Page 84 of Craving Venom (The Venomous Beauty Trilogy #1)

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

THE BEAUTY

“ S o, just to recap,” Tria says, flicking her lighter and cupping the flame against the wind. “Zane’s the city’s most wanted terrorist, who used a fake curfew to fuck you—”

“Can we not lead with that part?”

She ignores me. “and he’s also the infamous Nighthawk, bad boy turned morally gray vigilante, currently saving girls from a cult that auctions them off to men in demon masks.

And apparently he hacked every building, made a bomb threat to a police station, faked a lockdown, and still had time to make you coffee? ”

She inhales deep as the cigarette burns hot between her fingers. “Jesus. What happened to just getting a guy who texts back?”

I snatch the cigarette from her hand and take a drag.

“Corrine,” Tria says next. “She’s taken by that cult?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re going with Zane to extract her?”

“Why are you repeating everything?”

Tria snatches her cigarette back and blows smoke toward the ceiling. “Because I’m trying to process the fact that my best friend just became a sidekick to a man who probably has C4 hidden in his boot soles.”

I roll my eyes and stretch out on the bed. The sheet slips down my thighs, and I don’t bother pulling it up.

Tria flicks ash into a soda can and turns to me.

“You can’t go.”

“I am.”

She shakes her head. “No. You’re not going. It’s fucking insane, Faith. You’re not trained. You’re not safe. You’re not thinking straight.”

“I’m not backing down.”

“You could die.”

“I know.”

“And you don’t care?”

“Of course I care.”

“Then why?”

I pull my knees tighter to my chest. My skin sticks to itself, sticky with dried sweat, the bruises on my thighs blooming darker every time I move. I can still feel Zane on me. In me.

“Because I trust him.”

Saying that is the hardest thing I’ve done all night. Harder than taking him. Harder than not running. Harder than hearing him lie and letting him walk out anyway.

Because I didn’t just whisper some fragile hope into the dark. I confessed to trusting a man who, by all accounts, is a serial killer. A man with blood under his fingernails and a body count that starts in double digits and climbs from there. A man who’s turned death into performance art.

And still… I trust him.

It’s not just stupid. It’s not just dangerous.

It’s insane.

Because somewhere deep inside me, I’m not afraid of being next, I’m afraid of not being special enough to be spared.

It’s as if I’m having a wild, torrid affair with the Grim Reaper.

“Fuck.”

I smile, bitter and small. “Yeah.”

But the moment it leaves me, something else cracks.

I bite down on my lip hard, trying to stop it, but the shake in my chest gives it away. My shoulders pull in. My spine curls. The tears trail through dried sweat and the salty sting of everything I haven’t said out loud.

I don’t make a sound.

But Tria moves anyway.

She scoots in, wraps her arms around me from the side, tucks her chin onto my shoulder as if she’s holding glass and not a girl bleeding from the inside out.

I cry harder.

Because she doesn’t say Don’t .

My hands fist into the blanket and I shake. “What the fuck is wrong with me.”

“Nothing.”

“I let him,” I hiccup. “I let him inside me after everything. I let him touch me. I let him hurt me and then I, God, I wanted it.”

I wipe my nose on my sleeve, still folded into her side.

“You know what’s wild?” she starts. “The world keeps telling women to listen to their gut. Follow their intuition. Trust their instincts.”

I wipe at my cheeks, trying not to fall apart again.

“But the second your instincts don’t line up with what people expect they call you blind. They call you weak. They treat you like you were too dumb to know better.”

I settle beside her. My skin itches with sweat and shame I didn’t ask for.

“And you start asking yourself,” Tria says, glancing at me, “Was I really that stupid? Did I imagine it all? The way he looked at me? The way it felt real in the middle of all the wreckage?”

I don’t answer.

I don’t have to.

Because she sees it in my face.

“You didn’t imagine it,” she says softly. “And you’re not stupid.”

I squeeze my hands together until my knuckles ache.

“You want to know what’s actually hypocritical?” she asks. “People act like they understand complexity. Like they’re above black-and-white thinking. But the second a girl says ‘I loved someone who wasn’t good for me,’ suddenly she’s labeled.”

“Dangerous.”

“Or pitiful. Or dramatic. Or fake.” She scoffs. “They want your story wrapped in a moral. In a headline. They want closure. And when you don’t give them that, when you say you still feel something? They turn on you.”

My nails dig into my palms. “I never even said it out loud.”

“But you feel it.”

I nod.

“And you’re trying to apologize for it.”

Another nod.

Tria pulls her legs up and rests her chin on her knee. “You don’t owe anyone an apology for the way your heart beats.”

My mouth trembles. “Even when it beats for the wrong person?”

