My gasp rattled through the room, bouncing off the invisible walls of darkness. I blinked rapidly, my hand at my chest, my hair sticking to my skull because of the sweat pouring off me.

I was alone.

I didn’t need to glance at a clock to know it was the deadest of night. Because that was where my nightmares began. After I woke up. At this exact time, every night for the time I’d been sleeping alone.

The night was my enemy.

Lukyan was my enemy.

The night was where terrors were both born and brought into maturity. Without light to chase them away, shadows grew corporal, menacing and inescapable. And every dark thought lurking at the corner of my mind thrived in the shadows, and worries and despair had room to grow and mature. The world seemed on the precipice of end in the darkness, in the middle of the night, with darkness on either side.

But the sunrise chased most of it away. It didn’t conquer it, merely sent those shadows into corners or banished those ugly thoughts back to that basement of my mind that I only ventured to with the lurk of darkness.

Why I expected his menace to scuttle off with the upcoming rays of sun these past mornings, kissing the room and making it unremarkable and harmless as it always was, I didn’t know. Something as deep as what lived within him, that was him, was too powerful to be intimidated by such a thing as light. And despite the warm glow in the room and the lack of shadow, the nightmare still remained. Every morning. Every second I ghosted around the house, lost and angry.

The nightmare was my companion before, but it was my torturer now that I was alone.

And I found myself wanting it to remain. Needing it to remain. Because I had become so accustomed to my nightmare, so attached to it, I feared it disappearing completely.

Because he would too.

I couldn’t wake up another morning watching the sun rise, knowing it would change nothing. A new day was just another yawning emptiness, a ticking clock before the night swallowed me up again.

“This is crazy,” I hissed, yanking back the covers and jumping onto the ground. It was cold against my bare feet, or maybe that was my feet that were cold against the ground.

Despite my thin sheen of sweat, I was freezing. From my bones.

But I didn’t put anything on as I rushed through the shadowed hallways of the sleeping house.

It wouldn’t work. Layers, scalding showers, exercise. Nothing would get me warm.

I’d even tried holding my hand to the flame of a candle, more curious than anything. It reddened and blistered but the pain was nothing. I barely noticed it.

The man with an ice chip for a heart was the only one who would stop me freezing to death with the comfort of my own loneliness.

I had barely thought of my route as I rushed through the house, a nightmare and a blizzard on my tail, but I didn’t even notice I was going to the dead room instead of his bedroom.

Logic dictated he’d be sleeping; therefore that would be the first place to look.

But logic didn’t dictate Lukyan and me.

Light spilled out from the bottom of the door to his study. My ear throbbed annoyingly, but I was used to it by this point, more pain to add to the collection.

I followed it, the light, until my hand was flat on the closed door to the dead room. I settled my cheek onto the books encased in the door, inhaling the stale smell, letting it seep into me.

Then I pushed, tentatively, revealing the room to me.

Revealing death.

But the dead were nowhere to be found. Every single frame, every single colorful and beautiful corpse was gone, leaving only faint marks on white walls to show where they once were.

There was only one dead thing left in the room. And he was sitting in a chair, cradling a glass of vodka.

His eyes went straight to me.

I inhaled.

Then the warmth rushed through me. Its origin was the ice of his stare. It wasn’t logical, but it was Lukyan. The fire came hot and real from me too. My fury. My burning hatred.

The anger that I wanted him off the face of the earth after what he’d done to me, and the knowledge that I’d drop right off too if that were ever to happen.

“Where did they all go?” I asked.

I was looking around at the stark white walls. He was not.

He was only focused on me. The whole of his intense and concentrated focus. And not like I’d unexpectedly walked into the room in the middle of the night. No, like I’d been there all along.

“Elizabeth Helen Hades,” he said instead, pushing up from the chair.

I froze the second his steps betrayed his direction.

Me.

Wasn’t that what I wanted? Why else did I come here?

“Born 31^st October, 1987.”

My breath caught in my chest as he reached me, circled me, enraptured by me just as he was when he was staring at the frames describing the dead things inside them.

“More commonly known as Halloween,” he continued to speak, stopping his pacing to stand right in front of me.

His breath was hot on my face, the energy pulsing around him pressing through my skin. But he didn’t touch me.

“Originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, where people would dress up, light fires, for the purpose of warding off ghosts.”

His eyes tore at my soul, flaying it every moment I continued to meet his gaze. I welcomed it. The white-hot pain, the hatred swirling in my chest. For myself, for needing this, wanting him after everything he’d done. For him, for knowing I could go nowhere but here and utilizing that. Utilizing every single one of my weaknesses for his gain.

