Page 88 of Sweet Venom

“I love you, Mom.” I didn’t say it often. I usually just showed her. But tonight, I needed to speak it.

“I know,” she said, smiling through the line. “But not more than I love you. Now go… watch over your heart.”

The line clicked softly, and silence returned.

My mother’s voice still lingered in the back of my mind, her words cutting through the quiet like a soft breeze. She always knew how to get under my skin—how to reach the parts of me no one else could.

Well… no one except the beautiful creature currently sleeping under my roof.

I stared out the window. The storm had calmed, but thunder still split the sky, and rain tapped gently against the glass. Sleep wouldn't come. It never did. So I stood there, staring into the dark, when something caught my eye.

A flicker of movement. A flash of white and blue.

Her.

Poe.

She stood outside, just beyond the edge of the garden—almost ghostlike against the storm. Lightning cracked across the sky, painting the night in harsh, fleeting light, and for a heartbeat I saw her clearly—blue hair swirling in the wind, her white dress clinging to her body like moonlight itself had wrapped around her.

She didn’t belong to the night. Not really. But in some strange, twisted way, she fit inside it perfectly. Her light didn't fight the dark. It softened it. Shifted it. Turned it a shade of blue.

She’s been doing that since she was five years old.

What was left of my heart clenched tight at the sight of her. I couldn’t look away.

She moved toward the black iron gates, and I already knew where she was going.

The rose garden.

From up here, it looked small, harmless. But it wasn’t. It was massive. A world of its own tucked within the grounds of Blackthorn Manor. I had designed it that way—a sanctuary, a maze of petals and thorns, each path precisely planned.

No one had ever reached the center.

No one was meant to.

Until her.

I watched, frozen, as Poe stepped into the garden, the hem of her dress brushing against wet roses. She looked like part of the storm—wild, delicate, impossible.

And then the dread set in.

That deep, gnawing kind that starts in the gut and spreads. I had spent years hiding the truth. Burying my obsession for her beneath layers of silence and shadow.

But now, she was walking into the heart of it.

Into the place where I had hidden my madness.

Into the center of the rose garden.

It wasn’t just a rose garden.

It wasn’t just a place I designed for beauty, or a sanctuary for solitude hidden deep within the manor’s bones.

It was where I had buried my obsession.

My sick, aching love for her.

From the moment we were children, I felt it—that pull. That gravity she carried in her voice, in her gaze. How she could consume me with just one softly spoken word.

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