Page 117 of Petrify

No one butme.

He won’t be locked away in these walls anymore. He has a vessel for his music. A muse he would kill for. Unlimited resources. All of it, dangling before him.

But if I say no, reject his offer, what then?

We can’t reverse time. We can’t go back to how things were even a couple hours ago.

He can’t go back to life in these walls.

I can’t go back to the same menial life in the city. Iwon’t.

My lips are dry. “You want us to live like this? Moving around in secret while you… You can’t—kill—and have it all. What if you get caught? Isn’t that the opposite of what you’ve taught me? Isn’t a full lifeout therewhat you want?”

“We can still sate our urges and have everything. All we need to do is get rid ofthem.”

Mariane gasps the moment Baz turns in their direction, her face draining of all color again.

And then Baz tells his parents everything. Every thought he’s had these last fifteen years, every damning thing they’ve done to seal their fate. I don’t want to hear. Ican’t.

I think of Henri, wonder where he is.

I think of that first day, the shy boy who could barely meet my eyes.

Bastien said Henri was doomed to follow in his footsteps, such is the nature of this family and their curse. Every patriarch dying strange deaths. Succumbing to follies. Making fatal mistakes.

What will it be for Bastien?

Maybe his faked death at the pond tricked Fate and cashed in this doomed luck.

Henri would never raise a hand to his parents. He wouldn’t taunt them while his mother weeps, while his father finally spits vile threats that will never come to fruition. He wouldn’t tell them his plans to disembowel them while they’re still alive, just so they could feel how emptyhefelt. He wouldn’t describe every single second of agony they’ll feel in just a few minutes, when that rope tightens around their necks and he has the honor of pulling it tight.

Maybe Henri will outrun this family’s bad luck.

And then Baz is wrapping my fingers around the handle of a sharpened kitchen knife, its steel blade glinting in the golden light, shocking me out of my thoughts. His pupils are the size of pin pricks, gleaming with anticipation, as he turns me toward Leo.

“Go on,” Bastien says. “I know you want to.”

The knife is weighty in my palm, the handle worn but snug in my fingers.

“Youknow you want to.”

I glance at the man who’s supposed to be a ghost. “He hasn’t… he hasn’t done anything to me.”

“But you know he’s thought about it. He’s been thinking about it this whole time, hasn’t he? You walked into this house, a sacrifice. He just thought he had the right to take you for himself. He would have, eventually. You know it. He would have tried to take you from me. The moment he saw you—I know he was thinking about how he wanted to defile you, corner you somewhere and see how long it takes you to fight back.”

He wraps his fingers around mine, around the knife’s handle, pointing the tip directly over his father’s throat. Leo arches his neck back as far as he can.

His skin looks too paper thin. This isn’t the self-assured man who kept trying to get in my space.

This is when they start to get desperate. This is when it starts to sink in, that there is no way out.

“Now the only question is, how angry are you? How unforgivable are his actions?”

Leo is glaring at us. Real, tangible fear, in the exposed whites of his eyes, his chest heaving. Each movement, each breath, digging the tip of the knife against the fragile flesh of his neck.

He is afraid of us.

He is afraid of what I may decide to do. He isafraidofme.