Chapter Eight: The Roof

Sleep did not keep me. It set me down hard after a few hours, ribs sore from the kind of dreaming that keeps replaying the same scene until your nerves can’t tell the difference between memory and warning. I lay there, throat raw, staring at the ceiling until it blurred into darkness that wanted to be a sky. The house breathed under me, but the roof… the roof held.

I tried the rituals. Water. Blanket. Counting. They all failed. Behind my eyes: crimson. Behind my ribs: the moment his teeth sank into someone else’s throat. I had thought it would stay horror forever. It didn’t. My body made a traitor’s bargain and threaded want into the memory until I couldn’t tell them apart, and the confusion made me angrier than fear ever had.

Anger is a kind of courage you put on backwards. I put on a sweater. Bare feet on cold floorboards—penance and permission. I didn’t turn on the light. I didn’t want the house to see me make this choice.

The attic stairs waited like an ultimatum. My hand on the railing felt absurdly loud. Each creak counted me into the night and accused me of something I could not yet name. I stopped at the landing and breathed like a student about to step onstage: in four, out four, bluff your calm. It did not hold.

The metal mouth of the roof door was cold against my palm. I pressed my ear to it first, childish, as if I would hear him breathing. The roof gave me only the hiss of the city and a long, slow quiet like a body choosing not to move.

I opened the door. It yelped anyway, a bad-mannered announcement.

The sky above was iron-black, the lamps buzzing their witchfire. The city wore its noise like a crown—sirens stitched into the distance, an elevated train rattling itself thinner, bass from someone’s window turning the air to a low bruise. On the parapet, where shadow swallowed shadow, he crouched.

His head turned when the door complained. Crimson eyes caught the weak spill of light and burned. He was still—too still, like patience nailed into a body. The monster from the alley and the weight from my roof fused into one truth and stood there until I had to decide what to do with it.

“I saw you,” I said, and my voice sounded steadier than I felt. “You killed him.”

He did not pretend not to understand. He dropped down from the parapet in one silent fall, boots popping grit, the gravel answering him like a congregation. He stopped with careful distance between us—as if that were the only mercy he trusted himself to offer. “He put hands on you,” he said. “That is enough.”

“Enough to die?” The night made the word bigger than I meant it to be.

His gaze did not flinch. The crimson made his pupils into wounds. “Yes.” A pause. “And too much. I know both things.”

“What do you feel about it?” The question leapt out of me like a badly tuned note. “Do you feel anything at all?”

“Hunger,” he said, in the careful tone of a man reading a sentence from a stone. “Relief. Shame. None of them undo the fact of what I did.”

The wind pulled at my hair and at the hem of my sweater, a petty thief. I crossed my arms against it and against myself. “Do you do that for everyone?”

“No.” The word was flat. “You are not everyone.”

Something in me leaned toward him when it should have leaned away. I hated the part that leaned. I honored it anyway by listening. “You don’t know me,” I said, which was true and a lie.

“I know your noises,” he said, and it should have sounded like a trespass; it sounded like a devotion he did not want. “I know the house when it holds you and when it does not. I know the pulse at your throat even when you tie a scarf against it. I know that when the water falls from your conjured storm, you hum to trick the body into believing it is safe.”

Heat crawled up my neck that had nothing to do with blood. “It’s a shower.”

“It is a tamed rain,” he said, and the words made a small pain in my chest because he meant them.

We stood in a triangle with the chimney. He would not step fully into the skinned light that pooled at the door. I did not ask him to. The city hissed below as if we were two coins arguing about the cost of a wish.

“Tell me your name,” I said then, because I needed to call him something that wasn’t monster and wasn’t the roof and wasn’t the red of his eyes. “If you’re going to make choices for me, at least let me say the right word when I swear at you.”

His mouth shaped a letter and then closed around it. “If I give it, you will use it against me,” he said, and it should have sounded like superstition; it sounded like history.

