Chapter 120
- Becky -
Anger, the feeling, came easily, like breathing right now.
Every lie Josh told. Every secret he buried and was willing to take to his grave, I believed he was in. Every piece of himself he tore away from me. I carried them all like the broken mirror's glass in my chest, and now the shards were cutting their way from me, festering to the surface while I bled out.
I loved him. God, I loved him. That love felt like frostbite: precise, white-hot, and numb all at once. It hollowed me and sharpened me until I ached. He thought he was protecting us. He thought silence could hold wounds together. All it did was carve scars into everyone he'd try to save. In the silent cold nights, I was beside him. The grief I never let go; it was as if he were still dead to me.
And still—despite everything—I couldn't let him die again. Not now. Not when the choice was in front of me, raw as a blade. Even if it meant caging him away in ice.
And battling alone.
The demon fed on the cracks. I could feel it—a slow, greedy feeding—her delight when I flinched, her smile when my insides bared. Every scream I couldn't release, every little gasp from my lungs, she devoured. The brighter I burned with anger, the brighter she shimmered with life.
But in the midst of that rage, something else responded: a small yet firm grasp on clarity—a memory of something I'd done before. I'd seen it once—the demon twitch, a slight thing that made me stiffen rather than scream. When I didn't offer her my anguish on a silver platter, she was not unwavering. She enjoyed my suffering because it nourished her. She wanted me to rub myself raw so that her hunger would never run dry.
Which meant... I had a choice. I could keep breaking down for her, feeding her until she devoured me. Or turn off her supply chain.
Her hand—she had aimed for my heart. I couldn't dodge fast enough. Her hand lashed, mirrored nails razoring towards my ribs, wanting to tear the one thing she couldn't manipulate or devour ordinarily for her: love, the part of me that could give everything and still survive.
Her claws hooked beneath my skin like a machine; she wanted the prize, my heart itself. The touch was more than pain—it was a ripping vacuum inside my chest. The world inhaled with her. Air was pulled out of the room as if a wormhole had been torn open. My lungs burned; the world slid into a thin, bright focus. The chill of my breath was white, sharp with the taste of iron.
I did something I had never done for myself before. Reflex without doubt—time bowed.
I looped my last breath back into my lungs not once, but in a tiny, merciless reel. I snatched the previous clean second of air and rewound it again and again, each turn a stolen gulp. The trick wasn't elegant. It was like sucking smoke out of the wind. Each borrowed inhale was a nail hammered into the door that the demon tried to kick down.
Her finger dug in. Pain lanced through me, cold and burning. A searing freeze stitched the wound closed where she'd ripped, and the line of vision went white, then glossy with frost. Blood beaded and turned to rime. I dropped to the ground on my hands and knees.
She whimpered with that sound that made the last of what was left of the windows tremble: delight and a taste of annoyance.
"You cannot keep this up. You are resilient, but let go." She sang. Her voice came from inside me now. Braided from the shards of all the faces she had worn. Kaysi, Evan, Josh, and Micah. My own voice twisted to be unkind. She wanted the shape of me to be the only thing that bled.
I let grief come. But I did not pour it into her mouth to feed from me any longer.
I felt it—every bitter, painful thread. The nights I'd slept, curled up sobbing because he was gone. The memories I couldn't let go of. I once revisited the lab where he died and placed flowers. He kept this all quiet to save us. I carried all those bitter images until I could taste them.
She expected me to hurl them back like torches. Feed her some more with them and laugh while she gorges on me.
Instead, I collected each shard and wrapped it around a new core: the decision to be the thing I wanted to be, not the wound I had been made into. I took all the anger and made it armor. I took sorrow and braided it into a steady line. This was not denial; this was a different kind of honesty—one that from here on I refuse to sacrifice everything again in the name of punishment for myself or anyone else.
She noticed.
Got a slicker, her smirk cracked. It was almost—almost pitiful. A predator startled by a prey that did not flee but stood up and wouldn't willingly be eaten.
The seam of space she'd ripped widened. The warehouse's timbers groaned. The vacuum howled. She tore air like a child tearing paper. Debris began to spin in a slow, hungry cyclone: glass, splinters, dust, and frost. The icework beneath my feet vibrated with the tremor of the world trying to reknit.
I saw it, and I pushed. Not to crush, not to erase, but to braid. The threads with my own time threads she used to control the shards. I wrapped them. Not to snap moments for the whole, but to tie them to each other: the day in the field, the hospital corridor, and the kitchen table where the whisper had been heard. I tied them into a thick enough net to hold the demon that wanted to be free.
Her claws missed the heart today—but she was trying for it. She wanted memory anchors, the root chords of the people she could feed on: my connection to Josh, the trust I'd given, and the rage I'd stored. If she pulled them out, she could make me into a hollow thing she could eat forever.
So I wove them all together instead.
The first lattice snagged her arm—a caught instant. Learning roping skills from Matilda and Callian was working out for me. The demon hissed and twisted, trying to pull free, but my braid was quick, tight, and a rope around the angle of her wrist. One of her faces—Kaysi split into a dozen other smaller Kaysis, each accusing and hurt. I pressed the braid tighter, and something in her eyes flickered: the crack that I had ever seen!
She knifed at the braid; she grew weaker as well. The space tore. The seam opened like a gash. The wormhole sucked in harder. The vacuum grew: its bite, calling. The warehouse became a throat pulling us toward a place between places: the seam ripping filled with the smell of cold iron and old forgotten dreams.
It pulled us through.