Page 24 of Bonepetal
His laughter follows—ragged, wrecked, echoing through the corn.
“Run harder, bonepetal! I want that little body shaking when I pin you. I’ll lick the sweat off your spine while you cry out for a god that isn’t watching. Only I am. Only I ever was.”
Stalks whip at my arms and catch my hair. My platforms pound the dirt, lungs burning, but his voice is always there, threading the rows like he’s already inside me. Overhead, crows burst into the night, croaking loud enough to rattle my bones, their cries chasing me through the field as if they’re hunting too.
I break left, then right. Doesn’t matter. He’s everywhere. Every turn feels like it belongs to him.
And then he’s just… there.
I slam into him, his hands already closing on me, anchoring me to him like he’d planned every step. His breath ghosts my throat, hot and unyielding. The bone knife flashes in the dark, the hilt cool against my skin.
Fear coils sharp in my gut. And yet my body betrays me, thrumming with something I don’t want to name.
I thought the devil would come for me.
But I never thought Finn would.
He moves before I can bolt again. One rough hand catches my wrist, the other finds my waist, and the ground comes up hard against my back. Dirt presses cold through my clothes, corn stalks rattling overhead like a fucking audience.
I twist, but he’s heavier now, stronger. He pins me with his whole body, his breath hot at my ear, his weight making the earth dip beneath us.
“You still fight pretty,” he murmurs, voice low and jagged. “But you forget I’ve been waiting for this. Waiting to feel you again. Waiting to fucking break you all over again.”
I shove at his chest, but he’s already catching both my wrists, forcing them above my head. A snap of something rough, fibrous—corn stalks, pulled and twisted—binds them together, lashed tight to keep me there. My pulse hammers against the restraints, useless.
The skull covering his face dips close until the teeth nearly graze my cheek. His breath is hot, ragged. “You forgot who you belong to,” he whispers. “You forgot who bled for you. Whodiedfor you.”
I shake my head, panic surging up my throat, but he only laughs, a sound wrecked, broken, and cruel.
“Finn… please.” The words scrape out of me as I stare into the hollow sockets of Nathan’s skull, desperate for even a flicker of the boy I used to love.
He leans closer, voice a guttural rasp. “Don’t act surprised, bonepetal. While you were giving away the parts of yourself that were mine, I was rotting in hell. Burning. Suffering. Watching. Every scream, every flame, every fucking second they tore me apart I sawyou. And I promised myself when I came back, you’d remember exactly who owns you.”
The mask tilts, the sockets staring down into me like hollow eyes. “You broke the vow, Salem. Now you’ll learn what a broken vow costs.”
He leans back just enough to reach for something. The scrape of bone against leather shreds the silence, and then I see it.
The knife.
Its hilt is made from yellowed bone, rough and ridged with old teeth still set into it. The kind of relic no one sane would touch. The blade catches moonlight in a jagged grin, steel pitted and scarred, but still sharp enough to cut truth from lies.
The ritual knife.
The same one from the Thorned Patch.
The one he used to carve that symbol into his own chest the night everything changed.
My breath stutters hard in my throat.
“Recognize it?” His voice is low, vicious. He tilts the knife so the bone handle gleams pale in the fractured light, so the shadow of its teeth crawls over my stomach. “This blade tasted our people's blood that night. My blood. A fucking promise written in dirt and pain.” The mask dips, eyes glinting through the sockets. “And tonight? Tonight it’s your reminder.”
My legs kick, but he shoves his knee between them, pinning me open. His free hand slides rough up my thigh, catching the edge of my panties, and with one sharp tug he tears them down and flings them aside.
“Fuck,” he growls, his breath hot against my cheek. “You think you can just give yourself to someone else, forget me, forget what we are? Not a chance. You’re mine, Salem. You’ve always been mine.
“I knew you were meant to be mine from the first moment I saw you,” he growls. “In the chapel, when we were kids. That velvet red dress bringing out the color of your eyes. The way you knelt to the devil like he was your father. Everyone else thought you were meant for the sacrifice. I knew better. I knew you were meant for me.”
The bone hilt grazes my skin, trailing slow and merciless along the inside of my thigh. My body betrays me with a shiver, a gasp I can’t hold back.
