...
❝He was the poison I was dying to taste on my lips.❞
...
I was a coward.
The coward who wanted to leave behind the wreckage of her life for the man who had tormented her for as long as she could remember. The boy who had spit venom at me gro...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
DARLING, YOU'RE MINE.
River's words played on repeat in my head as I tossed and turned for the umpteenth time that night, knowing it was an ungodly hour, yet with sleep still somehow eluding me.
Mine to toy with. Mine to make your life a living hell.
I tried pressing a pillow with all the strength I could muster against my ears, but as if he was living inside my brain, inside my body, his voice continued to reverberate loudly against my ear drums.
Mine. Mine. Mine.
I wanted to scream as I gave in and got up, covering my face with my hands with a mere aggravated sigh. I may have hated him, but even that hate wasn't enough to make me disregard him so easily.
If anything, my hatred for him intensified my obsession with wanting to decode his words and figure out what he meant. He'd been talking in riddles since I'd arrived, as if the mystery would be enough for me to lose my sanity and hightail it out of here.
And if I was being completely honest, his threats were slowly seeping into my bloodstream, spreading something ugly. Something that resembled fear.
Fear that made the hairs on my arm stand on alert. Fear that made my heart worry it was beating too loud against the eery silence of the night. Fear that made me jump when I heard faint voices travelling up from downstairs and the sound of something shattering.
When, a second later, I realised that it wasn't just my imagination teasing my fear and that something was actually going on downstairs, I shot out of bed and rushed down the stairs, where the sound of water running led me to the faintly illuminated kitchen.
My grandfather stood at the sink, washing his hands and at the sound of footsteps, he turned, a grim frown on his face. The lines between his brows deepened when he saw it was me.
"Ishwarya." He sounded tense, frustrated even. "What are you doing here? Why are you not asleep?"
I ignored his questions and asked my own. "What happened? What was that noise?"
"It was nothing." Gulzar may have been good at pretending everything was fine when it came to our family, but he couldn't convince me of that lie, no matter how much piercing eye contact he maintained. "You should go back to bed."
"But—"
"Nothing happened, Ishwarya. Go back to sleep. It's late and you have school tomorrow."
"I just—"
He interrupted me again, his voice as hard as granite this time. "I said, go back to bed. We can talk in the morning."
I knew when to fight my battles, and knowing this would be a futile one, I spun around and walked away, spine rigid against the hostility that had built up in the room.
