Semua Bab The Sound Of Ruin: Bab 1 - Bab 10

I learned the shape of silence the way men learn a lover—by memorizing every edge until it cut me open.Not the gentle hush of snowfall. Not the kind of quiet you can share with another body and call it peace. This silence was a coffin packed with void. It clogged the ears, seeped into bone, turned time to a stagnant pool where thought went to drown.At the beginning—whenever the beginning was—I had fought it. Nails ripped bloody against stone. Knuckles split. I shouted until my throat burned and there was nothing left in it but the taste of old iron and my own contempt. The silence took the sound and fed me back nothing, and eventually even fury learned how to starve.After that, there was only inventory.One by one, I counted the things that still existed and the things that didn’t. Fingers—still mine. Teeth—still sharp. Pulse—thin as a thread in winter, the kind of thing you pinch and it breaks. Names—gone. Faces—gone. The world outside my sealed, sunless box—gone, or worse, indiff

Her home had a spine, and I sat on it.Shingle to shingle, rain stitching itself across my shoulders, I learned the grammar of the wood beneath the tar—where it kept old groans, where it stored heat, where it said not here, not now. I listened through the roof to the thin animal of her breath and the way it eddied when she turned, and I let the sound teach me the shape of night again.The city around us would not be quiet. It spoke in a hundred thin tongues I did not know. The lamps along the road burned with a steady, unnatural resolve that never lived in oil. A line of trapped lightning hummed above the street, strung from post to post like a net for wayward gods. Far off, some iron choir screamed and wailed and then faded, not bells but something faster, meaner. In the yards, square metal mouths ate rain and did not rust. Through windows I saw palm-sized glass that glowed from within and held pictures like scrying bowls that had forgotten to be mysterious.It all should have been

The city woke without me, and I followed it only because she did.When the sun fell low enough to loose me from stone, I found her by scent, by sound, by the way her pulse seemed to write itself into the air wherever she walked. I told myself it was vigil, debt, guardianship. It was hunger with a leash, and the leash was her indifference.She left the house in a coat too light for the wind. I tracked the rhythm of her boots down the block, from roofline to fire escape to wire. The city was an animal I did not know how to ride—its lungs were engines, its heartbeat the stutter of signals running through invisible veins.I had once known the shape of the world by hoofbeats, by bells, by the toll of iron on stone. Now it sang in strange tongues: brakes whining, doors sighing open by themselves, voices disembodied through little glowing talismans clutched to mortal ears.The tall rods along the street flickered with caged lightning. I thought them beacons, warnings, until I saw how mortals

The lamps on my block have a particular buzz when the damp sets in—like a fly trapped between glass and dusk. That sound followed me down the sidewalk, riding the edge of my nerves until everything felt a half step too near: the wet shine on the pavement, the gutter trying to swallow the day, the hollow click of my own heels. I should have called a car. I should have called Lani. I should have done a hundred sensible things, but I wanted air and the lie of being unobserved.I wrapped the scarf higher, the knot sitting right over the two tender commas at my throat, and took the longer, brighter route. I told myself it was precaution, not fear. I told myself a lot of things I didn’t believe.The city’s noises stacked on each other—sirens a few blocks away smearing into a distant argument, a bus shouldering past like a sulking animal, music leaking from somewhere with too many lights. All of it familiar, the hum that says you’re small and the world is busy and that’s how you get to be sa

The taste of her still lived in my mouth, metallic and sweet, a brand I could not wash away. The rooftop kiss—no, the rooftop almost-ruin—looped in me like a curse carved into bone. Her moans still rang in my ears, guttural and wrecked, the way her hips had ground against mine, slick heat spilling through thin fabric until I nearly lost the leash. I remembered the sharp bite of her nipple under my fingers, the obscene wetness soaking through as she rutted against my thigh, the shameless grind that smeared her heat all over me. I remembered the taste of sweat and salt on her throat when I licked where my fangs wanted to pierce. I remembered the way her body begged for more with every frantic twitch, every gasp that broke like prayer against my mouth. I remembered the way she nearly broke me open just by moaning, the sound of it louder in my skull than centuries of silence. Her scent had clung to me like sin, sweet and wet, until I wanted to crawl back up the roof and force her to gi