The Fates (Book I) - 2014 Watty Award Winner!

2.9 - The Parting Gift

Dear Readers: Back at the Golde penthouse with Atria and Axel...

P.S. Parts of this scene are pretty dark and possibly Rated R - just so you know :P

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Scene 9: The Parting Gift

A.D. 2015

Sorry… was she even sorry? What did it mean to be sorry—to wish that something had not happened? She wished every day that she’d never been born. Didn’t that make her sorry for everything that’d ever happened since she walked the earth?

All the hoards of self-hatred that Atria had harbored in her heart, throughout her life, came to the surface in this instant. Summoned forth at the sight of the boy, of the blood that she’d shed. It didn’t matter whether she had meant for this to happen. For it had. Because of her. Because she had been born and walked the earth, and walked into his life, the boy had died.

Axel’s chokehold tightened, harshened, where he stood behind her, viselike grip around her speechless throat. “You can’t charm your way out of this one. You can’t fuck your way out of this one.”

Atria wished his grip could reach back to before her birth, to grant her death wish in advance.

He swung her forcibly around to face him, pinned her to the wall, one hand still encircling her neck. She saw her deadly image mirrored in his darkling eyes. The epicenter of his rage, reflected endlessly between them, steeped in his brother’s blood. Upon her hands.

His other hand reached toward the collar of her coat, grabbing the pendant that hung just above it. “You came back for this? For this, and not for him?”

He yanked it from the chain and flung the sundered necklace to the floor. She didn’t flinch.

“The boy whose heart beat for you, bled for you—you couldn’t do him the honor of abandoning him to his face? Not even the fucking gift of a goodbye, before he died?”

Axel untied the belt of her trench coat, with one hand; he was well practiced in this maneuver. The other hand remained clamped hard around her throat. Another move that both of them knew well.

But in the past between them, these motions had always been born out of sheer, simple lust. Never bloodlust, as now. There was a thirst for blood now in his eyes, and Atria wanted him to slake it. She deserved it. That, and so much worse.

“Well,” he grunted as he cast the coat to the floor, then pushed her over to the desk, on which she'd left the fatal note. “Let me do the honors.”

“Do it,” she breathed suddenly—two words, nearly silent, slipping past her lips, resounding in the blur.

He had heard them, clear as day here in the dark. “Do it?” he echoed in her ear. His whisper was a snake that slithered deep into her soul, suffused with vicious venom. “Do what—fuck you? Kill you?”

She was not sure how her shattered mind could form the words to answer him, but somehow a word poured forth. Freely and willfully. She wanted this. Every demon in her shadowed heart demanded it. “Both.”

She felt his lip twist up into a smirk, against the soft lobe of her ear.

“No,” he sneered, and then spun her to face away from him again, the full force of his body driving hard into her backside. Thrust her down against the desk, her cheek against the note she’d left, the scribbled sorry shoved before her open eyes. “Just one. For now.”