Page 2 of Love Her Ruin
And it serves as a speed bump. Speed bumps buy seconds, and seconds are the currency of survival at the moment.
I sit on the kitchen floor with my back against the solid wall. James sits beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch, his shadow-wrapped hand resting on my thigh. My gun is in my lap. The knife is in my boot.
"He'll find him," James says.
Then why is it taking so long?
I listen for something I can't hear—the pulse of my bond with Daddy, stretched across the distance that separates us. He's out there. He's searching. The vast, hungry dark that chose to come back to its cage because I was in it is now tearing through the night to find the man who protects me with his mind.
“How long did it take to heal you, James?” I ask quietly.
"I dinnae ken." James's voice is quiet, not the playful lilt or the dangerous purr I’m used to. “I think it took a while.”
"Eddie held me in the hospital," I say. "He took the nail polish off my hands."
James's jaw works, and his throat bobs.
"If Eddie dies," I say, and my voice is a thing I don't recognize, flat and cold and filled with shadows. "I will burn this city to the ground. I will start with Vincent's house and end with his bones,and I will not stop, and I will not be stopped, and whatever is left of me when it's over will not be worth saving."
James looks at me. The embers in his eyes glow steadily, twin coals in the dark.
"Aye," he says simply. "And I'll hand ye the match."
“This is the same feeling I had when I thought you were dead, James,” I whisper. “And when I watched the video of Red Hands torturing you over and over.”
He squeezes my thigh. “I ken.”
“I’m sorry.” Those words are so shallow for what I truly feel.
He brushes his fingers over my cheek. "Dinnae apologize. You've never done one thing wrong."
I huff out a humorless laugh. I’ve done plenty of things wrong.
James's shadows pulse in time with my heartbeat, or maybe mine pulses in time with his. We're connected now, both of us tethered to the same darkness, and in the silence of this boarded-up house, I can feel the thread that runs between us humming with shared fear.
"When I was wee," James says, "and Da was on a tear, I'd hide in the cupboard under the stairs. There was a crack in the door, just wide enough to see through. I'd watch his boots go past. Back and forth, back and forth. And I'd think, if I just stay quiet enough, if I just stay still enough, maybe he'll forget I exist."
He pauses. The shadows around his hands darken.
"He never forgot. But the waiting was always worse than the beating. The beating had an end. The waiting didnae, but I’ll wait with ye for as long as it takes."
My chest aches. The cold fire inside me dims to something warmer, something that hurts in a different way. I press closer to him, and he loops his arm around my shoulders and holds me.
We sit in the dark and wait for Daddy to bring our Mind home.
James’s right though. Waiting is worse. Waiting is its own kind of violence. It doesn't cut or bruise or break bone. It just sitson your chest and presses down, slow and patient, compressing your lungs until each second is a year and the silence between heartbeats stretches into a void wide enough to lose yourself in.
But we can’t do anything other than wait.
Chapter 2
Azhrael
Ifindhimbythe smell of his blood, the way a river smells the sea.
The city is a grid of shadows, and I move through them easily into alleyways, into the drainage ditch beneath the overpass, under every parked car. I taste the air, taste the night, taste the fading warmth of a man who is leaving this world one heartbeat at a time.
There.
