Sweet Innocence and Gentle Sin || 𝐀𝐂𝐎𝐓𝐀𝐑

Chapter 25: For What I've Done

He stared at me with wide eyes of gold. There was fear in his gaze, and he stood prepared to react. As if I was a wild beast, a rabid animal who could only see red.

Tears clouded my vision and fell free as I blinked them away. My eyes stung, and my nose itched as waves of feeling rushed through me. I was flooded with it. The dam broke days—weeks—months ago, and yet only now was the water finally reaching me. The boiling water only brought with it pain and devastation because this happened. All of this happened and it was my fault.

My fault.

I couldn't breathe without choking. I sobbed and cried openly for the first time in months. It was so raw, so real now. I felt exposed, with an open wound on my back just begging for something to pounce. My body shivered as the wind picked up and the rain came down harder, mixing with my tears to make them disappear within the soak of my clothes bleeding red.

I looked up at him and tried so hard to calm myself. But it was impossible. It felt like, just by looking at him and knowing he could see me in this state, it just got worse. He glanced down at my hands—what was left of them. The blood slowly oozing from my open-faced palms and the clogging of open wounds as my body fought desperately to heal whatever it could.

I wanted to hide my hands from him. I wanted to take that look off his face. That devastation, that guilt, and knowing that made him subconsciously hide his own scarred hands. No one should know the pain he did. And yet there I sat, with hands that boiled from within, soaked in blood and darkened by the burning of muscles into charred meat.

But he did something I never expected. He embraced me and held me so close and tightly that all I could hear—all I could feel was the pounding warmth of his heart. The beating that told me this was real, I was alive, people were dead.

I was so tired, so desperate for it all to be over, for the world to turn black and never reveal color again. It just... hurt. There was no better, no simpler word to describe how I felt. Pain was too physical a feeling, sadness barely scratched the surface.

"What did I do?" I sobbed into his shoulder, praying that he'd hold me and keep me from drowning.

"What you had to," he whispered, brushing hair out of my face.

My body shook. I couldn't believe his words or the truth I knew was in them. Everything was burning, ripping through my veins and nerves, lighting every inch of my body on fire. It made it hard to think, hard to breathe. It made me want to scream, to shut it all off and go numb.

I pulled away from him as my hands started shaking again, alight from the inside with branches of white trying to push through my healing fingertips. Blood slipped through tears at the tips of my fingers, blisters formed over already-healed skin.

"Make it stop—please just make it stop." I wasn't sure if he could hear me through the sobbing and shuddering of my breath.

Azriel took my hands in his, and I could feel through that touch just how hot my skin was. How his own palms sizzled when pressed against mine, and how his face twitched with a flash of pain as he held tighter. As he fought through the horror it brought to feel fire against his hands just so he could hold mine.

"Look at me, Rowena. Breathe—look, it's going to be okay, just breathe."

"I can't—it hurts," I sobbed, shaking my head as I tried to pry my hands from his. "Just make it stop."

He wouldn't let me go, wouldn't let me save him from this pain. Instead, he held onto my wrists and let his palms turn bright red, let them paint with my blood and smoke from my burning. I tried punching and screaming and all the things I could do, but he wouldn't let go.