It is a strange thing, the way she can feel him before she ever sees him now.

She always could, in a way — the world had a way of bending around him, his presence undeniable, the air itself shifting and changing whenever he arrived. But it’s different now. Ever since he held her magic it is drawn to him, and she knows he is here by the gravitational pull in her veins. He is the moon and she is the tide, and she turns in a shimmer of golden stardust to meet his gaze just as those glass eyes hit the ground. Her heart catches in her chest at the sound of her name on his lips, but that disapproving look that he wears causes her blood to run cold.

“Carnage.” She had missed the shape of his name and the way it feels on her tongue, but the sound of the glass eye breaking may as well have been a thunderclap, and she tries to keep from visibly flinching.

He’s annoyed about Atrox; she pieces that together quickly enough.
She doesn’t argue with him, even if she has a hundred counter-points: that he is gone more than he is here, that she cannot escape his face and eyes in his hundreds of children that walk this earth and that she has to ignore that lest her jealousy swallow her whole, or, and perhaps most importantly, that if he has Gail why can’t she have someone else, too?

She doesn’t say any of this because the balance has never been tipped in her favor, and she is just lovesick and foolish enough to accept it.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes against his skin when he presses against her, but she offers no excuse or explanation. She wants to drag her lips across every inch of him, to reacquaint herself with every curve of muscle she memorized so long ago. But there is a tense kind of energy radiating from him, and though her chest aches when he pulls away, she does not follow him.

When he brings the girl out — pale, with blood streaming down her face, and she imagines it is like looking at a reflection of her past self — she feels her pulse still, before rushing again. Her jaw tightens when he wrenches the girl’s heart from her chest, and if her own scar from where Gale had once done the same to her burns in memory, she is sure it is only her imagination. She does not allow herself to look at the collapsed body, but instead looks at the bloody heart that still pulses weakly on the ground, before going still.

It’s a test; the kind she is known for failing.
Dread sits like a weight in her chest, unyielding. “I can’t rip out someone’s heart,” she says, soft and almost regretful. She says it, but finds herself wondering if she even means it. She is not the same as she was the first time he asked her to do something like this; she had been obsessed and obedient, but not the no-going-back in love that she is now. Her fear of him had morphed into a fear of losing him long ago, and that fear is already pushing the previous dread she had felt to the back of her mind.

“What happens if I say no?” She looks to him, doe-eyed and reverent and apprehensive, her own heart an erratic beat in her chest with the lifeless one sitting on the ground in between them.