Page 76 of Cruel Malady: A Necrosis of the Mind

In doing so, he set me free. But really, he only locked me inside a different kind of cage.

I rub my thumb over the engraving, the one Alex’s sister had inscribed, before I clean the dirt out the best I can. I stand and slip the watch into my pocket.

Time haunts me.

The internal ticking of Alex’s clocks is the soundtrack to my nightmares.

I’ll get out of here. And when I do, I will hunt you down. I will end you.Through the hollow expanse of time, my words echo around this place filled with death and despair to come back to me in severe clarity, a vow I swore to Alex.

I will find him.

I will have my revenge.

But first, there’s someone I need to meet.

26

TARGET PRACTICE

ALEX

Ihave loved to the point of madness.

I never fully appreciated the meaning of Sagan’s verse until I crossed paths with Blakely Vaughn.

She changed everything.

She changed me.

I’m no longer the same man, reformed on a molecular level.

Even my cells crave her, to be connected.

I find myself reciting the verse every time an image of her comes to me. The way her teeth sink into her bottom lip so teasingly. The way she crosses her long legs, knowing just how seductive she is. The way she stares straight through me with those bottomless, sea-green eyes, down to the rotten marrow in my bones.

I never felt more alive, more out of control, then when I was around her. Normally, that would terrify me. Loss of control goes against everything I stand for. But with her, it was easy to allow my primal, wild beast to revel in base pleasures.

She makes me weak, but also stronger than I’ve ever felt.

I trace my fingertips over the sketch of her face, infusing Sagan’s words into my system the way she infuses my whole being.

She is maddeningly a part of me now.

Mind, body, soul. My obsession consumes me from the inside out. Like the Carrion beetle burrowing to feast on decay, my necrotic matter called to her, and she devoured my rotted humanity to resurrect a new man.

I wasn’t strong enough for her then.

But I am now.

No matter what she professed at the river, I know the truth. She tried to deny what she felt—trulyfelt—when we made love under the fall.

But I felt her wilt in my arms. The strong, stubborn, unbreakable Blakely shattered beneath me. She broke against me as we came together, melding two souls into one. A sublime collision of lust and longing, and pure, unadulterated ecstasy.

Her emotions scared her. She’d never experienced them before. I had never experienced anything likeherbefore. We connected on a plane above morals and judgement, and that’s what frightened her.

She’s fallen in love with her villain.

The mad scientist she loathes. Her tormentor. The one she envisions when she smashes her fist into the punching bag, and the one she thinks about when she touches herself.

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