I smiled back. And I kept walking.
“I’m fascinated by how they stop working,” I replied.
I saw Leo once more, five years later. He was at a café, older, thinner. He smiled when he saw me. The same crooked smile. darling venom pdf
“You’re fascinated by how things break,” he said one night, nodding at my notes on tetrodotoxin.
My lips tingled. A ghost of the old numbness. I smiled back
That was the venom’s first dose: his words.
He wasn't just troubled. He was engineering his own poison. And he’d been slipping micro-doses into my coffee for weeks. I saw Leo once more, five years later
I felt my chest crack open. I wanted to crawl inside his wounds and live there. I told him about my mother’s illness, the slow erasure of her mind, how I studied neurotoxins because watching her forget me felt like being poisoned drop by drop.