She looks up at me, batting her dark eyelashes as if telling me to play along. Is this her way of repaying the favor? Trying to help? Coraline has no clue what she just signed herself up for. What her doing this means to Daniel, to my future.

Coraline is attracted to me, and that bothers her. Bothers her so much, I might get the worst of her venom if I push a little too hard.

I’m not Coraline’s enemy, but I’m a threat. She knows this attitude isn’t working on me, and it’s bugging the fuck out of her. It’s cute.

I felt it. That connection. The one I felt when I saw her leaving the Sinclair Manor. The one I felt when I visited her in the hospital. That secret language only the two of us understood when she called me.

Coraline Whittaker is a mystery to this town. To me. She is a mirage, a naturally occurring optical phenomenon that bends light rays to produce the image of a girl who is a familiar face but is unknown beneath the surface.

“I didn’t know it was possible for someone to wear this much black,” she says. “Did you know it was picture day, or did you purposefully dress like the fifth member of Kiss?”

Her eyes glimmer in the sunlight, like molten gold. Melted honey in coffee. My fucking favorite.

I let my hand skim my stomach, legs outstretched as my eyes close. In the dark of this classroom, I let my mind wander, let it think about Silas peering down at me, watching me.

I didn’t know it yet, but my cursed heart had already claimed two lives before I even started to believe my mother had passed something witchy down to me. A jinx. A hex.

“Do you taste sweet, Coraline? If I was a betting man, I’d say yes,” he whispers, a wicked promise in the back of his throat. “You’re going to drip like honey on my tongue, aren’t you?”

“Rook has the same shirt,” Thatcher says when she gets close enough to hear him over the howling wind. “Must have good taste, then,” she snips, adjusting the leather jacket on her shoulders.

Silas does not make me feel cursed. He makes me feel loved.

I want to make him feel good. To make up for all the good he’s done for me. Every moment he’s caught me while I was crumbling, carefully guiding me back together.  I want my body to be his comfort, like his voice is mine.

“I’m the spindle lover boys prick their fingers on. I leave them comatose with only the memory of my touch. I’m not the princess. I’m the rotten apple. The poison made to demolish happily ever afters.”

I meet Silas’s eyes, and my breath catches. His eyes don’t inspect me, measuring every imperfection, marking every blip. No, they admire me.

To Faye? I’m put together. I’m healed. But if she could have seen me just the other night, crumbled in the arms of a man I barely knew, fleeing the moment I’d been able to catch my breath, refused to even thank him for what he’d done? She’d see me much differently.

I’m not the princess. I’m the rotten apple. The poison made to demolish happily ever afters.

Coraline has given me everything I never thought I would have. A family of my own and love without conditions. I'm in awe of her constantly, her strength and dedication to those in her life. And now she's carrying my child, our babies very first home. What a lucky kid.

template by ign1teme, ib releasingten art by seijousai commissioned by silasvolkov

— silascora starter packs. ♡