The Villian Who Broke The Story

It wasn’t gradual. It arrived suddenly and completely — the edges of the room going soft, the light smearing, Lilith’s face across the table becoming the last clear thing in his field of vision. She was smiling at him. Not the small, genuine smile from earlier. This one was sweeter. More deliberate. The kind of smile that had been prepared in advance.

*Oh,* he thought, with the detached clarity of someone watching themselves make a mistake from a slight remove.

The room tilted. The table’s edge came up fast and then didn’t matter anymore.

*I shouldn’t have let a villainess cook for me.*

The thought arrived precisely, almost amused, in the last half-second before everywhere went dark.