“In the eighth century, Pope Gregory the third designated November 1^st as a time to honor all saints,” he continued, voice businesslike, a sharp juxtaposition of everything else he was saying, everything else that lay underneath the words. “This nearness to Samhain meant that over the years, All Saints Day incorporated some of the traditions. Which is how All Hallows Eve later came to be known as Halloween. Scottish poet Robert Burns actually helped popularize the word ‘Halloween’ with the poem he wrote in 1785 under the same name.”

I observed him, the way he spoke with facts, with efficiency. Describing me like I was already dead, he was somehow eulogizing me in life. And instead of feeling like he was pushing me closer to death, I’d never felt more alive.

“According to Celtic mythology, the veil between the Other, the world beyond, and our word is thinnest during Samhain,” he said. “It makes it easier for the spirits and the souls of the dead to return. Of course, you, Elizabeth Helen Hades, would be born on the day that death colludes with life, tries to grasp it in its embrace. And that’s what you’ve been doing your whole life, all three decades of it—trying to shake off that touch of death that came from the grave on the day of your birth. You were born with more Samhain in you, more death, than any other October child.”

His hand reached out, toyed with a strand of my hair, marveling at it the way I had marveled at the feathers of the birds once inside these walls.

“And that’s how you spoke to me, because of your connection with the thing I collected. That I’ve now dispersed.”

He cupped my cheek lightly, barely even a touch. It bruised instantly, somehow worse than any strike he’d landed previously.

“You’ve lived your life in pain and suffering, and you know nothing else. But it does not define you.”

His hands ghosted over the scars on my face, heating them with his attention.

“You like to read, horror mostly, anything that simultaneously takes you out of the horror of your current reality but also reminds you that horror is the only reality. You know a world’s fantasy is not monsters and evil, but a world that worships perfection and beauty.”

He trailed his hand along my lips. I wanted to open them to him, to let him inside, to let his words pry open what I’d closed inside me. But I couldn’t. Not yet. This was torture, but it was an imperfect torture that epitomized us. Him, cold, calculating on the surface, the lion. Me, the lamb both shuddering and frozen in his presence. The proverbial story. But we strayed from that because I was the lamb that wanted to be devoured by the lion. And he was the creature that wanted to feast on the lamb’s flesh while keeping it for his own.

“‘The underground of the city is like what’s underground in people. Beneath the surface—’”

“It’s boiling with monsters,” my thin rasp finished for him.

“Guillermo del Toro,” he said. “Your favorite author. Well, one of them, at least. You like him in particular because he’s honest about the ugliness of the world. Among other things.”

I sucked in a breath, unable to fathom how he knew something I’d never uttered aloud.

“And that’s you. You don’t become more beautiful with artifice or effort,” he said, brushing at the wayward strands of my violently chopped bob. “What makes everyone else in this world beautiful is what diminishes everything you are. You’ll forgive me for quoting him once more, but I do find myself quite enamored. ‘Perfection is just a concept—an impossibility we use to torture ourselves and that contradicts nature.’” Lukyan devoured me with his gaze, his words both poetry and pain. “You thought my collection in here was an accumulation of perfection. Of beauty. But it was, in the end, what nature itself created: the anomaly, something so far beyond what was considered real and normal that that in itself made it ugly.”

He waited a beat. Prepared me for something.

“Your daughter was born on your birthday,” he said, voice softening at the edges. “You held her in your arms on the day the dead came back to claim what was always theirs. What you could’ve never been because your ugly and horror-filled life would not allow for such beauty. There was no room for it.” He still gripped the strand of my hair in his fingers, handling it like it was a fossil, ready to crumble if gripped incorrectly. “Do not misunderstand to think that I’m suggesting you are in any way responsible for this. I’m not. You did not deserve this. But the world gives the most despicable of horrors to the least deserving of them all.”

He dropped my hair and his thumb ran along my bottom lip roughly, trying to tease it open. I let out a sound at the back of my throat, both from the heart-wrenching pain of his words and because of the shattering agony of his touch.

“You were born to be something more complex and unique than purely happy,” he said, his eyes fixated on my lips, then snapping back up to my eyes. “Because you are too complex to be able to sustain life like that. You weren’t born brave or strong. But life made you that way anyway, because if you hadn’t turned into that, you wouldn’t be here, in front of me.”

He stepped forward, his eyes the gates of hell, inviting me in since it was apparent that heaven would never be accessible to me. I didn’t fight as he pressed his body to mine, because I couldn’t. I sank into him as easy as a hot knife might slide through weak flesh.

“You, Elizabeth, are all I need in my collection. What this room was about. Finding the one thing I could grasp in my hands without sucking the life from it.”

“You are sucking the life from me,” I whispered, his lips brushing mine.

“And you suck mine right back, my love,” he rasped.

Then he kissed me.

His fingers twined in my hair, gently at first, combing out the knots caused by my midnight battles. Then, as the locks smoothed out to a kind of peace, he clenched his fist and yanked, pulling at the strands he’d taken such care to untangle.

