Page 111 of Architecti
“You ungrateful cunt.”My fists ball.A deep need to break something fills my gut, my lungs, it’s all I can breathe, all I can see.But she won’t let up.She won’t stop screaming.
“And you’re an obsessive, controlling freak.”
“Get out.Get out and never come back.”
She gets up from the bed and begins packing her shit, and I slide down the wall.
I stay there, staring at nothing.Listening to the sounds of my future disintegrating.Each item she packs is another splinter, another fracture in the life I thought I was going to have.
All of it shoved into two suitcases and a rucksack.
She pauses by the front door.I don’t look at her.I don’t look at anything much.
She must wait for at least three minutes.Whether she’s contemplating saying something, apologising, hurling more abuse, maybe telling me she still loves me, it doesn’t matter.
In the end, she says nothing, just walks out.
The door clicks shut.It’s the loudest thud.The heaviest crack in my heart.
I sink to the hardwood floor.Cold seeps into my bones as I cry, alone.
Silent.
No one mops my tears or hears my screams.
I stay there until day turns to night.Until the moon rises and the stars wrap a cloak around me, stitching me back together like a patchwork quilt.Nothing quite fits anymore.Nothing quite works.But when morning comes, there are no tears left.
There is no love left in my heart.
There is only the knowledge that I have nine years and six months left to break my contract.I will not let my soul be reaped for her.Aurelia does not get to live while I die.
It twists and gnarls into a thirst.The kind of primal hunger that only the obsessed and the deranged can understand.
I must have vengeance.
I must have redemption.
By the time I haul myself off the floor, I am raw thirst.I am pure revenge.
And it flows deep, deep, deep in my veins.
35
Lucy
Lex survives her brush with the wraith and spends thirty-six hours in the medical ward before losing her shit about missing lectures and discharges herself.She had a transfusion for the blood loss.The wraith punctured through her chest, somehow missing every vital organ.She was incredibly lucky, all things considered.
Father, thankfully, accepted the lie that it was because of a Veil tear and that we’d been close by to intervene.
I pull my contract out of the drawer, the contract I have coveted for forty long years, only to shove it away and slam my fist on the desk.
What a fool.Hope surged through me the night we found it.I thought this was it, that I’d be able to read it, dissect it and find a loophole.
Except it’s written in a celestial language.I can’t fucking read it any better than I can see the runes on my neck.
Useless.
But I didn’t want to tell them.Not when Lex risked her life for me.Was injuredbecauseof me, and for what?A fucking useless document.
