Page 164 of His Trick

Drip.

Every drop against the gravestone echoed like the pulse in my skull. I sank to my knees in the muddy ground, my hands pressed against the cold, slick grass. Carrington’s name was in front of me. Carved into the marble stone of the tomb.

Carrington Harding.

Loved, lost, but never alone.

The words staring back at me were like a mocking mirror.

A year. A fucking year, and he wasn’t here.

“I hate you,” I cried. “You are gone, and I am still breathing. Still alive. Still cursed with the memory of you, and what I fucking did to you.”

I couldn’t escape the ghost of his touch, the echo of his laughter, and the heat of his love. My chest felt like it had been crushed by the weight of a storm I couldn’t outrun.

“You were right,” I whispered, barely audible over the storm. “My light…my fucking light…it’s gone. You were my light. You always will be. Without you…I am worse than the darkness.”

I pressed my forehead to the cold stone, tasting the rain and the mud. I tasted the despair and the tang of blood I hadn’t shed, but soon would. I remembered the feel of his hands in mine, the warmth of his kiss, the way he had looked at me, forgiving, pleading, begging me to just give in to the inevitable.

Loving him…and I had killed him instead.

My hands flexed, digging into the mud, trembling. The memory was like a knife twisting in my chest, bleeding me dry on the same grounds he eternally rested in.

My mind flashed to his voice calling my name, trembling, desperate.

“Shiloh…don’t…you have to see.”

I saw him on the floor of that shed, the blood, the pleading in his eyes, even when he was dying. I had failed him. And every day since had been a gnawing ache with his absence, this empty hunger I could not suppress.

I rose slowly, letting the ever-present rain plaster my clothes to my body, soaking my skin to the bone like I deserved. The storm around me mirrored the storm in my heart. The wind tore into me, but I barely noticed. All the grief, the guilt, the longing,it had become a festering presence inside me, a beast clawing its way out.

Carrington was truly gone.

My light had died with him. And now, standing over his grave a year later, I felt that darkness stir—the hunger, the pull, the need. It coiled through me like fire corrupting my frozen veins. I could feel it twisting my humanity, pulling at me in ways I didn’t want to admit. It was a year of holding it down, a year of pretending and hiding.

I married her.

The woman who didn’t remember much about that night. The one who called me her hero for surviving the night and her missing brother. I married the woman related to the man I killed. For nothing but to hold onto him a little longer. A year of quiet madness, stewing guilt, and remorse.

And now…

It was finally breaking through to destroy me and everything in its path.

Xanthy.

My tether to humanity. My wife. The safety net I held onto for as long as I could. The only thing I could cling to.

And the only thing left I could destroy.

Ipressed my hands to my face, feeling mud in my hair, rain dripping into my mouth, swallowing the taste of earth, water, and my own despair. My vision blurred with my tears.

“I…I can’t…I can’t survive without it…without you…without…my light.”

The Harding Hunt had begun its masked maze hunt earlier today. I had watched Xanthy laugh and mingle, oblivious to what waited in the storm inside me.

She couldn’t see it. She didn’t know I wasn’t okay. I had deteriorated over the year. I didn’t belong to Alexandra Harding.

I belonged to the blood flowing through her veins.