VIOLENT DELIGHTS¹ ━━ John Murphy

𝖎𝖛. Parting

𝖕𝖆𝖗𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖌

GLASS WAKES UP A SATISFIED GIRL, the next day. Pretty much every Skaikru member is terrified of her after the battle training, to which all she thinks is Fucking finally! Most of them had been thinking of her as some useless little deaf girl, particularly after her gunshot wound, but she's better than all of them and she's proved it now. Sure, she's got bandages wrapped around her torso and her thigh and her head hurts like a nomonjoka, but she won and that's all that really matters, right?

At least, it's all that should matter.

Because, as usual, John Murphy is plaguing her mind. Clouding her thoughts. The night he should have never given her haunting her.

If one were to halve Glass with their blade, she isn't quite sure what they'd see. Her opal bones and tar black heart convulsing with her wickedness doesn't feel like the proper answer anymore; perhaps a crevasse, sticky not with obsidian blood but an abyss of shadows, the dividing fault line twisting from her skull to her feet. Torn into two. A contorting canyon cleaving her into two parts. Each half of the same soul.

Because that's how John Murphy makes her feel.

Torn.

DEATH IS YOUR BIRTHRIGHT! The voices of the damned howl into her void heart, reminding her of who she is.

You will one day be Commander of the Blood and the komgeda, Roan had vowed to her once. All your life you have been training for this. Everything you do is for this purpose.

That day had been so long ago. How old had she been? Eight. A child.

Born for blood.

But it's everything she's ever wanted. She cannot allow John Murphy to rip the onyx void further apart. She will not. He will become her damnation and ruination if she does, destroying her from the inside out. Swallowing her whole.

He is a distraction.

He means nothing to her.

So imagine her despair when the very boy she's trying to erase from her life saunters up to her, unusually more distressed than cocky and carefree.

"John Murphy." She stares him in his pale eyes, not backing down, cold and emotionless.

"Oh, so you can look me in the eyes?" He asks, though strangely without malice. "Listen, I need to speak to you - "

"And so you did," Glass says. "Well done!"

She moves to sidestep him. He doesn't let her.

"Jaha's leading a group of people to the City of Light," he says quickly, before she can make him move. "He's going to take them across the desert."

"Then he's going to kill them," says Glass, trying to get around him again. Again, Murphy blocks her path and she gets annoyed. "Get out of my way, John. I don't really care what Jaha's doing. It has nothing to do with me and it has nothing to do with you, either."

"It has everything to do with us, Glass," says Murphy in a sort of strained tone. "He asked me to come with him."

Freezing, Glass stops trying to get around him and instead stares at the dark-haired boy.

He takes that as a sign to keep talking. "I mean nothing to my people. I'm just a criminal, I always will be. They've never seen me as anything more than the bad guy and that's all I'll ever be to them. But... but this City of Light thing might be a chance for me to start over. I'm thinking - "