I can feel her figuratively slipping through my fingers. The hope for a cure. The need for her to belong with me. All destroyed.

I can’t do this again. I cannot start over. Not with another subject. Not to reach another disappointing failure.

I stalk toward her, sloshing water as my feet find determined purchase on the riverbed. “The only monster here is you,” I say, taking hold of her arms. “You’re a flawed design, wrong from birth. You corrupt everything and everyone around you. There’s only one solution.”

I throw her over my shoulder.

Blakely’s nails scratch at my back as she fights to be set free. I wrap my arm around her thighs, preventing her kicks. She beats her fists against me, and I feel no physical pain. Once we’re in the basement, I climb the staircase and unlock the cabin door, then toss her down in the corner of the black room.

“Alex…please.” She pleads my name, but the anguish I detect in her tone is false. I can turn off my receptors now. I can do what needs to be done.

“Fuck you, Alex.”

“There’s the real Blakely,” I say.

She wipes her damp hair from her face, staring up at me with a fierceness I wish she felt. “You will suffer. If not by me, your punishment will come one day, Alex Chambers.”

“Oh, Blakely. To love such an unfeeling thing. I assure you, that is my punishment.”

I close the door and turn the lock.

21. Metamorphosis

21

Metamorphosis

Alex

As Blakely observed, the waterfall is beautiful. Though not without its flaws, it’s the faults, the original features, that are unlike any other fall in the world which makes it the breathtaking structure that it is.

A monument carved from the elements and time.

And now it might as well be a shrine. Some hallowed place of worship where her memory will haunt. Every time I return here, I’ll see her face, those jaded green eyes. I’ll remember her soft skin and what it felt like to sink deeply inside her and lose all sense of the world.

Blakely speaks of torture—but there is no greater torture than to experience a blissful taste, only to have the pleasure snatched away. It’s better to yearn for a moment unfulfilled than to know exactly what you can never have.

Her memory will weaken over time, becoming tarnished and faded around the edges. As humans, we’re not intended to recall every detail of our past in perfect clarity. We require the ability to forget. It helps the mind accept and move on.

The morning sun crests above the treetops, shining a brilliant ray of clarity over Devil’s Peak, making the night before seem like a distant dream. Sleep deprivation might also be giving way to less lucid thoughts.