Page 117 of Hellebore

How didn’t I see Lawrence’s venomous hand at work? How didn’t I see how fast my name appeared on that company right before trial?

I shake my head, and my eyes sting from days without closing, from weeks without rest. Fuck. The exhaustion presses down on me like the weight of the grave itself, yet my mind races like a storm.

He killed my mother over nothing. Destroyed my life, and the woman I love, for nothing but his own selfish rot. And now he waits in a cell deep in the basement, surrounded by the black hellebore flowers I had scattered around his body.

He will not live much longer, that bastard. But I lack the strength to end it yet. I want to savor it, to draw it out until his screams echo through the stone.

Right now, only Briar calms the beast inside me. Only she keeps me from losing the last fraying threads of my mind.

She looks so peaceful, her chest rising and falling in the dim glow of the single candle I refuse to extinguish. But when I close my eyes, I still see her as I found her, the way she screamed. That sound will haunt me until my final breath. My Briar… the raw agony in her voice, the fracture in the air itself⁠—

Fuck. Another tear slips down my cheek. I didn’t even cry when my mother passed. Yet in these last twenty-four hours, the dam has broken, and the darkness floods through.

“Drystan?”

Her soft, sleepy voice pulls me back from the hellish hole devouring my thoughts.

“I’m here,” I murmur into the gloom, my voice rough as gravel. “Rest, my love.”

“Aren’t you coming to lie down with me?” Her sad blue eyes flutter open, drifting over me, lingering on the gun still clutched in my white-knuckled grip.

“I can’t…” The words tear from me.

She rises from the bed, my oversized shirt draping over her to mid-thigh. Her black hair cascades over one shoulder, a river of midnight silk. The bruises bloom across her cheek, the cut along her neck and the fingerprints—his fingerprints—mark her pale legs in vicious violet. Rage ignites in my veins, a slow, feral boil that threatens to consume everything.

She stops in front of me, close enough that her warmth cuts through the chill clinging to my skin. I tilt my head up to meet her gaze. She leans in, her small hands enveloping mine. I grip the gun harder, unable to release it, as if letting go would invite the abyss to swallow her whole.

I must protect her⁠—

Briar straddles my lap, pressing her body into my chest. Her breathing is steady, calm, a lifeline in the storm. Her warmth seeps into my frozen bones. I wrap my free arm around her, crushing her closer, and breathe her in like a man dying of thirst in an endless desert, she’s the only salvation I have ever known.

“I thought I lost you,” I whisper against her hair, the words fracturing. “I thought I lost you forever.”

“I thought I lost you too…” Her reply brushes warm against my chest.

“I’m sorry it took me so long.” I fight to keep my voice steady, but the knot in my throat chokes the sound into something raw and broken. “I tried. I never stopped looking for you. I never would have, not until my last breath dragged me under.”

She shifts higher on my lap, straightening, her gaze locking with mine. “You came for me. You nearly died.”

“I deserved it. You didn’t.” My eyes never leave hers, even as my hands tremble with the effort not to seize her, to brand her with everything raging inside me. “I told you I would take all the darkness so your light could shine. And I failed.”

“Drystan…” Her voice is a velvet blade. “I know you think this is because of you. You blame yourself, and it is destroying you from within. Lawrence isn’t you. He never was. He hated it. He hated every time I called your name, every time it slipped from my lips in the dark. Your darkness… it kept me alive. Deep down, I knew that if anyone could find me, it would be you. And you did.”

She leans in and presses the softest kiss to my lips, a fragile seal against the chaos.

“I—” I begin, but her finger rises to hush me.

“Help me remember who I was.” she begs against my mouth, her breath a caress. “All of it.”

“What?” I pull back slightly, searching her face in the flickering candlelight.

“Help me feel like me again.” Her hips roll against me.

“Briar, you’re hurt—” She silences me with the crush of her lips, hungry and desperate.

“I don’t want him to be the last memory my body keeps.” Her plea slices through me like a rusted knife. “Please, Drystan⁠—”

I drop the gun. It clatters forgotten to the floor as I surge upward, lifting her with me. I carry her to the bed and lay her down with a reverence that borders on worship, though every muscle in my body screams to claim, to ruin, to heal.