Page 42 of Love Her Ruin
Click-click-click-clickon the porch steps, the sound of something other approaching my front door at full speed.
Eddie opens the door, and there’s the detective, my Mind, wearing his leather jacket and jeans, his dark hair flopping over one blue eye. He’s holding a leash, and at the other end of the leash is a huge dog with tawny fur, a black mask, and ears like satellite dishes.
And it’s looking at me like I'm made of bacon.
Its tail is going so fast it's a blur. Its whole back end is swinging with the force of the wag, and its tongue lolls out. Its eyes are an enormous, liquid brown, radiating a joy so pure and so total that it borders on unreal.
"This is a K-9 washout," Eddie says. "She failed the program because she couldn't assess threats. The trainers said she'd run up to an active shooter and try to lick his face."
The dog sees me looking at her and loses what remains of her composure. She lunges forward with the desperate, full-throttle enthusiasm of a creature who has decided that I am the most important thing that has ever existed and the three seconds of leash between us is an injustice she will not tolerate.
Eddie lets the leash go.
She hits me like a furry cannonball. Paws on my upper thighs, nose in my neck, tongue everywhere, whimpering and wriggling and pressing her entire body against mine like she's trying to climb inside my skin and live there. Her fur is warm and coarse under my hands, and she smells like dog breath and grass.
She sees me—not Sera Vale, not Penelope, not the queen or the victim or the weapon—just the warm body in front of her, and she has decided with her whole uncomplicated heart that this body is hers to love.
The tears come before I can stop them.
They come from somewhere I thought was dead, a room in my chest I sealed off and boarded up the way James and I boardedup the windows. The door to that room is splintering now, broken open by seventy pounds of failed police dog, and what's behind it is so bright it hurts.
Pure happiness.
I didn't know I could still feel it. I thought that part of me died, killed by the same man who killed everything else soft in me. I thought the best I could hope for was satisfaction, vengeance, the dark pleasure of watching monsters fall. I thought all of my happiness receptors had burned out.
But this dog is looking at me like I hung the moon. The sound coming out of my throat is something between a laugh and a sob, and I am so fucking happy I can't breathe.
"Hey." Eddie is beside me, his hand on my shoulder, voice dropping into a quiet, careful register. "Hey, Sera. If you don't want her, I can take her back. It's okay. I just thought—"
"Don't you dare," I manage, my voice wrecked.
He blinks. Then his face breaks into a rare, real smile, the one that transforms him into something even more edible than he already is. "Okay. She's yours."
"What's her name?"
"The program called her K-9 Unit 7,” he says, chuckling. “She doesn't answer to it for some reason."
"Of course she doesn't." I hold the dog's face in my hands, my thumbs stroking the velvet fur beneath her ears. She gazes at me with those uncomplicated brown eyes, tail still going, tongue still reaching for any exposed skin. "You need a name, don't you?"
She licks my chin, and I take this as agreement.
"Nyx," I say.
The goddess of night. The mother of shadows. It fits her, not because it matches what she is, but because it matches what she's walked into. She's the softest thing in a house full of darkness, and naming her after the night feels like a benediction.
Nyx barks once, sharp and joyful, and her tail hits the coffee table and scatters my opened bag of forgotten jellybeans onto the floor.
James appears in the kitchen doorway, drawn by the sound of a bark in a house that has never contained a bark. He takes one look at the dog, at my tear-streaked face, at Eddie standing there looking quietly triumphant, and his grin splits wide.
"Och, you've done it now," he says to Eddie. "She's going to love that dog more than all of us combined."
"So long as they’re both alive and safe," Eddie says.
James crouches, and Nyx immediately diverts from me to investigate, her nose working overtime, tail wagging hard enough to generate a breeze.
She sniffs his shadows and doesn't flinch. She licks his hand—the one that's held knives, carved bones, carved me—and James laughs, boyish and delighted, and scratches behind her ears with the tenderness of a man who understands exactly what it means to be the thing nobody wanted.
"You’re a wee disaster, aren't ye?" he murmurs. "Aye, you'll fit right in."
