You Must Fall In Love

Chapter Fifty-Seven

What she needed was something she had never had to begin with.

There were hints, of course, dripping like menstrual blood into her ears and brain. Flashes of memory, turned into something dark and coppery and foul, filled with wasted promise like unfertilized ova.

She had spent her life being peevish and angry, and what for? Fighting against marriage, an impending marriage that she didn't want. Just that?

Her righteous anger had turned sour, her wit had curdled into sarcasm, and her hopes had scattered into so much dust, withered not by circumstance but by herself.

Your heart is crusted, Christine Lam; cold and hard as a rock.

If she had made herself into someone better, someone with a spine, with integrity, then maybe she would be able to draw the courage to stand now.

But she was frozen. She couldn't. She couldn't stand. She had three amulets in her pocket that she had spent weeks crafting, and yet she knew that even if she tried pulling them out, even if she could somehow sneak the lighter from her other pocket, Nimrod would shoot her or throw a knife or do something to make those amulets as good as tissue paper.

So it had all been for nothing, basically.

Only when it begins to bleed will you begin to feel.

She felt like she wanted to throw up, again, because she could still see the blood oozing from Rob's chest and the helplessness in his eyes, the sheer confusion that mirrored her own.

What was she meant to do? She couldn't just stay here! She needed to do something! She —

Jen let out a sob, a horrible choking noise that Christine had never heard before in her life, and revulsion threw her headlong, sent her tumbling beyond her own limbs and made her quite incapable of fear.

"NIMROD!" she screamed.

Wild, like an enraged cat, she ran towards him, even as every nerve wailed and her mind shrank to the size of a millipede's.

She was scared. She was so scared.

But she hated herself more than she feared him.

And that anger fueled her, made her believe that she might just be able to do something that would stop him from stabbing Rob in the neck, right before he did it anyway and slapped her hard in the face, sending her to the ground in a fountain of foreign blood.