Page 69 of Craving Venom

And fuck me, I almost need to grab onto something to keep from going to my knees.

She’s dressed as an angel, which is fucking ironic because there’s not a single holy thing about the way she looks right now. A short, flowing white dress clings to her frame, stopping just high enough to turn every step into a goddamn sin. The sheer sleeves slip down her arms. Soft white feathers curl from a halo sitting lopsided in her hair, and fuck—her hair. Loose, wild waves spill over her shoulders, catching the glow of the lanterns like they were woven from something celestial. Like the light itself bends just to kiss her.

It isn’t fucking fair.

That someone like her exists in a world so full of depravity. That something so pure could even breathe the same air as people who don’t deserve to touch her shadow. It’s like shewas made to balance out the worst of this place, sculpted into something unreal just to remind the rest of us that we were born in the dark.

And those eyes—

I always thought eyes were the most useless part of a person’s anatomy. I never cared for sight, but looking at her, I see how blindness would have been the cruelest fate.

And now that I’ve seen her, I’ll never unsee.

She is imprinted in me, burned into the marrow of my bones.

I don’t just want her. Want is too small, too human. Ineedher. In my blood, in my veins, in the space between my ribs where the ache of her absence would turn me into something unrecognizable.

The universe was reckless to let me see her. Because now? I won’t stop until she’s mine. If I have to break her to make her stay, then so be it. A shattered version of her is better than a version I don’t own.

I’ll be the nightmare she won’t wake from.

The obsession she won’t escape.

And the addiction she’ll crave more than freedom.

Faith throws her head back, laughing at something the girl next to her says. It’s an unguarded kind of laugh, the kind that doesn’t have edges, doesn’t cut. It wraps around me like a noose anyway.

I force my feet forward, keeping to the shadows, tracking her as she and her friend weave through the crowd. They come to a stop in front of one of the fortune teller booths, an old woman draped in layers of velvet and beads is sitting behind the table. She barely glances up before lifting a frail, wrinkled hand, beckoning them closer.

It almost makes me laugh.

Faith hesitates, but her friend nudges her forward, and she sighs before lowering herself into the chair across from the teller.

“I’d like to know my future,” she says.

The woman reaches across the table, takes Faith’s hands in hers, and closes her eyes.

Seconds pass.

Then, her eyelids flutter open, and a slow, knowing smile stretches across her face.

“You are going to find something,” she murmurs. “Something that you will love and hate with equal passion.”

I smirk.

Isn’t that exactly what I’m going to offer her?

“Hate everything but love it? Well, that’s a new one.”

Faith’s friend snorts. “Sounds like my love-hate relationship with her love for crime documentaries.”

They laugh together. Meanwhile, the old fraud just keeps smiling, as if she actually pulled some deep cosmic truth out of the abyss.

I push off the tree, weaving through the crowd as the music pulses around me. Laughter, screams, the distant shriek of some haunted house actor jumping out at his next victim, it all blends together.

Some guy stumbles past me in a cheap-ass ghost mask, and I snatch it right off his face before he can blink. He makes a confused noise, glancing around as if it got stolen by an actual spirit, but I’m already gone.

I slide the mask on, settling it over my face as I move behind her.

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