Sweet Innocence and Gentle Sin || 𝐀𝐂𝐎𝐓𝐀𝐑

Chapter 42: The Hopeful Worship The Kind

TW: Slight Gore

I just wanted to be yours; can I be yours? Can I be yours? Just tell me I'm yours. If I'm turning in your stomach and I'm making you feel sick.

~)(~

I thought it was over—how stupid I was to believe it was over. How many times can a person get beaten down before it becomes numbing? How many times will it take before I start to feel it?

The gold frames of the gallery gleamed under the candlelight, hanging against walls painted a suffocating shade of crimson. Every flicker of light seemed to make the shadows come alive, as if the depicted horrors were real, waiting with bated breath to strike.

I couldn't understand why anyone would want a gallery filled with such gruesome artwork, but it seemed no one cared. Every canvas screamed, the brushstrokes like the cutting of a blade, exposing the exhausted, broken bodies of innocents crawling through fields of fire. It was intimate, closed within a labyrinth of rooms that seemed connected in a never-ending circle. The air was heavy with dim candlelight, pressing against my chest as a constant reminder of what surrounded me.

How could anyone be comfortable in a place like this? Conversing, laughing, dancing, all the while surrounded by mangled bodies depicted in cruel detail. Like blinded cattle walking atop bloodstains, oblivious to where they stood.

Did that make me crazy? For being so affected, unable to even drink without fearing I won't be able to swallow. Or was that the point—to paint me insane?

Had the High Lord planned to torment and remind me of every detail of my life I regretted? As if seeking some twisted revenge for my defiance, a reminder of how vicious his court could be. As if I was his to own, to break like a horse. He probably wanted me to snap, wanted an excuse to punish me. And so I bit my tongue and pretended to be just as oblivious as the rest of them. I wouldn't let him win, not until I was dead.

It was difficult—impossible not to react when looking at such sadistic noise of faded bones and splattered blood. Dismembered figures spread across a blackened earth, cast aside like unwanted weapons. Ripped fabric and sharp steel, pulled hair and suspended tears—broken morals and grieving rage—the rage of vengeance, of pride.

I stared at the art, at the faces drawn. The faces of men with red eyes and bloodstained skin, faces of women pleading with hands raised to the sky for the Mother. I felt my own simmering wrath, my own silent grieving.

I saw my face etched with precision. It made me look away.

A break—I needed something to distract myself from the thoughts building like a thundercloud against my skull. I looked around the room, my eyes searching for any face I recognized, any anchor I could lean against. And I found it.

The clinking glass and murmured conversations melted away, and I felt it at the edge of my mind, lingering with the faintest touch of a familiar scent, a stare that held me with urgency. My pulse jumped to my throat, my body recognizing him before my mind. Across the room, trapped in what I could only assume was an interrogation by some old and vicious military general, was Azriel. Like an unnoticed whisper, the weight of his presence was a balm to me. The very thing I couldn't run from or live without. The sun to a thorny, tangled rose bush.

And the moment the shadows twisted around his ears, and his golden eyes flicked up and met mine, something raw and yearning took root. A need not to touch, kiss, or devour but to listen, feel, and know this was real. Even after everything, after all he had done and every bruise I had given him, I still couldn't deny it, my heart betraying me.