Page 21 of Borrowed
T he silence was thick, like incense, clinging to the lungs. The only sound was the drip of blood hitting marble.
A metronome for madness.
I stared at her body.
Still.
Slack.
I bent over the altar in the same pose she made me kneel in when I was small, obedient, and hollow.
Not anymore.
I reached for the cross again, hand trembling but not from guilt.
From adrenaline.
From release.
My fingers were too slippery.
Toby’s voice snapped through me like a whip.“Run.”
I froze.
“Now, Tabby.”
His tone had teeth.
I didn’t hesitate. I stepped over her blood. The warmth clung to my soles. The altar behind me blurred. The air smelled like copper and my childhood.
“Faster,” he hissed.
My feet hit the aisle hard. The church stretched around me.
Vast.
Empty.
Forgotten.
Stained glass watched me with judgmental saints, their eyes locked in eternal disappointment.
Toby laughed.
“They always look down. Never do a damn thing to stop it.”
I hit the doors shoulder-first. The wood groaned open. The cold air bit my naked skin. My breath came out white, fast, and alive.
And then I was running.
Barefoot.
Bloodied.
Glorious.
Into the night, dragging his cape like a weapon and a promise.
Toby whispered inside me, soft and possessive.
Good girl.
You did it.
But where am I going?
* * *
The lake was still…quiet.
Still waiting to breathe.
Like me.
I kept running. But now the lake bled, too.
Not too far was where it began.
The house was still standing.
Barely.
The roof sagged like a dying breath. The siding peeled back in strips like skin left too long in the sun. But the bones were all there.
Blackened.
Splintered.
Familiar.
My feet bled more with every step over broken glass and charred wood. But I didn’t stop. Toby was humming in my ear. That lullaby he used to sing when I cried behind the drywall. The one no one else ever heard.
“Hush, my twin…”
I climbed through the gaping hole in the wall—what used to be the kitchen. Rats scattered. The air reeked of mildew and memory.
“This is where I died,” he whispered.
I touched the scorched floor.
Still warm.
Still his.
The imprint of his life, death, a shadow we both felt.
The living room was worse. Half the ceiling had collapsed. One of our old bunnies, blackened and split open, sat limply in the ashes, the bones frozen in the flame’s rage.
Trumpet. Or maybe Delila.
They looked the same when the fire got to them. They screamed the same.
“I forgot the cross,” I said, breath hitching. “It’s still on Mother’s neck.”
Toby appeared then. Or maybe he always had been, perched in the dark like smoke, eyes glowing through the bandages like cinders. The butterfly fluttered near his wrist, wings charred and perfect.
His smile was small.
Tender.
“Lay down, Sister.”
I did. I kneeled before him like he was my God.
Right where the coffee table used to be. Right where Mother told me to sit still while she left to take Toby upstairs. Right where I stayed, frozen, listening to Mother pray and Toby cry. Because good little girls were supposed to be quiet.
Now, I wasn’t a little girl anymore.
I was Toby’s.
He came to me and pressed his mouth to the soft skin of my neck, right where the cross lay inside Mother.
“This is where we were born,” he said.
“And where we’ll burn again?” I whispered.
His fingers curled in mine.
Tight. Possessive.
Burned. Warped.
Holy.
Toby stared at me like he’d starved for years, and I was the last beautiful thing left in this rotting world. His hands trembled.
Not with fear.
With need.
His voice was rough. Cracked. “You’re mine.”
I nodded. My lips split in a smile.
“I always was.”
He surged forward.
No warning.
No hesitation.
And slammed me into the floor.
The ashes billowed around us like smoke reborn. His mouth crushed mine.
Teeth.
Tongue.
Heat.
His fingers gripped my jaw, holding me in place like I might vanish again if he didn’t own every inch of me.
“I waited for you,” I gasped against his lips. “I waited in the dark.”
“I died for you,” he growled. “And now you’ll live for me.”
He yanked my thighs open, pulling me into his hips, the buttons of his shirt scraping across my chest, the floor beneath us digging into my spine, but I didn’t care. Pain felt like home. His breath tasted like fire.
Like that night.
It burned.
It devoured.
He entered me without patience, without words, just a groan like a man breaking open. My body arched. My nails clawed at his back. I wanted to be inside him.
To tear open his ribs and crawl inside.
Toby moved like vengeance.
Every thrust, a memory.
Every kiss, a scar reopened.
I burned. I erupted. The black butterflies were on fire around us, fluttering in a cadence that swirled like the smoke we were born in.
The wings beat in time with my moans. Toby growled, and it felt like the house shook beneath us, ready to finally collapse after years of being left broken.
“You’re my ruin, Sister. You are everything in me I’m scared to feel but everything I crave never to forget.”
“This is where we end,” I whispered, eyes rolling back.
“No,” Toby snarled, pounding harder. “This is where we begin.”
He gripped my throat.
Not to hurt.
But to anchor.
To remind me.
I was his body, mind, and soul. My very existence was his demand.
His fingers brushed my jaw, tracing the blood at my nose and smearing it down my lips and then lower, across my chest, down the line of my ribs, so softly it made me shiver.
“You don’t even know what you are,” he said.
“Yes, I do.”
He gritted his teeth. “Say it.”
“I’m yours.”
He groaned, almost in pain, and then he snapped.
His mouth crashed into mine again, and I tasted copper and water and the ghost of everything we’d burned. His hands wrapped around my waist, flipping me onto the soot-caked floor. My knees hit the ash. My chest found the stone. It felt like sand kissing my nipples.
He was behind me in seconds.
“Tell me this is real,” he breathed against my skin, trailing kisses down my back, across my ass, biting as he went. “Tell me you’re not just another goddamn memory.”
“I’m here,” I moaned, arching up into him. “I’m right here. Feel me.”
He pushed my back down and leaned forward, bowing my back like a sinner at the altar, one hand tangled in my hair and the other sliding between my thighs. He didn’t waste time, not tonight. Not when we both knew this was the last time we could be free.
His fingers sank inside me.
Rough.
Worshipful.
I gasped, clawed at the floor, at him, needing more, needing all of him.
He pressed his forehead to my shoulder blades, his voice ragged.
“I want to destroy you. I hate myself. I can’t hold on. I can’t hold onto you. I feel you slipping away.”
“Then do it. Destroy me,” I whispered. “You were always the one to put me together, Toby. I’m nothing but yours to control. To own.”
And Toby broke.
He lined himself up and slammed into my ass with a choked groan, deep and desperate, his hips crashing into mine like he wanted to bruise every memory into place.
I screamed, grabbed his hair, and held him to me like a lifeline.
Like if I let go, I’d truly disappear. The fire burned me from the inside out.
He moved like a man chasing his own shadow.
Fast.
Frantic.
Gone.
“I love you,” he hissed against my hair. “I love you, and I’ll never forgive you for it.”
“I don’t want to be forgiven. I want to be remembered.”
“I don’t exist without you. I never have.”
He fucked me hard, filthy. Deep enough, I saw stars. My back arched. My nails dug into his broken boards. Leaving lines in my skin that bled. He kissed me like he was drowning. Like I was the last breath he’d ever take.
When we came, it felt like an earthquake, like the house remembered us. Like the fire wanted to start again.
But I didn’t let go. My muscles remained clamped around him, pulsing in sync with my heartbeat.
Even when his body went slack.
Even when he collapsed on top of me, panting.
Whispering nonsense against my neck.
I held him.
Because we were both already gone.
But for a moment, in that ruin…
I just wanted to be alive.
In the soot.
Tangled.
Stained.
He buried his face in my neck and whispered, “I love you, my twin. Without you, I’m nothing.”