PROLOGUE - Silas
15 years earlier…
The air in the room smelled of formaldehyde, sharp antiseptic, and the end.
I stood in front of the metal table, perfectly still, my hands casually shoved into the pockets of my black coat. The neon light above us buzzed with an irritating, erratic rhythm, casting pale shadows on her face.
She was beautiful even in death. Her skin now had the color of old porcelain, and her lips were bluish, closed forever. On her thin, delicate neck, the thick, dark purple mark of the rope was clearly outlined.
I didn’t cry. Tears are a human emotion, reserved for weaklings who don’t understand the absoluteness of death. But somewhere deep in my chest, where there should have been only cold reason, a heavy, paralyzing emptiness was spreading. I looked at her and felt how an entire world, the only world that had ever truly understood me, had just extinguished.
Slowly, I pulled my right hand out of my pocket. With my fingertips, which felt unrealistically warm against her icy skin, I brushed over her closed eyelids, and then down her cheek, stopping exactly on that brutal bruise on her neck.
“Did you really think this was the only way to escape, Isabella?” I whispered into the sterile silence. My voice was deep, dark, devoid of a tremor, but filled with a weight that no one else would ever be able to recognize.
There was no answer. There was none of her music, none of her tears, nor that beautiful defiance of hers that had fed me. Only absolute silence.
“Everyone will say that I drove you to this,” I continued slowly, leaning over her lifeless face. “That I shattered your mind into pieces. That I suffocated you with my darkness until you could no longer breathe. Let them think that. I know you believed it too, in the end.”
With my thumb, gently, almost reverently, I brushed over her lower lip.
“I let you go. I allowed you to choose that perfect, fake life of yours. Your safe, boring paradise with him.” I laughed, and the sound was dry and bitter. “And look where your paradise has brought you. You couldn’t bear the emptiness, could you? You couldn’t survive the boring light after you had known my darkness.”
Heavy footsteps echoed in the hallway outside the morgue. The pathologist had given me only five minutes of solitude. Her fiancé that perfect, pathetic citizen who was probably just sobbing in front of the police was arriving to identify the body.
I had no intention of sharing the same air with him. Nor did I have any intention of letting him see me here.
I leaned even closer, closed my eyes, and pressed my lips to her cold forehead. I lingered there a second too long, inhaling the last trace of her, feeling that sick, dark love tearing my chest one last time.
“I will miss you, my little genius,” I whispered right into her cold skin. “More than I thought possible.”
I straightened up, buttoned my coat, and with silent steps headed toward the side door, blending into the shadows of the room just before the main doors opened.
I left her there. I left her to her perfect, normal world that, in the end, killed her.
