Page 24 of Little Author

I thought the gun would feel heavier.

It didn’t.

It felt like a decision I’d already made.

My hands shook, but not from fear. I realized that too late.

It wasn’t fear anymore.

It was something else.

Roux was there, his voice in my blood, his scent crawling down my throat. Blood, smoke, and paper ash. My paper ash. My stories, my sickness, all soaked into his skin. All burned into memory and creating something new.

He was bleeding from the bottles and broken glass. But he didn’t flinch. Didn’t groan. He just watched me like a starved god waiting for his sacrifice to kneel.

“I see you,” he repeated

The cop, Constable Canton, clutched his ribs, eyes wide. He was talking, still talking, like he could talk me back into the light.

“Elodie, please. This isn’t you. I know you’re scared, but this man, he’s a monster.”

He didn’t get it.

He still thought I was worth saving.

“You don’t know me,” I said in a broken whisper.

Roux took a step closer. And another.

I didn’t stop him.

He walked toward me until the gun hit his chest, the barrel aimed at his heart.

“Don’t,” Canton croaked from behind him. “Don’t let him turn you into something you’re not.”

And there it was.

The lie.

Because…I was already in darkness.

I knew it personally. I wrote it, everything I craved, the obsession I felt, and the love I had for Roux. Everything I’d buried, every violent, shameful, black hunger I’d pressed down with candlelight and neat manuscripts…the darkness enveloped me.

It was me.

I was just done pretending it wasn’t done writing someone else’s story instead of my own.

Roux tilted his head. His voice was low, reverent as he leaned down to my face.

“Make him sing, Little Author.”

I looked at the man who wanted to save me. He was kind. Gentle in a way of his own. Real. But he was also…a lie, a lie that didn’t want to save me, a lie that would arrest me, and a lie that whispered sweet bullshit into my ears until it felt real.

He wanted to end my story. He didn’t want the monster in me. No, he wanted the broken girl.

Roux?

Roux wanted the monster.

He wanted what he read, what he knew to be true. He wanted me…the real me, not some made-up story.

My finger slid along the handle of the gun. Roux moved to the side, the gun pointed directly at Officer Canton. His eyes went wide.

“Elodie, be reasonable, don’t…”

I pulled the trigger. The shot was louder than I expected, and he jerked back like a puppet cut from its strings.

There were no screams, just the ring in my ears from the gun, the ache in my chest where the metal slammed into my skin from the force of the shot.

Roux moved first.

He knelt beside the body and gently closed the cop’s eyes, as if he were tucking in a child for sleep.

I couldn’t breathe.

My body was singing with every nerve awake. I dropped the gun because my hands were shaking.

But inside? Inside…I felt clean.

I felt whole and new.

Roux came to me with the copper’s badge in his hand.

He cupped my face in his bloody hand, bringing the reflective metal up to my face.

“You finally see yourself,” he murmured.

I nodded.

I didn’t even know when I started crying.

He kissed me, claimed me, and I let him because it wasn’t about giving in anymore. It was about finally letting myself free. It was then that I realized the truth…I never wanted to be saved. I wanted to be understood.

And Roux?

He understood everything. He was always the one thing in my life that made sense, the one thing I didn’t have to pretend.

I wrote my fantasies, and he reenacted them all.

He destroyed my mind, my body, hell, even my soul. The truth was always there beneath the surface.

I was his.

The ending to my story was always there.

It was always him, from the start to the finish, it was Roux Patel.

And now?

It was the beginning of my own.

The End