“I wouldn’t,” I lied, and we both knew it.

“Another time,” he said. “If there must be one.”

I took two steps onto the gravel, socks soaking cold. The roof bit my feet and I wanted the bite. “You don’t have to keep… doing this,” I said, and heard how small doing this made it sound. “Perching. Guarding. Paying.”

“Paying,” he agreed. “I do.”

“I don’t want penance.” My throat tightened. “I want—” The rest refused to come, cowardly. Courage sulked and then returned. “I want to stop thinking about dying.” The laugh that escaped had too much salt. “You’re the first thing that’s made me feel more alive since.”

His body went still in that terrible way of his. Crimson eyes searched mine, a calculation he didn’t want me to see. “I am not the right shape for that,” he said.

“That’s not your call.” I hated the pleading that wanted to creep into my voice. I made it iron and dared him to break it. “You don’t get to decide what makes me feel alive.”

“It is exactly my call,” he said softly. “Because if I let you choose me for that, I will choose you for everything. I will not stop. I know myself at least that much.”

“You say that like it’s a threat.”

“It is a promise I am not allowed to make.”

The night shrank around us, the roof making a narrow country out of stone and shadow. I could not tell if the dizziness that came next belonged to fear or anger or the hunger I did not want to name. I reached up before I could think better of it, set my fingers against the rough line of his jaw. His skin felt alive in a way it shouldn’t. Heat licked up my arm. My wrist brushed his mouth, and I felt the faint scrape of fang where lips hid teeth. His eyes flared brighter.

“No,” he said, but it was a threadbare word, and he didn’t move away.

“Tell me you don’t want me.”

He closed his eyes. In the red-dark behind his lids, he looked stricken. “Want is not the question.”

“It’s absolutely the question.” My thumb traced the corner of his mouth. He shuddered. His breath came out rough. “I want you. There. Reckless enough?”

He opened his eyes and the crimson nearly unmade me. “You want,” he said softly, “without forgetting what I did the first time I touched you.”

“I remember exactly.” I gripped his collar, tugged him down, defiant. “You stopped.”

“Barely.”

“Then stop again. Unless you're afraid."

The laugh he gave was jagged. “I am afraid of nothing. That is why they built boxes to put me in.”

“Then kiss me.”

He should have left me standing there. Instead he let me pull him down, and I rose on my toes and crushed my mouth to his.

Heat detonated, violent, more a collision than a kiss. His lips parted, his breath came harsh against mine, and when I gasped he swallowed it greedily, like a man dying of thirst who has learned the word no but not how to mean it. His hands clamped my waist, claws of pressure bruising through the thin sweater, dragging me flush. My body betrayed me with a moan I’d never meant him to hear.

He hardened against me. His restraint trembled like a beast breaking its tether. The kiss grew savage. My hands wound into his hair and yanked, dizzy with the fact of him, with the way the world collapsed to mouth and grip and the merciless rhythm he gave me: slow, punishing, a lesson carved into flesh.

My knees buckled, and he ground me back into the parapet, hips locking me in place. I clung, shameless.

He pressed me harder, his thigh sliding between mine until heat sparked in a place I hadn’t dared touch since the alley.

I rolled against him, chasing friction, shameless and furious at my own need. He growled into my mouth, a guttural sound that vibrated straight down my spine.

His hands slid lower, over the curve of my ass, squeezing, dragging me against the thick line straining his trousers. The rough rub of fabric against fabric made me shiver, made me wetter than I should have been.

“Look at me,” I demanded, breathless.

He obeyed. Crimson eyes seared mine, and the world narrowed to their fire. He bit his way along my jaw, down to the fluttering pulse at my throat, his fangs grazing skin hard enough to promise blood.

He lingered there, lips sealed against my jugular, sucking until I whimpered and tilted my head back like I was begging. He made a sound then—low, guttural, desperate in its restraint—and I wanted to be cruel to it. I wanted to break it, to force the night to pour through him and into me until nothing human was left standing.

