Famished by Meghan O'Flynn (latest ebook reader .TXT) 📕

into flame and singed my lungs. “Did you choose me because I was damaged?”

“Yes.”

“But you…you helped me, helped to fix me—”

But then I knew: helping me had been a side effect, not the goal. What was the goal? He clearly hadn’t fixed those other women. Or Timmy. Or…Jake.

He killed for me. He loves me.

No, he doesn’t. He’s going to kill me.

It wasn’t a question. His face mutated into a mask of predatory excitement. Adrenaline zinged from me to him and back again, a ricochet like a wayward bullet.

My muscles coiled in anticipation.

He lunged, impossibly slow as if the world had stopped spinning. I leaped sideways, and pain shot through my skull as he dragged me by the hair, the room sliding past my socks on the marble as if I were walking on ice. I skidded, flailed, kicked, and pain blazed up my leg through my ankle under the distant sound of shattering glass.

The world wobbled. A dream, just a dream.

I clawed at his fist, and he tightened his grip on my hair. Bright orange pain pulsed through the top of my head into my vision, dimming the shadowy white plaster of the moonlit ceiling. Then the white ceiling disappeared. A light flickered on, illuminating deep wood, and I could smell leather and books and my own rank sweat. Rugs. Wood.

He stopped at the bookshelf and reached for something. A sound like a slithering snake hissed in my ear, then a thunk as he threw something on the table. I clung to his arms, tears blurring my vision as the room pulsed black and focused again.

On the table, a box full of silver tools glittered sharply on velvet. A scalpel.

Panic screened my senses and tunneled my vision, and there was only him, the box, and the scalpel he grasped. Then I was being dragged again, attached to his fist like a doll, flailing, clawing, kicking until my knee connected with something hard, and a clatter reverberated through the room. Chess pieces rained off the table from the toppled board.

He stopped and stared, then jerked me toward him, my feet skidding against the hardwood as he raised the scalpel and plunged it into my upper arm.

Pain—hot, white, exquisite—shot through me. My arm weakened, and my hand faltered against his.

He tore the scalpel free, and the scent of copper thickened the air.

The pain. Endorphins poured into my bloodstream, smooth and warm. My vision opened. Air filled my lungs.

I wondered how long it would take me to die.

He pulled me out of the library and into the living room, and the ceiling swam, painted in bloody moonlight. Glass jangled around our feet as he dragged me through the kitchen toward the mudroom door.

No, no, no, I cannot leave this house with him. My fingernails dug into his skin, slipping in my blood.

“Dominic, please! I won’t; I’ll never—”

His chuckle told me there was no point. He’d just make it hurt more. Like my father had.

My pulse thundered in my temples. I could see, feel, smell the cold, dark room where sheets of poetry would be scattered over pieces of my body. Here a foot, there my ear, here my entrails shoved into my dead, gaping mouth.

The pain. Focus.

I drove my palms against his hand, every drop of energy pooling in my wrists, pushing away from his grasp on my hair. An audible grinding screamed inside my head as the roots of my hair cleaved a chunk from my scalp. Wetness dripped over my ear. I crashed to the marble, free.

Run! I scrambled toward the living room, glass from the broken sculpture tearing into my feet, my lungs burning, threatening to implode. His shoes crunched closer, closer. I cut around the couch, slipped, and fell to my knees. My fingertips closed around a chunk of broken sculpture—sharp, jagged, deadly.

He bared his teeth and lunged, arms extended.

You’re stronger than you think.

I lurched upward with the piece of broken glass and thrust it into his belly. Blood bloomed across his abdomen in a vibrant red stain. A dream, just a dream. I plunged the glass into his flesh again, pushing until the hilt disappeared into the wall of his stomach.

He reached for me again, but I leapt backward, sliding on the glass and on blood that was probably mine, but maybe his too. I tumbled onto my left side, and my head struck the floor. The world turned in dizzy circles—some nightmarish alternate universe where I had just stabbed the man I loved. He raised his arm above him in a final gesture of hope.

But the blackness didn’t care about hope. It was trying to swallow me. Maybe I wanted it to.

Why couldn’t he just love me?

I closed my eyes and let the darkness take me.