Page 43 of Love Her Ruin
The temperature drops. The shadows in the corners of the room deepen, thicken, and Daddy's presence swells the way it does when something has invaded his house and he needs to assess it. I feel his attention settle on Nyx with the weight of something hellish and vast examining something small and warm and entirely outside its frame of reference.
Has he even seen a dog before?
Nyx looks directly at the darkest corner of the room, where the shadows are densest, where Daddy's presence is most concentrated. Her ears rotate forward. Her nose twitches. Her tail slows from manic to cautious, a measured wag, assessing.
Then she sneezes, wags harder, and trots over to the corner to sniff the baseboard.
The shadows recoil slightly.
I feel Daddy's displeasure through the bond while he’s being evaluated by an animal that failed obedience school.
Nyx finds a spot on the floor near a vent, where Daddy's cold breathes into the room, and lies down on it. She rolls onto her back, paws in the air, belly exposed, tail sweeping the floor in long, lazy arcs.
She has claimed the coldest spot in the house. Daddy's spot. The place where his presence is most concentrated, most himself.
The vent sighs. A long, resigned exhalation of cold air that ruffles Nyx's fur.
My heart feels like it might burst.
* * *
Later that night, Nyx sleeps at the foot of my bed, curled in the crater between my feet, nose tucked under her tail, making small whuffling sounds in her sleep while she dreams happy, pure dreams.
Eddie is on my left, arm across my waist, breathing deeply. James is on my right, sprawled and shameless, one leg hooked over mine, his face buried in my hair. Daddy is everywhere, in the walls, the floor, the cold that settles over the bed like a second blanket.
Our shadows pulse in time with our shared heartbeat, slow and content, predators at rest.
I lie awake for a while, which is not unusual. What's unusual is the reason.
I'm awake because I want to remember this.
The weight of them around me. The warmth of Nyx at my feet. The cold of Daddy in my walls. The way moonlight comes through the new window and lays a silver stripe across the footprint-stained floor that looks like a path leading somewhere I might actually want to go.
I want to remember what it feels like to be full. I was not broken in simple ways. I was shattered and reassembled by hand, by rage, by two men and a devil and a dog that failed at everything except love.
I’m not healed because I can’t be healed. So I’ll be this—scarred and sharp and full of dark fire, a woman with a court and a cause and a dog named after the night.
That's enough. That's more than enough. That's everything.
* * *
When I wake the next morning, Nyx is gone, her warm crater at the foot of the bed replaced by a rumpled indent in the sheets.
I pad downstairs with bare feet to investigate, following the smell of coffee, and I’m greeted with blinding sunshine and odd sounds from the backyard.
James is at the counter, pouring coffee into my favorite mug. Eddie is at the table with his laptop. Both wear grins that grow wider when they see me.
A soft yip comes from the backyard, and I look through the kitchen window. The grass is still patchy, half dead from the autumn season and half alive from stubbornness.
In the middle of the yard, Nyx is in a play bow, front legs flat, back end up, tail going like a propeller. Her eyes are locked on something in front of her with laser focus, like she has found the single greatest thing in the universe and will die before she looks away from it.
In front of her, hovering six inches above the dead grass, is a bright-green tennis ball. Completely ordinary except for the fact that it’s suspended in midair by a tendril of shadow so dark it looks like a crack in reality. The tendril extends from the ground, from the deep shadows beneath the shed, and it holds the ball with the delicacy you'd hold a soap bubble.
The tendril flicks.
The ball launches across the yard in a low arc. Nyx explodes after it, ears pinned, legs a blur as she covers the distance in three strides. She catches the ball on the first bounce, skids in the dead grass, whips around, and sprints back to the spot where the tendril waits.
She drops the ball at the base of the shadow.
