You Must Fall In Love

Chapter Fifty-Two

Rob limped.

His ankle was burning, biting with every disgusting step, but burning was familiar by now. He had experienced every sort of pain possible in his life — dislocated joints, ruptured organs, migraines that felt like thunder cleaving his skull entire. It was nothing to him now, even though it felt new every time.

The only reason he healed was so he could be put through more pain. So pain was an old friend, one that reminded him he was still alive, still going. The day he stopped hurting, he was dead.

Instead, what hurt was the truth Jen had told him: that the pain, and his curse, had been something more than the will of God.

That it had been the work of someone else. Someone who had done it deliberately, with absolutely no care for him or for what he was feeling, or for the agony it would cause everyone around him. Someone with less knowledge and more malice than the loving Father.

From childhood, Rob had wrapped himself in layers, shrinking down into himself, until he had become a child in a baggage assistant's body. The sarcasm was a layer. The fake glasses were a layer. The sweater and the nose-touching was a layer.

Only the anger was real.

He had mummified himself in musty rags, taken out his brain and put it carefully in a jar, because if the beasts within him came out they would tear everything around him to shreds...

No. Because he knew, deep down, that there was no cure, and that this curse was forever, and there was no-one to blame. He didn't believe in God, after all.

But now there was someone. Someone less hypothetical than the First Cause and Unmoved Mover, someone who could take the full heft of his hatred and the weight of his wasted life.

Rob leered, slavered almost. His heel was burning, but his brain was too. It was ablaze with something he couldn't remember feeling at all, so much that he was almost amused at his own self-knowledge.

Delight. He was utterly ecstatic.

"You are in grave danger, Miss Lam. Did you know that you are living with a rabid beast?"

The lump of meat was talking. It was all fat and all meat and not very many bones, and it was saying things that he had always known were true.

"Yes," he said. "She does know. What are you going to do about it?"

The grin split his cheeks, even as his heel gave way and collapsed into a soft, warm, bleeding mess.