“Even then.”

My mouth trembles.

Then Tria grins. “Unless it beats for your freshman-year Tinder match, Tyler, who wrote poetry about his cock.”

A laugh punches straight out of me.

She lifts her hands in mock defense. “I’m just saying. That man spelled orgasm with a ‘z’ and you still called it art.”

I snort. “He said my pussy tasted like destiny!”

“And you believed him!”

We’re both laughing now, harder than we should be, and it’s the kind of laughter that makes your ribs ache and your eyes tear for a reason that has nothing to do with crying.

It’s needed.

I fall back onto the blanket, wiping my face. “God, I hate you.”

“You love me,” she says, stretching for the tiny fridge tucked beside my desk.

She opens it and grabs a bottle of wine. It’s not chilled, not classy, and probably expired. But we don’t care. She yanks the cork out with a pen and a key, muttering curses the whole time until it finally pops.

We pass the bottle back and forth.

The wine tastes like fruit and regret, but it warms my stomach anyway.

We drink, we lean into each other, and we settle into the kind of quiet that feels earned until a sudden bang shatters it.

I pull myself up and walk over. I peek through the peephole, nothing. But when I open the door, there’s a box sitting on the hallway floor. It has no label, no return address, just a single ribbon tied around it.

“What the hell.” Tria steps beside me. I crouch. My fingers hesitate at the edge.

“It’s not ticking,” I whisper.

“Helpful.”

I lift the lid slowly. Inside the box, folded like it was made for a promise I haven’t said yes to yet, is a white dress.

It’s a silk dress, backless, with barely-there straps that hold together with tiny gold clasps shaped like crescents.

The hem flutters from fingertip to mid-thigh.

It gleams as if it was stolen from a moonlit altar.

“Holy shit,” Tria gasps.

I reach in, fingers trembling as I lift it. The fabric pools like water between my hands.

Tria takes it from me before I can ruin it with wine-stained fingers.

She holds it up to the light. “This is what you wear when you’re about to be worshipped or sacrificed.”

“Or both.”

She presses it to my body, measuring the fit. “He knows your size.”

I swallow.

Tria doesn’t stop. “Your tits will look insane in this.”

“I don’t think that’s the point.”

“Oh, it’s exactly the point.” She spins the dress toward the light, her voice pitched somewhere between awe and full-body panic. “If you die in it, I’m stealing it off your corpse.”

I take another drink. “Comforting.”

We look at it for another minute in silence.

Then Tria leans over and whispers, “You know he’s going to rip it off with his teeth, right?”

I don’t answer because she’s not wrong. That dress isn’t made to last, it’s made to tempt, to surrender in, to bleed in if it comes to that. That is, if he survives the night.

I take a deep breath, stretch my neck, and try to focus. The conclusion. Just the conclusion. That’s all I need to finish, and then this project is done.

And then what? my mind whispers. What are you going to do with it?

I shouldn’t be able to focus. Shouldn’t be able to breathe, much less analyze case studies or synthesize data. But I do.

Maybe it’s the silence.

Maybe it’s what’s filling it.

In conclusion, the mind doesn’t always work in logic. It works in trauma. It works in silence. It simply works in survival.

I pause, blowing out a breath. My hoodie sleeves fall down over my hands as I type the next line.

I still don’t know why Zane Valehart did what he did. I’ve read the reports. Analyzed the footage. I’ve watched the interviews, listened to the tapes, examined his body language.

I glance down at the blanket covering my lap.

I sat in a room with him. And still, I don’t know.

My fingers hover over the keyboard.

The thing is… it should feel obvious. It should be easy to check a box that says monster or madman. But it isn’t.

It never was.

I type again.

Sometimes there isn’t a why. Sometimes people don’t need a reason to do awful things. Sometimes the answer isn’t in what they said or even what they did, but in what they were trying to silence.

My legs uncurl slightly. I shift back against the pillows, stretch my back. My shirt slides up, exposing the top of my hip where a bruise shaped like his hand is blooming dark and deep.

My pussy throbs again. It’s not desire. Not really. It’s leftover adrenaline.

Maybe Zane didn’t kill them because of anger. Maybe it wasn’t revenge or a break or even bloodlust. Maybe it wasn’t even about them.

I pause.

My hands are trembling again.

Maybe it was about being seen. Maybe it was about not disappearing. Maybe it was about control. Maybe…

I stare at the screen. My breathing slows.

My fingers move again.

…maybe it wasn’t him.

I stop.

My throat tightens.

I delete the last sentence. All of it and rewrite it.

…maybe the story doesn’t always begin where we think it does.

I end the paragraph there.

My phone vibrates on the desk, and I glance down.