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“No,” I spit out before I could think twice about it.
He cocked his head. Kind of like a raptor inJurassic Park. Where you just knew he was studying every weakness you had. Even the ones you didn’t know about.
“No?” he said silkily, sitting back in his chair.
“Thomas Danton. Remember him? He screamed so beautifully when you sliced his skin…and that blood spray. Seriously compelling.”
My blood was freezing in my veins as an image of a bloated, shivering, pale man soared through my brain.
I could still hear his screams in my head.
“Margarite Placid. Ah, one of my favorites. I think one of her hands is still in a jar somewhere. That was quite creative.”
“Okay!” I spit out, feeling like I was on the edge of bursting into hysterics. “I can’t come every week though. It would be too hard to get here. And I don’t have any money right now.”
“Hmmm. I suppose we could do every month.” He didn’t ask about myno moneycomment. Maybe he assumed I’d burned all my cash on my useless plastic surgery.
“Every month,” I repeated, my mind already churning with how I could get my hands on that footage and rip his grip off my proverbial throat.
The guards were there then, tearing him out of his chair and yanking him forward so he was forced to stumble or fall on his face. He looked over his shoulder at me, and I had the crazy urge to shout for the guards to sleep with a gun in their hand. Or better yet…to not sleep at all.
I knew what that look meant.
Death.
Those guards would be lucky to last until dawn. Even with my father behind bars.
* * *
The ride home was like a dream. If you were having a dream laced with arsenic where you lost absolutely everything you’d ever loved.
I’d thrown up in the parking lot. Scratch that. I hadn’t even made it to the parking lot. I’d thrown up the second one foot had left the building. The concrete by the front entrance of the prison was littered with pieces of my darkness. Pieces that only the Demon had been able to access.
There was a saying somewhere, one that talked about how villains were either born or they were made. The writer had asked which one you should be more scared of.
The answer was clear. You should be scared of both. Definitely both. Because the evil people who were born that way never had a soul to begin with, but the people who were made into villains…their souls were altered, corrupted. Made into something unrecognizable. And that was just as fucking scary.
I knew that from experience.
It felt like I was shedding a layer of skin the farther away from the prison I got. The switch from Delilah to Aurora was like an unexpected breath of fresh air.
When I got to campus, I parked Jenna’s car and then went to return the keys.
”What’s wrong?” she gasped when she saw me. I winced. I could only imagine how I looked. Probably more dead than alive. That’s what spending time with a Demon did to you, it sucked the life out of you.
“Just tired,” I said, trying to smile…unsuccessfully.
“Go to bed early, and then text me when you wake up,” she ordered.
My throat felt clogged. “Thank you,” I murmured, trying to thank her for a whole lot more than just letting me use her car.
Her face softened, and there was a slight sheen to her eyes as she looked at me. She just nodded and smiled brightly, and I said goodbye before walking as fast as I could back down the hallway.
It was amazing how tired emotional trauma could make you. The way it battered at your defenses until you were like half a person.
The trip to the Sphinx felt like a lifetime as everything inside of me shut down and I almost wanted to cry when I got to the door and remembered that I was at their mercy to reach my bed.
I sank to my butt and pulled my knees up to my chest, not caring how I looked to passersby.
