CHAPTER 421: CRACK PT 2

"YOU FUCKING BITCH, WHO DO YOU THINK YOU’RE TALKING TO?"

His words were distant, muffled by the ringing. Then his fingers were in my hair, a vicious yank that snapped my neck back, forcing the ceiling into my view. Tears, not from sadness, but from the sheer physical insult of it, blurred the plaster.

He hit me again. A different part of my face this time. The world tilted.

"No one—" Crack. "—forced you—" Crack. "—to do anything!"

My vision splintered into fragments of light and shadow. The copper taste of blood bloomed hot and thick in my mouth, a familiar, almost comforting flavor.

"You were the desperate one!" Another blow, this one to my temple. A lightning bolt of white pain. "You crawled to me because you’re a parasite who can’t exist without a host!"

I stumbled backward, my body no longer my own to command. My hip connected with the sharp edge of the table. A sick, dense crunch echoed through my bones, the vibration traveling straight to my core.

To the thing inside me.

The key. The leverage. The only thing that was still purely, entirely mine.

"Andrew!" Sabrina’s voice was a whip, cold and practical. "Stop. We’ll have a dead pregnant slut on the rug, and the cleanup would be tedious."

The pressure in my hair vanished. I folded, collapsing to the floor. The expensive wool of the carpet scratched my skin. My hands flew to my stomach, claws protectively over the swell. I couldn’t get a full breath. Each gasp was a half-thing, strangled and weak.

Blood dripped from my nose. One drop. Two. Darkening the pristine fibers. A stain.

The rage was gone. In its place, something crystalline formed. A diamond of pure, absolute clarity. It was cold. It was sharp. It was a plan.

I had been asking a child for a weapon. A mistake I would not make again.

I pushed myself up, movements slow and deliberate. My hands, smeared with red, trembled as I wiped my face. The trembling wasn’t fear. It was the vibration of a engine turning over after a long sleep.

Andrew looked down at me, his expression one of pure, undiluted disgust. "You look better like this," he observed, his voice flat.

He crouched, bringing his face level with mine. I flinched back, an animal reflex, but his hand shot out, fisting in my hair again, forcing my gaze to his.

"Let me remind you, you pathetic whore," he whispered, the words intimate and vile. "Right now, I am your only path to what you want. Cross me, and not even your worthless parents will find enough of you to bury."

His smile was a gash, cold and cruel.

"Tomorrow. A press conference. You will tell the world Kael gave you these." He gestured to my face, a curator presenting a work of art. "With his history, they’ll believe it. I need his reputation to be ash. I need to be the only viable heir. I need to convince the world that I’m the fucking Jesus of the Roman family. And you will do just that for me."

He released me and stood.

"Enjoy your evening, Sarah."

He was gone.

The physical pain was a symphony. My cheek throbbed in time with my heartbeat. My hip screamed with every shift of weight. A deep, worrying cramp pulsed low in my belly.

But it was the other pain, the psychic wound, that truly consumed me.

My ego. My pride. That thing had laid hands on me. Had diminished me. Had made me less.

And for that, he would learn what diminishment truly meant.

---

I didn’t go to the new house. That was his cage.

I drove to the old apartment. My sanctuary. The place that still held the ghost of her scent. Vanilla and sleep and Aria.

The key turned with a click that sounded like a bone snapping. Inside, the air was thick with memory. It was a museum of us. Her laughter was etched into the walls. Her smile was a stain on the light.

The bathroom mirror showed me a stranger. A canvas of violence. Purple blossoms under the skin, a split lip, the ghost of his fingerprints on my jaw.

But the eyes. The eyes were the real horror.

They were not my eyes. They were the eyes of a creature that had been cornered and had decided, finally, to stop pretending it was tame.

Aria had looked at me with fear.

The thought was an icicle through the heart. She had never... never. I was her safe harbor. Her constant. I was the one who kept the monsters away. And now she looked at me as if I were the monster.

The cold clarity in my mind shattered, and the fire returned. It was not rage anymore. It was a holocaust.

I picked up the chair from the corner. It was a solid, wooden thing. We’d bought it together at a flea market. I swung it against the wall. The impact was a satisfying, splintering crash. Once. Twice. Again. Until it was just kindling in my hands.

My arm swept across the dresser. A meteor shower of glass and metal. Photographs of us smiling shattered. A bottle of her perfume exploded, the air suddenly, sickeningly sweet with the smell of her.

I found a lamp. I threw it. The bulb popped, a tiny death.

A picture frame. Another. The glass rained down like sharp, glittering rain.

I seized a splintered leg of the chair. I turned to the mirror.

The woman there... the bruised, wild-eyed thing... she was the problem. She was the one who had failed.

I swung the wood, screaming at her.

The mirror exploded. A thousand replicas of my madness fracturing into shards. One sliced my palm open. The blood was warm, real. It felt like proof of life.

I didn’t care.

I brought the wood down on the wall, over and over, picturing Andrew’s face caving in. I imagined the precise angle needed to sever a spine, the wet sound a throat makes when it’s cut. I saw Cain’s body in my mind, the clinical detachment of the act, the pure, clean silence afterward.

I couldn’t stop screaming. A raw, endless sound that had no words, only a frequency of pure, undiluted hate. The tears were not of sadness, but of fury so absolute it had to leak out somehow.

Then, silence.

Panting in the wreckage, my body thrumming, I looked down. Clutched in my bleeding hand was a photograph.

College. Her arm around me. Our faces young, unlined by this poison. We were smiling. We were happy.

A tear fell onto the glass, smudging our frozen joy.

"Why?" The word was a broken thing. "Why did you make me do this?"

My chest hitched. The sobs were ugly, wrenching.

"Why won’t you believe me? I would never lie to you. Never. He’s the liar. He’s the disease." I was pleading with a piece of paper. I knew it was insane. The knowledge was a pebble dropped into the ocean of my madness.

I sank to the floor, curling around the photo like a child with a talisman. The broken glass bit into my legs. I welcomed the pain.

"He could never love you the way I do." My voice was a ragged whisper. The truth of it was a physical agony, worse than any blow. "He’s using you. Why can’t you see?"

The silence of the apartment was a living entity. It whispered back with her ghost.

Her laugh from the kitchen. The soft sound of her breathing from the bed. The weight of her head on my shoulder on this very floor.

Before he came. Before he infected everything.

I rocked slightly, the picture pressed to my heart.

"I have to show you," I whispered to the ghost. "I have to make you see the truth."

The words hung in the air, solidifying.

In the cold, clear darkness of the shattered room, the last vestige of Sarah Brown, the friend, the confidante, the woman, quietly died.

What rose from the wreckage was something else. Something simpler. Something pure in its monstrous intent.

I would make Aria see.

I would peel the lies from her eyes, even if I had to skin her alive to do it.

She was mine.

And I would burn every last thing she loved to the ground until I was the only light left for her to see by.