“You’re wrong,” I whispered, my breath mingling with his.
His gaze burned into me, filled with something I couldn’t yet name.
“You’re not a monster,” I declared, my determination hardening like forged steel.
His throat bobbed, his breath shallow.
“You have no idea what I’ve done,” he murmured, voice stripped bare, the weight of untold sins pressing down on his broad shoulders.
His next words were quieter, almost as if he feared saying them aloud.
“Or who I am.”
I didn’t move, didn’t flinch.My pulse roared in my ears.“I don’t care.I’m not leaving until I know the truth.”
The words spilled from me recklessly, binding me to him in ways I couldn’t yet comprehend.“I understand enough.You push me away because you think you’re protecting me.But you’re not.I’m already in this, Amir.We both are.”
His gaze locked onto mine, unwavering, endless.
“You want to see who I really am, Elizabeth?”he murmured, his voice laced with a terrible promise—as he stepped back, once again creating distance between us.
Then, before my eyes, he changed.
The air thickened, dark wisps curling around him, shadows swallowing the room’s warmth.The edges of his form blurred and twisted, warping the space around him.
And then?—
His flesh began to crack.
Thin fractures spiderwebbed across his face, splitting open like dry, decaying wood.Chunks of skin sloughed off, curling at the edges as they peeled away, revealing raw muscle beneath—wet, glistening, rotting.
I froze, horror rooting me in place.
Gods, his eyes sank into hollow sockets, leaving behind swirling pools of sickly green light, a ghostly, unearthly glow where life should have been.
I wanted to scream, but the sound caught in my throat as his lips peeled back—blackening, rotting—before his teeth crumbled away in jagged, decayed shards.
His body convulsed as if something was draining the life from him in real-time.His frame collapsed inward, his shoulders caving, his form shrinking, shriveling, until he was barely more than a wraith of himself.
His hands?—
No longer human.
Elongated.Skeletal.Twisted.The flesh clung tightly over bone, splitting at the knuckles, leaking foul, black ooze that splattered onto the floor in thick, nauseating drops.
Then the stench hit me.
Rot.Mold.Decay.
A putrid wave so strong I gagged, my hand flying to my mouth, my stomach lurching violently.
His hair thinned in patches, falling away in brittle clumps, revealing a blistered, oozing scalp.
He stood before me, no longer a man but something caught between life and death, a walking corpse suspended in an eternal state of rot.
I had never seen anything so horrifying.
Yet—I couldn’t move.
