Page 48 of The Road to Ruined

A hand closes around my throat, shutting me up, and he writhes on top of me for a few seconds more before he's empty.

And when he pulls out, I feel the bed shifting under me and then hear his feet on the concrete floors.

"Bone Saw?" I roll onto my side. "Don't leave me like this."

When he doesn't reply, I panic. He's still in the room, though. I can feel his eyes on me; I can hear his heavy breathing near the foot of the bed.

The mattress sinks down at my backside again, and I exhale relief when he unwraps my wrists and pulls the hood from over my head.

It was a pillowcase. He sets it on the bed beside me. When I turn onto my back, stretching my arms out in front of me and rolling my aching wrists, his costume is fully intact down to the gloves and shoes.

There's no normal guy disguise here. There's only the monster.

"I'll stay with you until you fall asleep," Bone Saw says, running his fingers through my hair, "so you don't feel like you have to go sleep on the bathroom floor again."

"Okay," I say, pulling the covers over my body. I face away from him with my back to his chest, and he throws an arm around my waist.

"But I'm not your boyfriend, Teagan," he adds. "I don't love you."

"I'm not stupid. I know that," I tell him, blinking back tears. I know what love feels like, and it's not this. "I don't love you, either. That doesn't mean you have to say it out loud."

NINE

There are no windows in the bedroom, but light seeps in through the open door from the windows in the main room. Alone in the bed, as promised, I roll onto my back, stretching my sore arms out in front of me again. My eyes catch a flash of red against my skin. I turn over my right arm and read the words written across the inside of my forearm:I'M SORRY.

It's in all capital letters, with a small heart to the side of the 'y,' the bottom of which loops the way you'd write it in cursive. I don't know why that's the part that makes me smile, but it does.

Bone Saw is the kind of monster who makes a fancy little loop at the bottom of his 'y's'.

And it's written in blood—his blood.

I climb out of bed and make my way through the empty, open room to the bathroom, and then turn on the shower and wait for the water to warm up. It doesn't take long before steam fills the glass enclosure. I think, for just a minute, that I don't want to wash it off, but then I think of how he'd laugh at me from behind that mask silently, which would piss me the fuck off.

I scrub it clean before I wash my hair.

"Black licorice," a voice says from behind me. "Why are you making that face? Did you piss off someone else you shouldn't have?"

"I told you not to follow me home," I tell Fake Luca, even though I'm happy to see him. "And I don't know, probably. I really miss you."

"This isn't your home, though. Or is it?"

"It's not a home at all; it's a place where monsters go when they need rest."

"But you're not a monster, you're an angel."

"What if I am? I think they want me to become one…and I think it's working."

"Then I'll fix you again like you fixed me," he says. "It'll be fine."

"That's a nice idea," I say, closing my eyes as he rinses my hair. "You'd have to come back for me for it to work, though."

"What are you so worried about?" he asks. "You've seen real monsters before. And that monster out there…he's just a man, Teag."

"A dangerous one."

"Yeah, but at the end of the day, we all want something. You want freedom—"

"I wantyou.I want my best friend. Fuck freedom."

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