Page 9 of Bonepetal
I saw the slip. The lean. Saw her let someone else’s shadow cross her skin. His fucking mouth pressed to the hollow of her neck—the place carved out of her body for me. Made for me. The only altar I’ll ever kneel to.
She closed her eyes. Not because she wanted him, because she was pretending it didn’t kill her. Pretending it didn’t rip her in half to let someone else trespass where she already swore only I belonged.
The vow she made over my body shattered. Cracked open like river ice breaking under weight it was never meant to hold. I felt it split, felt it crush me all over again, like a hand around my neck dragging me back from the fire.
The veil felt it, too.
Devil’s Night. The goddamn border between what belongs in the ground and what refuses to rot is paper-thin. And all it fucking took was the pressure of that broken promise, and my love—which has never been holy, only hungry, rabid, and fucking endless—for me to pass right through it.
I was always going to come back.Always. The second she let another man’s hands, and mouth, anywhere near what’s mine, hell itself shoved the door open and begged me to walk through.
And with the veil split thin for the first time since that night, there’s not a single fucking thing that can stop me. Not God. Not Devil. Not her tears or her lies. She’s mine, and I’m going to make her remember it.
I walk. The cemetery is a cold parish—crooked teeth of stone, dead grass chewed to nub, and a ring of skeletal maples chattering in the wind. Houses glow on the hill beyond, yellow squares of counterfeit safety.
The crows string themselves across the night, wing to wing, a black ribbon pulling through the dark.
They don’t wait for me, they move. A living arrow. A command in feathers and beaks.
Each beat of their wings stitches a path through the fog, and I move in their wake, hunting, because my body only knows one command when she’s near,take.
I follow, boots pounding gravel, then dirt, then soft grass, each step stitched to theirs. Every time they vanish into fog, one drops lower, croaking sharp, dragging me back on course.
Fields pass underfoot. Fences. The faint glow of porch lights where people think they’re safe. The crows never falter, a livingcompass, a sermon in fucking wings. When I slow, they wheel back, shrieking until I pick up the pace again. They know where she is. They always fucking know.
And then, lantern light. Strings of sagging orange bulbs come into view, bleeding color into fog. Jack-o’-lanterns grin from hay bales. Scarecrows slump like hanged men, empty-eyed and waiting. Teenagers in thrifted flannel and plastic masks stumble around with spiked cider, laughing too loudly, and eager to prove they’re not afraid.
The corn whispers like a congregation. Fog licks the ground. Somewhere, a speaker moans on loop—an actor trying too hard to make death sound sexy.
I almost laugh, but don’t.
I step off the path and into the corn.
The stalks close around me like jealous sentinels, rising to my shoulders, trying to keep me from what’s mine. Dry leaves rasp my palms and slice little kisses into my skin. I don’t bleed red anymore, hell burned that out of me. It taught me patience is worthless, that color is a fucking lie.
I move through without brushing a single string light, every step cut sharp and sure, like the maze itself knows better than to touch me.
And then I stop.
Because I feel her. Because she’s here.
The word isn’t observation, it’s ownership. It’s the gravity that keeps the world from splitting apart. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s already in my hands. Always was. Always will be.
The crow on the Corn Maze sign tilts its head and my vision slides. Through its eyes, I see her just inside the maze. Black dress scattered with pale roses, leather jacket snug at her waist, socks pulled high to show just a strip of bare skin before her boots.
Every detail screams what no one else around her seems to notice—she’s still alive because of me. Thriving. Glowing. Moving through the world like she finally belongs to it, but I know better.
She’s talking to him. Smiling even. On the surface, she looks whole, beautiful, and untouchable. The kind of girl everyone else sees as strong enough to have outrun her ghosts. But I see the cracks. The way her eyes cut sideways when no one’s watching. The little pause before her laugh, like her body’s asking permission it doesn’t want to grant.
He says something and she gives him a laugh. But it isn’t the one she used to give me. Not the one that split her chest open, raw and reckless, like she’d finally stopped pretending she was anything but mine. No. This one is thinner. Brittle. A laugh that aches to sound real but carries the truth of her longing for me. For the hands that taught her what it felt like to come undone without fear.
Her hair is shorter now. It curls at her jaw, sharp as a blade. The moon cuts her cheekbone into something I want to grip, bruise,remind. My hands ache to hold her face still, force her to look at me and remember the vow she made. Of who she fucking belongs to.
And then he does it. He leans in. Puts his mouth on the hollow where her neck meets her shoulder.My hollow. My mark.The first place I ever claimed her with my touch, the place I died to keep sacred. Yet she lets him, just lets him touch what’s mine. Lets him taste what only I should ever taste.
Her pupils flare. She even smiles after, like this is what living feels like.
My vision whites out at the edges.
