But you touched what belongs to me.
The sentence wasn't uttered with explosive fury.
It was worse.
It was uttered with conviction.
The hooded woman tried to speak—perhaps to plead, perhaps to lie—but the words never came out. The shadow at her feet detached itself from the ground like living pitch, rising up her legs, enveloping her waist, her chest, her throat. She tried to pull the hood back, perhaps hoping to reveal a human face, something that would evoke mercy.
Elizabeth had none.
The darkness tightened.
Her bones began to crack one by one, not all at once, but slowly—first her fingers, bending backward; then her wrists; her elbows breaking with a damp sound; her ribs sinking inward as if invisible hands were crushing a ripe fruit. The scream finally came out—thin, torn—before the pressure completely collapsed her chest. Blood trickled from her mouth in thick streams before her entire body was compressed until it became something unrecognizable on the floor.
