Page 140 of Sins of the Hidden

I didn't move.

My hands wanted to reach for her. Not from fear—from starvation. Every muscle screamed to close the distance. The closest thing to agony my body knew.

Last night changed us. Last night, she held a knife over my chest and couldn't use it. Last night, I drugged myself into defenselessness. She'd heard me beg phantoms not to take me again. Heard me plead about five being enough, about staying quiet, about someone making me prettier for when they came. She'd witnessed me reduced to fragments—begging her not to let them come tonight, not to leave me alone with the echoes of footsteps on stairs.

She'd seen the boy who counted pills and knew exactly what they meant. Who'd learned that love was something done to you while you stayed quiet and still. Who'd been taught that prettiness was currency and silence was survival.

And she'd stayed.

Not because she forgave me. Because she couldn't leave me broken on the floor, begging phantoms from my past. The girl who fainted at sharp objects had held a blade over my heart, and when she couldn't use it, something inside her had shifted. Cracked. Started to understand the language I spoke.

I'd corrupted her. Turned her into someone who recognized the monster because I'd planted seeds of night in soil that was never meant to grow anything but light.

She used to faint at sharp objects. Now she gripped blades with only a slight tremble. I did that to her. I turned her into someone who could hold a knife steady over a man's heart. That wasn't love—that was breeding killers.

The worst part wasn't that I'd destroyed her innocence. The worst part was how beautiful she looked doing it.

"V?" Her voice cut through my thoughts, through the constant watch of threat and opportunity that passed in my skull.

I'd been staring again. Always staring. Drinking in every detail like a man dying of thirst, who'd found the only water that mattered. The way dust caught in her hair, how her pulse jumped beneath the skin I'd memorized in Braille.

"You're thinking about last night," she said. Not a question. She was learning to read the monster, decode the patterns that meant danger or desire or the thin line where they bled together.

"Always thinking about you."

The honesty escaped before I could cage it. Unfiltered. The kind of truth that made normal people uncomfortable because it carried the weight of obsession, the metallic taste of something that wasn't quite sane.

Her fingers found the ring on her left hand—the ring I'd forced there while she was unconscious, drugged into compliance, stripped of choice. She twisted it without thinking, a nervous habit that had developed since our wedding. Since I'd stolen her future and called it love.

She never used to fidget. Never used to twist jewelry or bite her lip or look over her shoulder. I gave her those habits. Wrote anxiety into her DNA with my own hands.

"You can take it off," I said.

The words hit the air like a confession. Her hand stilled, fingers frozen around the band that had become a shackle we both pretended was jewelry.

"What?"

"The ring." My voice came out rougher than intended, scraped raw from holding back everything I wanted to say. "You can take it off."

She stared at me like I'd spoken in a different language, like the concept was so foreign it couldn't translate. Her fingers moved to the band, hesitating. She started to slide it up her finger—just a fraction, barely visible movement—then stopped.

My chest caved. The hesitation hurt worse than refusal. The moment where she considered freedom and pulled back from it.

Her face had gone pale, fingers trembling against the metal. She was remembering. The chapel. The dress I'd chosen. How I'd slipped the ring on while she was unconscious and called it a ceremony.

"I won't stop you."

The weight stretched between us, heavy with what I was offering. Last night, the drugs had made me honest about things I'd buried under decades of corpses.

I hurt her. Actually, physically, systematically hurt her. Not protected her from the world's cruelty—I'd become it. I was the monster she needed saving from, the thing that went bump in the night and called it love.

I drugged her unconscious. Forced her into a wedding dress while she couldn't fight back. Made her speak vows to a man she feared while chemicals kept her compliant. Stole her name, her future, her right to choose—and convinced myself it was romantic.

She thought I didn't understand what I did. I did. I understood it with surgical detail. I didn't just steal her body—I rewrote her future and called it love. Etched my name into her bones and convinced myself it was devotion.

Every time she flinched afterward. Every silence. Every step away from me. I earned every fucking one.

But I wanted more than her compliance now. I wanted her to choose me. To look at me and see something worth staying for, not just someone too dangerous to leave. I wanted her to wantme back—not the scared submission I'd forced from her, but something real. Something given freely.

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