Page 47 of Hollowed

“I was made to undo.”

His voice was rough. Low. Thicker than usual.

“I was made to carve women into silence. To take the parts of them that remembered how to want and smother them in stone and scripture. I didn’t fuck. I broke. And it worked.”

He paused.

I said nothing.

“Until you.”

He turned his head then.

Looked at me with eyes no longer void.

Eyes full.

“You didn’t just kneel. You stayed.”

“Because you didn’t lie,” I whispered.

“I didn’t want to want you.”

“Then why did you touch me like that?”

He didn’t blink.

“Because I never knew how to love anything that didn’t flinch.”

The air left my lungs.

Not from shock.

From truth.

I crawled to him. Slow. Bare beneath the blanket. My knees dragging across the stone. I climbed into his lap and wrapped myself around him like silence itself. My head on his shoulder. My mouth at his throat.

“Then let me teach you how to keep what doesn’t run.”

He held me.

All of me.

Without asking for the vow.

And that was the vow.

That was everything.

ChapterEight

I woketo cold stone and absence.

Not silence—absence. The kind that crept beneath the ribs and whispered something sacred had moved. The kind that made me feel like I’d been left in the mouth of something that no longer wanted to swallow.

He wasn’t beside me.

The heat from his body had already faded.

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