Page 34 of Monster’s Obsessive Hunger

LYSSA

T he journey back to Thorrin’s territory is a long, cold walk into the heart of my own fear.

Every step is a deliberate choice. My side throbs with a dull, persistent ache, a constant rhythm that reminds me of the stakes.

Elira’s knife is a heavy, solid weight at my hip, a symbol of the hard-won wisdom she has given me.

I am not the same naive girl who first stumbled into these woods chasing the ghost of a lullaby.

The forest has scoured away my softness, and Elira has given me a spine of steel to replace it. I am no longer just prey.

When I reach the border of his lands, I do not hesitate.

The markers—bleached bones and the skulls of his kills—are a grim, familiar sight.

They should be a warning, a sign to turn back.

Instead, they feel like the landmarks of home.

I step across the invisible line, a willing trespasser returning to the domain of her monster.

The air here is thick with his scent—that deep, musky smell of ancient stone and solitude, but it is laced with something else now. A sharp, raw grief that seems to cling to the very air. I follow it, my boots crunching in the deep snow, my breath pluming in the frigid air.

I find him near a small mound of freshly disturbed earth and stones at the base of a pine tree.

His back is to me. He is a looming silhouette of despair, his massive frame hunched, his head bowed.

He is so lost in his own torment that he does not sense my approach.

He is speaking, his true voice a low, gravelly whisper that the wind almost steals away.

“You deserve a gentler monster,” he whispers to the cold, empty air. It is a farewell. An act of letting me go that is tearing him apart. He believes he is doing the honorable thing, exiling himself from my life to keep me safe. He is a fool. A beautiful, noble, broken fool. And he is my fool.

“I don’t want a gentler one,” I say. “I want you.”

He freezes. His entire body goes rigid, a statue carved from shock and disbelief.

He turns slowly, his movements jerky, uncertain.

When his skull-face finds me, the cinders where his eyes had been are a dim, sick green, flickering with confusion.

He thinks I am a ghost, a hallucination conjured by his own grief.

His light, which has been a dull, miserable glow, flares with a brilliant, startled gold.

“Lyssa?” he rasps, my name a question, a prayer.

I do not answer with words. I begin to walk toward him, my steps even and sure in the deep snow.

I do not stop until I am standing directly before him, close enough to feel the cold radiating from his bones.

He is trembling, a fine, violent shudder that runs through his entire frame.

He is a mountain on the verge of an avalanche, and I am walking willingly into its path.

I raise my hand, and he flinches, a small, pathetic movement from a beast of such immense power.

He expects me to strike him, to punish him.

Instead, my palm comes to rest gently against his ribs, directly over the turbulent, glowing heart of his being.

The light pulses under my touch, warm and alive and so full of a pain I can feel in my own soul.

His gaze is locked on mine, the fires in his sockets a maelstrom of confusion and a hope so fierce it is almost a terror. I give him the truth, the only gift I have left to offer.

“I’m not here because I have to be,” I say. “I left a warm fire and a safe bed to walk through a frozen wilderness to find you. I chose this.” I press my hand a little harder against his chest, willing him to feel the certainty in my touch. “I choose you .”

My words, my touch, my choice—they are the final blow.

The monstrous strength that holds his massive construction together seems to dissolve.

A sound, half-growl, half-sob, he collapses.

He drops to his knees before me in the snow, his entire body shaking, his skull-face bowed in a gesture of absolute, profound surrender.

It is not the submission of a defeated predator; it is the capitulation of a soul that has been granted a mercy it never believed it deserved.

I do not move. I keep my hand on his chest, a steady, grounding pressure, an anchor in the storm of his emotions.

The light beneath my palm is a chaotic swirl of color—the gold of wonder, the blue of a sorrow so deep it has no bottom, the fierce, protective white of a love he does not know how to name.

He looks up at me, the bright coal in his sockets no longer burning with guilt, but with a raw, desperate devotion that takes my breath away. This is the truth of him, stripped bare of all pretenses. He is a monster who has learned to kneel.

He takes my other hand in his, his massive claws impossibly gentle as they cradle my fingers. His voice, when he speaks, is a raw, broken vow torn from the depths of his being.

“Then I’ll never hurt you again,” he swears, the words a sacred promise in the cold, hallowed silence of the forest. “Even if I starve.”

The vow is an impossible one, a promise to fight for my sake.

The weight of it settles in the air between us, a new and terrifying foundation for whatever future we might build.

He is offering me his control, his restraint, his very life.

In return, I have offered him my trust. I kneel in the snow before him, my heart aching with a love so fierce it is almost a pain.

I am no longer afraid. In the presence of this kneeling monster, in the heart of this dangerous, wild forest, I have never felt more safe