Page 9 of The Shadow Sanctum

His kiss on my neck dips to my collar bone while his palm slides over my stomach. I open my eyes at his command and raise my arms so he can take off my sweater. When he coaxes me to lay down, I obey without a word and point my gaze to his lone bookcase—the maneuver so automatic, it’s as if my body remembers the game as well as it remembers breathing.

There’s a photo of a young girl with blonde hair so fair you could mistake it for white and eyes bright and proud. She sits on this sofa with her hands on her lap, and though she doesn’t smile, you can see the glee in her eyes. This is her first time in front of a camera. And her first time in her father’s study.

How incredible the feelings she was capable of. The way her eyes lit when he called her pretty, even for a demon girl. It was worth it to her, somehow. For years, it was worth it.

It’s hard to say when she died—the death was shamefully slow.

I don’t close my eyes again. It would be disrespectful. But while I wait for my father’s loneliness to be cured, I mourn the girl in that photo.

Silently.

With dry eyes and white knuckles grasping at the cushion.

When it’s over, and it’s time for me to find my voice, it sounds no different than when I arrived.

I bring up Sawyer’s money and his desire to reinitiate. Father agrees right away.

Until a replacement is found, my happiness is a priority.

CHAPTER 4

SAWYER

There are seventeen cracks in the wall of the training house bedroom, one longer than the rest. It carves a path to the windowsill, cream paint peeling around it. Four feet beyond in one corner of the ceiling, four dead flies lie stranded in a spider's web, bellies up.

I have tapped my teeth together a total of twelve thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven times.

Still, Luna has not arrived.

My jaw aches from the movement, but I don’t stop. I can’t stop. I’ve already tried.

“Fuck,” I hiss with a slap to the mattress. I spring from the bed and walk each floorboard for a fifth time—all twenty-nine of them, five that creak. One step in front of the other, like practice for a sobriety test.

She’s not coming.

Angel.

Angel.

Angel.

My shoe catches on a warped board as my heart thumps hard, a punch to the temple. I stumble and gasp as my muscles seize—wildly dramatic, but it pauses my tapping teeth. I clench my jaw before it can start again. No more.

She’s not coming, but she isn’t dead. Angel would never make it so easy; he’d want her to suffer. He’d want me to suffer.

It’s all right.

For now, it’s all right.

With a slow breath, I force myself back to the bed and slump against the headboard. It thumps ever so softly as my knee kicks to a familiar rhythm. It seems random until I remember the last time I heard the thump of this headboard.

I wait.

And I wait.

Until the muted gray of dawn filters through the dirty glass window, and the front door slams. Slams, not shuts.

I jump to my feet and stare at the door like a fucking dog waiting for its master, an image so repulsive, I nearly sit back down.