All Chapters of The Sound Of Ruin: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The house did not want me. Then a foolish mouth unbarred it.A few words tossed into the gray morning as if they weighed nothing—come on in, man, we’ll take all the help we can get—and the old law in the wood shivered, unlatched, and let me cross.I stepped over the threshold and felt the memory of a thousand dinners, a thousand fevered nights, a thousand small domestic wars recede from the doorway like a tide. Dust lifted to greet me. Air thinned and turned metallic, tasting faintly of old nails and the damp breath of stone. The silence inside was not empty; it was loaded, a shell packed with years, waiting for a strike.She was the strike.Nyssa stood three paces down the hall with her mask looped at her throat and the folder tucked against her ribs like a book she trusted. Her eyes were wrong for work—too bright, too alert, already measuring me and the door and the distance between them. She had told me to stay by the door. Her mouth had not invited me. That mattered. I folded myse

The bandage held the shape of her hands.By evening the cut in my palm had closed, but the cloth still carried her heat the way stone keeps daylight after dusk. I should have torn it away. I kept it. A penance, I told myself. A brand, answered something less honest.The name on the stiff white card gnawed at me while the sky spoiled toward night.Thorne—House of Sacred Song. A circle knotted into itself, cousin to the iron that had once spelled my suffering around a lid. I knew that work. Churches that thought themselves clever. Guilds that learned the geometry of hunger and decided to become its cartographers. Men so certain their hymns were righteous that they sang them over coffins and called the sound mercy.They had bound me with song before they buried me with stone.Not the song her body makes.I took to the roof at the edge where the day fails. The city opened its thousand mouths: steam rising in white prayers, iron beasts coughing under their own harness, windows blinking to

The door below slammed the way a wound closes—fast, ugly, final. I took the roof as if it were a punishment I had earned. The night had teeth. My hands still shook. Her scent still clung to my skin, stubborn as truth; the fabric at my shoulder was torn where her nails had found the old meat and made it remember it could bleed. The ache she’d dragged up in me lived on with the insult of a bell that refuses to stop ringing. And beneath it all, the echo of her slap still burned across my cheek—a sting that should have been an insult but twisted strangely into something I wanted to chase.My skin still hummed from it, a hot welt of defiance that made me harder than her mouth had. The shame was that I liked it. That I wanted more. That I could imagine her palm there again, red and stinging, a brand of her fury that belonged only to me.I found myself reeling not just from the denial of blood, but from the fact that I had liked it, that her defiance marked me deeper than her nails. Even wh

Dawn took its time. I was grateful for the delay. It let me keep my head against the hatch and borrow its cold instead of my own.Her scent lived on my hands. Copper, rain, the bright salt where her skin had burned under my mouth. The roof kept pretending to be stone while my body remembered every indecency. I could still feel the seam of her bitten lip against my tongue; the split I’d given her; the way she made a weapon of the word please.I had thrown her through the hatch because I wanted to live long enough to hate myself. That was the truth. If I had kept going, I would have fed. If I had fed, I would have finished her.I wanted to finish her.The admission sat in me like metal. I turned it with my tongue until it cut. The animal under my ribs didn’t care that I bled for it. It only cared that I had pulled my teeth away from a pulse that had offered itself without shaking.The house breathed. Water started somewhere below—pipes waking, a shower’s hiss. The sound went straight in

I did not sleep. The night rotted into dawn with her blood still hot in me, her pulse still ghosting against my tongue. She slept heavy, half-curled against me, her body trusting even in ruin.Nyssa had gone under in the early afternoon light, and now morning bled through the estate windows—a full day and night lost to the weight of blood I had stolen. More than plausible. Necessary. Her body had demanded that kind of oblivion, and I had held her through every hour of it.Every shallow rise of her chest was both salvation and torment. I had not killed her, though I had come close enough to taste it. The hours crawled. I counted them by the tilt of the light through the windows, by the shifting weight of her breath against me.Hunger gnawed at me, but I did not move. I would not leave her side. I listened to the house creak and sigh around us, felt the shadows inch like a tide across the walls, all while her body lay slack in my arms, mending itself one fragile heartbeat at a time. Hol