If there was a single gesture to sum up all that was us, it was that. Lukyan’s hands taking quiet, gentle care of all the things that were tangled and broken in me, merely so he could have a clean slate to break them his way.

But I was made to be broken. Born to be broken. As Lukyan’s hands ripped at my hair, as his mouth assaulted and alternately worshipped my mouth, I realized the truth to his words.

It was not by design, by fate, just accident of birth. My life was destined to be miserable. Biology made it so.

Biology was what killed humanity in me.

What ruined me.

Biology was also what made my blood sing, my heart bleed and mince in my chest at the man holding me in his arms, kissing me like he wanted to kill me just so he could bring me back to life.

We fought each other, clawed at each other in order to strip ourselves down to our skin, in order to feel the life and the death on each other.

My clothes ripped under his grip, my skin bruised. His flesh opened as my nails scored across it. All this fed into the all-encompassing, all-consuming storm that was our love.

Our hatred.

His fingers found my entrance, pressing into me with beautiful brutality. I hissed into his mouth. He slammed me into the wall, my head rapping back into the surface painfully. His fingers distracted me from this probing pain as he worked me toward climax.

A second before I exploded, his fingers were gone.

I glared at him. “You fucker,” I hissed.

He grinned.

Grinned.

The first time I’d ever seen such a thing.

Then he sucked on the two fingers that had just been inside me, eyes winter fire as he did so. My body pulsated with need watching him. His hard length pressed into me.

“Lukyan,” I demanded, my hands running through his hair, tugging at the strands forcefully.

He responded by clutching my hips and lifting me, slamming me back into the wall—harder this time, to show me who was in control.

I let him, because once my legs were wrapped around him, he was inside me.

It didn’t matter who thought they had the power at that point.

The truth was neither of us did.

* * *

“I don’t forgive you,” I said, trailing the broken skin on his chest, picking at the dried blood with my pinky. Blood I’d created. I relished that.

“I don’t expect forgiveness,” he replied, his voice clear but somehow lazy. Sated. Almost content.

“I still hate you,” I continued, circling his pecs with my fingertips.

“I can live with hatred.”

I glanced up to those iceberg eyes. The ones that had betrayed me, the ones that had created me, destroyed me. “I don’t know how long it will take me to get over this,” I told him honestly.

His eyes were full. So full that all that—whatever was inside them—leaked out of him and started to fill me up too. “I’m not giving you a limit. Forever is a preference.” His arms tightened around me. Too tight. Tight enough to be painful. But that’s how it would always be with us. Too much to be comfortable, just enough pain to keep us alive.

I blinked. “You want me to be mad at you forever?”

“Forever is a perception, not a timeline,” he murmured, his mouth pressing into my hair as he inhaled my scent. “I think you might have to be mad at me forever, hate me forever, one way or another. It’s the only way you’ll survive me.” He brushed his lips against the bruised skin on my shoulder. “It’s the only way I’ll survive you.”

“We won’t find safety in this, us, will we? No peace in each other?” I whispered.

“No,” he agreed. “We won’t.”

Then he kissed me, and I found I didn’t want safety or peace.

Not one bit.

* * *

The second lot of assassins came three days later.

Lukyan had been expecting them, so we were ready.

And they all died bloody.

With Lukyan and I standing together, fighting side by side.

“We have to leave, lzyubov moya,” Lukyan said, brushing a spatter of blood from my cheek. Not my own. “You know this.”

His eyes went around the room, touching on the bodies, the blood, the horror with a jaded gaze.

“All this, this is the beginning. This house will turn into a graveyard for anyone who tries to harm you, take you from me,” he promised, hand biting into my hip. “But it will eventually become our crypt if we don’t leave. A sitting target is a dead one. And you’re not dead, not anymore. I will not let it be so.” His stare was unyielding. “You just have to make sure you don’t let it be so either. It’s time to make sure that the weakness left inside you—the humanity that lingers—doesn’t kill you. That’s what it’ll do, given the chance. Because humanity kills almost as well as it helps. The scourge and the blessing, as del Toro says.”

I might’ve imagined the twinkle in his eye.

“You’re afraid of the outside world because it’ll crush you, hurt you, destroy you. But you have been crushed, hurt, destroyed.” His words were harsh and gentle at the same time. “So why is it that you fear the world that offers more of the same when you are not the same? When instead of letting the world destroy you, you can offer destruction right back?”

I gazed at him, the man who once spoke in no words, only death. The one who had been unthinkably cruel and also unfathomably kind. The saint playing the grim reaper. Or the grim reaper playing the saint. My scourge and blessing.

I stepped out of his arms, and he made a move to snatch me back into them. I held up my hand to stop him.

He did so.

My eyes were fixated on him. Then they moved, scanning over the death with what I imagined was the same jaded gaze. The dead didn’t scare me. It was what lay beyond. That garden that taunted me with the sheer vibrancy of life.

