I stop and look at him.
“What?” I ask, thrown off by the question.
“To heal,” he says. “From what I did. Is there anything that could help you? Is there anything that would make you hurt less?” A pause. “If you hurt me… would that help you?”
I blink. “What?”
“Would hurting me help you?” he repeats. “It helped Temperance. What she did to Bones. To the club. Would that help you?”
I stare at him, horrified. “Are you asking me to torture you?”
He shrugs. Fucking shrugs. Like it’s nothing. Like he’s talking about the weather.
And there’s no fight in his eyes. Just... resignation.
“Are you insane?” I screech, stabbing a finger in his direction. “You really think cutting you open is going to fix this? That hurting you would somehow undo what you did to me?”
“Not undo it,” he mutters, his shoulders lifting with a deep breath. “I’m not asking for forgiveness. Or pretending this would make it right. I just thought… maybe it would help. Make the memories hurt less. For you.”
I study him closely. What I see nearly takes me to my knees.
He’s not posturing. Not playing martyr. He means it. He’s offering himself up like a sacrifice. Like bleeding for me is the only thing he has left to give. And that fucking grief — that cold, bone-deep grief — spreads into my chest like rot.
“I’m already working on healing, Ghost,” I whisper, throat dry. “I don’t need to hurt you so that I can heal. I don’t need you at all.”
I pause, and let that truth settle between us. “What happened between Temperance and Bones… it was more complicated than torture or revenge. What you’re suggesting? That’s just more broken thinking. More proof that you’re still living inside that same twisted, damaged mind.”
His eyes shutter. Not even the darkness peeks through them now.
“I get it,” I say, softer. “I understand the betrayal you felt. The rage. That your whole fucking brain snapped in half at the sound of a name.”
A breath rattles out of me.
“But none of that means it hurt less.” I swallow hard. “None of that means I can look at you without hearing every cruel word. Feeling every blade you shoved into me.”
Now comes the part that nearly destroys me to say out loud. I force the words out anyway.
“It doesn’t mean that I don’t fear you.”
The silence after that is deafening.
“Because you made me fall in love with you so easily,” I whisper. “I gave you so much power over myself. Too much. And when you decided to use it, you took control of my mind. My actions. You used my biggest weakness against me. And it was too fucking easy. You just needed a few words to do it, to turn the love I had for you into poison.”
Tears spill down my cheeks, impossible to hold back.
“You fucked me up for life, Ghost,” I let out a bitter, breathless laugh. “Do you even realize that? How could I ever fall in love again? How could I ever trust myself with that again?” My voice cracks on the words. “When I believed all of your lies for a year.A year. Such a long fucking time.”
“It wasn’t a lie, Adora,” he says, voice sharp. “Not that part.”
I look at his eyes, and it’s like gazing into the sun. The fire that I used to know all too well is blazing — feral, raw, devastating — staring back at me.
“You weren’t wrong to fall in love,” he breathes. “And you weren’t wrong to think I loved you back. Because I did. I still do.”
A pained look flashes across his face.
“But you are wrong now because you’ve got it backwards. You think the only truth I ever told you was the day I destroyed you. Us. But that was the real lie. That was me ripping my own heart out and blaming you for bleeding.”
He clenches his jaw, his teeth grinding like he’s barely holding himself together.
