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The fear fuels every muscle, every pump of blood, and I release a hidden urge of power trapped in my chest.
I scream at the top of my lungs.
It feels like an animal’s roar has climbed out of my body, sending a shock wave through the heated air, cutting into the devouring flames.
And Kane looks up at me, an instant locking of eyes. A gaze that sinks to the bottom of my stomach, nearly choking the oxygen from my lungs.
But he quickly looks away, growling as he lifts himself out of the flaming beams. One foot in front of the other, and he’s barreling out of the house with me, coughing hysterically, grunting, dodging the collapsing ceiling. The moment we reach the open grass and trees, I can hear the house crumble to the ground. A puff of smoke and soot and ash are flying freely around us. And Kane falls next to young Skylenna’s sleeping body, groaning in horrendous amounts of searing pain from his burned back.
He reaches for her limp hand and gasps for breath.
“It’s my fault,” he rasps. “I’ll never fucking forgive myself. It’s my fault. I should have left the asylum sooner to check on you. Oh, god, not Scarlett. It’s my fucking fault!” he roars in agony, filling the smoky skies with his regret and guilt.
At this angle in the winter sun, I notice that his hair has been dripping with water. Not just from sweat, but his eyes are bloodshot, and his skin has lost its bronze glow.
He came from the simulated drowning treatment.
I force the bile back down my throat and try not to wretch. Not only was he torturing himself for what happened here, but he ran all this way after enduring hell in the asylum.
His words trigger something Dessin once said to me. After he tried to teach me how to give a good right hook outside of the asylum, I told him a theory. Something that made us more alike than I thought.
“I can’t talk about Scarlett… about what happened to her, because I can’t face what I have done. Speaking about the day she died would be like holding up a mirror and seeing myself for the villain I truly am. I cannot forgive myself, and that guilt is burning me from the inside out. I know I recognize that feeling in you. The guilt of something you’ve done or someone you’ve hurt. I can see it when I look into your eyes, just as you can see it when you look into mine.”
It was his answer that unlocks what I’m seeing now.
“There is much irony in your words. One day, you’ll understand.”
This is the guilt Dessin and Kane have spoken about. Something he couldn’t forgive himself for. Not being here for me, for Scarlett when we needed him most. He carried that responsibility and beat himself up when he failed or thought he did.
I sink to the grass with my hands clutching my chest.
“This wasn’t your fault,” I croak. “Scarlett made this choice. You shouldn’t have had to carry this guilt to your—grave.”
My hands shake, and a cold vehemence unravels within me. An awakening. I’m suddenly desperate to hurt all who’ve harmed this man in any way. Urgent to fulfill the promises and threats he was never able to exact.
The shadows of my weak, kind conscience break away in shards that could severely wound. My gentle hand fizzling into a ghost of a memory. My urge to always be compassionate, even to those who don’t deserve it, simply shrivels up and dies.
And I become something else entirely.
It only takes a brief moment to shift focus and narrow in on the only place I’d like to start exacting Dessin’s threats.
Only one place I’d find great pleasure in unleashing this broken, twisted, unmistakably vicious new wrath of mine.
The Emerald Lake Asylum.
21. The Newest… Patient Thirteen
They grip my elbows like I was brought in against my will. Like I might fight back, try to flee, scream and thrash around like a victim.
But I am exactly where I want to be.
It started with me weeping like a tenderhearted little girl in the church pews. Praying loud enough for the priest to join me. The same one that thought I could hear God’s voice in my head. The one that finally brought Judas to my room when we admitted ourselves.
It ended with him touching my shaking hand, revealing to me a vivid hallucination of the priest as a little boy, praying that his mother might finally die as she was suffering greatly from consumption. Coughing up blood, gurgling with each breath she took.
He just wanted her suffering to end.
I didn’t allow myself to feel badly or morally sour for using this memory against him. Not even when I gasped and told him that God showed me a vision of young Juliessa dancing in heaven, singing to the tulips like she did when he was a boy. That she was no longer in pain.
