely him. I turned my face into the pillow and breathed him in, inhaled until my lungs ached. Until the pressure in my chest became unbearable.

The bruises on my thighs pulsed with every breath. I ran my fingers over them, tracing the places where his hands hadpressed too deep, where his blade had teased too hard. A canvas. That’s what I’d become—painted in shades of him, a masterpiece of violence and possession.

I should have felt angry.

I should have felt free.

But all I felt was severed, a marionette whose strings had been cut.

The world was off-kilter without him. The gravity of his presence was gone, and I was floating, untethered, lost in the vast nothingness he’d left behind.

It should have terrified me—how much I needed him now. How much of myself had been rewritten in his image. Even before Mom’s stroke, I had always been alone. Always learned to navigate the world on my own, to survive without needing anyone.

And yet, here I was, clawing at the ghost of him.

The devil himself had built me a gilded cage and called me his. Instead of fighting it, I had stepped inside and locked the door.

Inside these walls, I wasn’t just Remington Cain.

I was something else.

Something darker.

Something freer.

Domino had looked inside me—past flesh, past bone, past the carefully constructed version of myself I had built for the world—and he had seen the truth.

The hunger.

The fascination with death.

The thrill of power, the beauty in destruction.

I had spent years burying it. Locking it away. Hiding it behind careful smiles and sketchbooks full of things I could never say out loud.

Domino had ripped me open. Set me free.

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