Total pages in book: 21
Estimated words: 19922 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 100(@200wpm)___ 80(@250wpm)___ 66(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 19922 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 100(@200wpm)___ 80(@250wpm)___ 66(@300wpm)
It was the only way to stay awake when she heard the door open, and he came walking in at three in the morning—
Oh.
Her husband's steps slowed to a halt at the sight of her waiting for him, seated at the foot of the stairs. His handsome face was inscrutable, his golden eyes shuttered. He was still in his suit, but his tie was loosened, and there were shadows under his eyes that she hadn't seen before, and even from here she could see the tension coiled through every line of his body.
And somehow...she knew that he knew.
Maybe he had checked the security footage before coming home. Or Orion had told him. It didn't matter either way. But it was clear that he had known she was waiting for him, and yet...he had still made her wait.
She set down her coffee cup. Her hands were trembling, so she pressed them against her knees.
"What did I do?" she whispered.
He didn't move from the doorway. The distance between them was maybe ten feet, but it felt like an ocean.
"You remember why I married you."
"Y-Yes."
"Then why are you doing what I don't need you to do?"
Her nails dug into her palms. "A-Are you saying...you don't want me to love you?"
"Will you stop if I tell you to?"
"I...I..."
I don't want to cry.
But when she saw his lips tighten, she knew that she already was, and it just hurt, seeing how he now despised the sight of her tears when he used to be the first one to wipe them away.
"Are you also saying that you c-can n-never love me back?" she choked out.
Silence.
The word hung between them, and the silence that followed it was the cruelest thing she had ever heard, because silence could mean anything, and she was terrified of what it meant coming from him.
"M-Mykos, please..."
"Why do you even bother asking?"
The words hurt, but not as much as it hurt to hear the way he was speaking to her. It was almost as if this whole thing bored him. Her heart was breaking, and it bored him—
"We both know you're the kind of idiot who'll keep loving me anyway even if I don't love you back."
And then he was walking away. Past her. Up the stairs. Without looking back.
Because everything about her now...bored him.
She sat at the foot of the stairs for a long time after his footsteps faded. Her coffee had gone cold. Her tears had dried on her cheeks, leaving her skin tight and stiff. Somewhere upstairs, a door closed.
She pressed her forehead against her knees and wrapped her arms around herself, because there was no one else to do it.
God?
Are you still there?
Because I don't know how to do this.
MYKOS PUNCHED A HOLE in the wall of his study as soon as the door closed behind him.
Why?
Why, dammit?
Why?
They had a good life together.
In fact, the past two months they had been together were the best time of his life. From the moment she became his wife, the demons from his past had been silenced, and sleep no longer eluded him at night.
She had done what she was supposed to do.
She had kept the monsters at bay.
Not just the ones that haunted his memories, but even the one inside of him, the one that simply wanted to give itself up to the chaos of violence because it could no longer see any hope and goodness in this world.
It could have stayed that way, too.
If she just hadn't said...
I love you.
Those words didn't just change things.
Instead, they ruined everything.
Love was why her own father had abandoned his family. And love was also the reason Diogenes had gradually lost sight of who he was. When Mykos's mother had died a cruel death at the hands of a rival gang, vengeance in the name of love had consumed Diogenes, and since then he had stopped at nothing. He killed everyone who got in his way. It didn't matter if they were innocent. He did what he did in the name of love...even if that love had become so twisted that it could no longer be called love.
In the world Mykos was born to, love wasn't just a weakness.
Love was a disease, and it had to be completely cut off before he, too, would end up forgetting who he was.
He looked down at his hand. His knuckles were bleeding. The wall had a hole in it the size of his fist.
And somewhere downstairs, his wife was sitting at the foot of the stairs, alone, because he had put her there.
Good, he told himself.
Better this than what happened to his mother.
Better this than becoming his father.
He almost believed it.
Taken
taken (v.): past participle of "take"; to seize, to steal, to remove by force; see also: the thing that made Mykos Ravensworth remember he had a heart
MAIKA WAS AT CAMPUS when it happened.