“Do you remember?” I asked, hating the tremor in my voice, hating the need.

“No.” His voice was wrecked, raw with hunger. “But my body does. That is the danger.”

“Then let it.”

He did, briefly. His hips drove into mine, grinding me against the parapet until sparks burst behind my eyes. His teeth scraped my skin until it sang with near-pain, the sharp sting skating close to breaking.

Enough to make me cry out, enough to make me chase him, rolling my hips for friction like sin. His hand slid up under my sweater, rough palm against bare skin, scorching as he cupped my breast and rolled his thumb across the peak until I arched into him with a ragged moan. He caught that moan in his mouth and devoured it, punishing me for giving it to him.

I wanted more. I wanted everything. I wanted him inside me on the cold rooftop where the world could hear, could see, could know exactly what ruin looked like. And he gave me enough to believe he might: a rough thrust of his hips, a hot scrape of his teeth. Enough to taste what ruin might feel like.

The city’s noise went thin around us, like the world had taken off its earrings for a fight and was waiting to see if we would start it.

And then—

He tore himself back—but only after his control had cracked. His mouth had already crushed bruises into mine, his tongue already tasted the salt of my moans, his hand already shoved under my sweater to pinch and roll my nipple until I sobbed into his mouth, my legs already spread to straddle the hard line of his thigh.

He had rocked me there, forcing me to rut against him, dragging wetness through my thin shorts until every grind left me shuddering. And his other hand—God, his other hand had shoved between us, palm grinding my sex through damp fabric until I thought I’d go blind from it.

He was muttering against my mouth in a language I didn’t know, promises or curses or both, and the vibration of it almost made me finish right there. His hips had already bucked, savage, like he meant to take me against the parapet and damn consequences. He was a heartbeat from breaching me when the leash finally yanked.

When he wrenched away, the absence was violent. My body hit the parapet hard, unsupported, aching with the denial. My hands flailed at the air he’d left. The night came flooding back into my ears all at once—the hiss of lamps, the shiver of a far train, my own breath wrecked and furious.

“What the—why?” My voice cracked, half feral, half broken, the edge of climax stolen and left raw. Heat still pulsed between my legs, aching with emptiness. I wanted to claw him back, to bite, to scream that I hadn’t been finished. My body shook with the denial and the fury of it.

He slammed his fist into the wall. Stone cracked. His voice came out gravel. “Do not make that sound again. Not for me.”

I froze. The shame came first, sharp as teeth in my chest, then anger climbing fast over it. “Are you serious?”

“That sound—” He shook his head, wild, crimson eyes still glowing as if lit from within. His chest heaved though he didn’t need breath. His mouth was wet, his jaw trembling with restraint. “I almost didn’t stop.” The confession ripped out of him, broken and harsh.

“One more sound from you and I would have taken you here, against the stone, until nothing of you was left untouched. I wanted to ruin you so badly the world would never mistake you for mortal again. I wanted it enough to forget what debt is.” He pressed his forehead to the wall, knuckles bleeding where he had struck it. “I cannot hear it without wanting to break the world until it makes that noise forever. I will not do that to you. I will not add that to what I owe.”

My thighs trembled. I could still feel his hand between them, the ghost of pressure that had almost undone me. Rage and need braided together. “You don’t get to make that choice for me.” My whole body felt lit, wired to the lamps. “It’s mine.”

“Yes,” he said. “And it is also my ledger. You do not decide what I owe.”

The words cut clean. “Then don’t kiss me like that if you’re going to stop like that. It’s cruel.”

“Cruelty would have been not stopping.” His eyes dimmed a fraction, the crimson lowering like coals shoved under ash. “This is mercy you don’t like.”

“Mercy?” My laugh was jagged, more wounded than amused. “You ground me against you until I was begging without breath, and then you call it mercy to leave me shaking in the dark?”

