Page 15 of Sweet Venom

And something inside me cracked.

I didn’t know if that was good or bad. Probably bad. Everything else was.

The pink in her cheeks returned, but she didn’t flinch. Didn’t run.

I blinked, caught off guard by her calm. She wasn’t afraid of me. Not my silence, not my knives, not the blood still drying on my fingers. She just... stayed.

So, close I could feel her warmth. Smell the faint scent of something sweet and floral clinging to her dress. But it didn’t suffocate me like everyone else’s perfumes. It didn’t make me angry. Not like strangers did.

I looked down at my bloodstained fingers and rubbed them together. I didn’t want her to see them. I didn’t want her near the blood. She shouldn’t have to see this part of me.

My chest ached. My eyes shifted back to her. She’d folded her legs and was sitting quietly, her gaze still fixed on mine. Curious. Patient.

Unshaken.

She was different.

Why was she different?

After a long moment, she spoke again, barely above a whisper.

“My name’s Poe.”

The name caught me off guard. Poe.

I repeated it in my head. Let it echo. It was strange, like her. But it fit. It was soft and sad and lovely. Like her eyes.

Pretty...

Damn that word again.

I still said nothing. I wanted to. I wanted to give her my name. I just didn’t know how. The silence between us grew long again, filled only by the gentle purring of Greta, who had curled into a ball nearby.

And still, Poe didn’t move.

I didn’t move either. I sat there with the knives in my hands and a storm in my chest, and somehow she made it all bearable.She’d quieted the screams. Muffled the past. She didn’t even try to fix me—she just existed beside me.

I watched her out of the corner of my eye, still thinking about how breakable she looked.

I was an expert in breaking things.

I’d had no choice.

And yet, something inside me shifted. Just slightly. A barely-there tremor deep beneath the surface of everything I’d buried.

This girl.

This small, strange, fearless girl.

She’d broken something inside of me with a smile. With stillness. With green eyes and a single question about a little prince.

And maybe...

Just maybe...

That something she broke had been waiting for a crack all along.

My cold, quiet, careful heart.

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