I stepped over a body, not bothering with the warm blood that stained my bare feet. It would sink in, find its place with my monster, and then it would wash off.

My fingers closed around the doorknob, testing the strength of the metal with my palms, playing with the idea of opening it. Letting the world in. Instinctively, my palms moistened, my heartbeat accelerated, and the air became thick and sticky.

Then I remembered my pain. My suffering. Made myself feel the utter horror of it all. How could a garden be worse than that? Maybe that was it. Maybe I knew it couldn’t be worse, so I feared it might be better.

Heat hit my back.

“I’m at home in misery and pain,” I whispered. “I don’t know where I fit around beauty and peace.”

Lukyan’s breath kissed the nape of my neck. “Your home will always be misery and pain, Elizabeth. You will never fit in with beauty or peace. That’s not in the plan for us now. But that doesn’t mean you can’t exist around it. That we can’t.”

His hand closed over mine and we opened the door together, the rush of the spring breeze chasing away the stench of death, or just masking it for the moment. I would always be able to taste the rot of decay underneath. Like the underbelly of monsters beneath humanity.

We stayed there, Lukyan’s heat pressing into my back, reminding me of my safety in misery and pain. The breeze of gentle and false beauty and peace flickering in front of me. He sensed I wasn’t ready to step out into it just yet, that it wasn’t something to be forced in that moment.

The man who’d forced me to become everything I was, everything I had to be, let me have that moment, because he knew something. He knew everything.

That this might’ve been the last snatch of whatever kind of peace we’d be afforded in this lifetime.

Because we had to leave.

I knew this.

Only death waited for me here.

And for once, I wasn’t going to wait for it.

* * *

There was no big speech the next day. Not many words at all.

Lukyan made gentle, rough, furious and all-consuming love to me the moment I woke up. It wasn’t that cringeworthy and horrible ‘making love’ that the movies made look so fluid and tender. Because that’s what the world wanted love to be.

They didn’t want to lift the curtain and show everyone how violent and fatal the reality was.

But we had no curtain to cling to. I didn’t want to. Because that was all I needed. The reality of our ugly and all-consuming love.

We packed a small bag each. There was nothing to take we couldn’t purchase on the road. Nothing of consequence to carry with us. We carried everything of consequence in places that didn’t zip up.

Lukyan destroyed every single one of his computers, his hard drives. He had a small tablet with all the relevant information on our families.

On our targets.

There were no words of encouragement, no questions about my state of mind. Lukyan knew my state of mind. Intimately. So he knew it was a barrel of rioting snakes.

But he also knew I could handle it.

Because I had to.

And it was that resounding faith in me, his surety that I would be able to do this because he knew I could, that had me putting one step in front of the other as we approached those foyer doors and their death-inducing stare.

Every step closer, the bag I had thought was so empty seemed to gain a bucket of lead. My back started to strain under the weight, pain shooting through my body as it tried to betray me, convince me that I couldn’t continue without dying.

Lukyan was right, it was that little piece of humanity inside me vying for my death. Because I wasn’t going to walk out that door and be able to hold onto my humanity. I wouldn’t survive with it intact. I would lose what connected me to the sprawling, pulsing masses on this planet. Well and truly stop belonging.

And some chemical survival instinct in me stopped me. Or tried to. Because humanity tried to tell us that straying from normality and morality was death. And my own little slice of that tried to tell me that too. Tried to scream it at me.

I paused, right in front of the door, resolve wavering as the weight of the decision settled heavily on my frail shoulders.

“What if I’m too weak, too fragile for this?” I whispered to the door.

The door didn’t answer, only smiled at me. Showing its power.

Lukyan turned to face me, forced me to do the same.

“You’re fragile,” he agreed. “But not in the way a flower might be. That if you crush it, pluck it, it’s destroyed. No, like a land mine. When you try to step on it, it not only destroys itself but everything around it. The world that tried to crush it. It was just lying in wait for the perfect moment.” He grasped my chin roughly. “That’s what you need to realize, lzyubov moya. The time for destruction is now.” He opened the door and the wind cut through me, circled around me.

Instantly, my palm moistened, my heartbeat increased, and my throat turned to sandpaper.

“You always thought the world was going to end you. But you’re more likely to end the world than the other way around. And we will, together. End every single person who ever had a hand in your pain.”

He stepped outside and the loss of him was palpable. On reflex, my feet followed him, like a magnet. It was only when my foot was inches above the brick steps of the outside that I realized what I was doing.

I froze.

Lukyan watched me. Waited. “It’s time for destruction.”

And I let my eyes connect with his as my foot landed on the ground. My other followed, and my hand settled into Lukyan’s dry and firm grasp.

“It’s time for destruction,” I agreed.

Then I let the world swallow us up, crush us, just so we could crush it right back.