His jaw clenched. “Yes. Because the other choice was ruin, and I would not have stopped.”

“Maybe I wanted ruin.” The words escaped before I could catch them. My thighs still ached from the press of him. “Maybe I wanted you to finish what you started.”

He flinched as if I’d struck him. “You don’t know what you’re asking. If I give you that, I will keep taking until there’s nothing left but me in your veins. Until every sound you make belongs to me alone.”

“Maybe that’s already true.” I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from saying more, tasting blood and shame in equal measure.

His voice broke low, ragged: “You think this is want. It is hunger, and I can’t separate them. Don’t beg me for the thing that will damn you.”

Silence after, wider than the roof. The city hissed and buzzed below. A siren stitched two blocks together, then gave up. My heart pounded like a fist on a locked door.

I swallowed the worst of what I wanted to say and chose something I could live with. “Say you wouldn’t have killed him if I’d asked you not to.”

He didn’t lie. “I don’t know,” he said, and the honesty in it burned. “I might have stopped sooner. I might not have. The thing in me speaks first when there is blood in the air. I am learning to answer louder.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“It is the only truth I can afford to give you.”

He stepped back into the shadow near the chimney, as if the bricks themselves could act as a leash. The gesture didn’t soothe me so much as underline how close I had come to being dragged somewhere I would not forgive myself for loving.

“Don’t follow me,” I said, because I needed to set the line again, because I needed to hear myself say it with the taste of him still in my mouth.

“I won’t,” he said. Then, quieter: “Not where you can see.”

The honesty made me dizzy. Temper saved me from tenderness. “Then here are my rules,” I said, stealing steadiness from the shape of the words. “Do not kiss me like that if you’re going to stop like that. If you kiss me again, you finish what you start, or you don’t start.”

His hunger stepped forward behind his eyes and volunteered. He shut it in a room and turned the key so hard I could hear his teeth grind. “Then I will not start,” he said. “Not until I am certain the ruin is ours on purpose.”

“You talk like a cathedral,” I snapped, because he made me feel like a supplicant and I hated it.

“I talk like a debt,” he said, and the worst part was that I believed him.

Wind caught at the corner of my sweater and tried to pull me sideways. I gathered it back around me and used the movement to back toward the door. At the threshold I paused, palm on the metal, eyes on the middle distance as if I could hear the future deciding how to be cruel.

“Tell me your name,” I tried one last time, softer, because I wanted something to take downstairs besides the heat and the refusal and the memory of my own sound.

His jaw worked. He bit down on whatever he meant to give me and swallowed it. “Soon,” he said instead, and it was not a promise or a threat; it was a word that knew how to hurt.

I went inside. The door yelped and then sulked shut. I stood with my forehead against it, counting until the rooms below believed I was coming back. Dust rearranged itself. The bulb made its tired little sun. I walked down the stairs like a person carrying a bowl of something that would slosh if I wasn’t careful.

In the kitchen, the sink clicked, the fridge hummed, the house did its domestic sorcery. I put my hands flat on the table on either side of the violin case and felt the wood accept my weight. The shaking that I had held at the roof finally took me, not fear exactly, not desire exactly—some braided mess that lived under both.

“He won’t start,” I told the room. It wasn’t comfort. It was a problem with a bow on it.

When I finally crawled back into bed, the ceiling had less to say. The crimson behind my eyes dulled to embers. Above me, the roof practiced being empty again, and I decided—for the space of a few breaths—that it was enough to know he was up there refusing me for reasons that were almost kind.

It didn’t help me sleep. But it kept me from going back up the stairs.

Somewhere above, weight shifted and held—no step, just the sense of a watch deciding to keep time with me instead of against me.

“Fine,” I told the air. “Haunt my roof. Be a debt. Count my noises.” I swallowed. “But don’t tell me mercy and then kiss me like sin.”

No answer, of course. Just the faintest thread of quiet twinned to mine, as if a refusal could be a kind of companion.