Page 5 of Love Her Ruin
The Burger King bags are still on the passenger seat, and I’m sure the burgers and fries inside have gone cold. So have I.
The cold is like a low, steady hum beneath my skin. It's him. Azhrael. Threaded through my veins and my bones.
He’s also outside my car. I can feel him in the shadows that slide alongside, beneath the chassis, pooling in the rearview mirror's blind spots. Following me home to Sera the way a current follows a river.
I flex my left hand on the wheel. The fingers respond instantly with no lag, no tremor. Stronger than before, if I'm honest.
I should be in shock. Physical shock, psychological shock, spiritual shock—pick a flavor. I was shot twice by my former boss, the former fucking sheriff.
I’m pretty sure I died. I remember the moment there was nothing below me but gray. Then something old and cold and vast reached into that gray and brought me back out because Vincent Harrow is still breathing and Sera is not finished.
Iam not finished.
I take stock of myself. My shirt is destroyed. The car window is gone, night air screaming through the gap, and there's blood on the seat, the console, the headrest where the second round punched through the leather. I'll need to deal with the car.
But the usual noise in my mind is gone. The second-guessing, the procedural anxiety, the constant low-grade hum ofam I crossing a line, am I becoming the thing I'm supposed to catch. Gone. Replaced by sharp clarity.
I don't decide to drive toward Vincent’s house. My hands make the decision for me, the wheel moving before the thought fully forms, and the new clarity in my skull doesn't object.
The porch light is off. All the inside lights are off.
The driveway is empty, but he usually parks his truck in the garage.
I idle at the curb and let the cold darkness beneath my skin reach outward, testing. It's a new sense, this ability to feel the shape of night, to read its texture. My shadows slither beneath his front door and search the house.
Empty. No warmth signature behind the walls, no movement behind the dark windows. The house is a shell. He's not here.
He could be anywhere, disposing of the suppressor on his gun, establishing an alibi at a bar two towns over, buying a drink with a credit card so the timestamp proves he was somewhere elsewhen Detective Eddie Crowe was shot in his own parking lot. Or he's driving aimlessly, burning gas and adrenaline.
I pull away from the curb and continue toward Sera's house
I know what Vincent did. I know why. I know how he staged Evelyn's body, and I know he drove to my apartment and waited there to kill me.
And I know he thinks I'm dead.
That's the advantage, and it's enormous.
A dead man who's still walking is the worst thing that can happen to a man like Vincent. Because you can't kill what's already died.
You can't silence what's already been silenced and has come back with a devil in its blood.
Chapter 4
Sera
Thefrontdooropens,and the shadows pour in with a rush of cold that hits like a physical force, frosting the boarded windows and making the floorboards creak in greeting.
Daddy's back.
James and I are on our feet in an instant. Before I can get a word out, Eddie steps over the threshold with blood soaking his shirt, his face pale but his eyes sharp as ever, alive and whole andhere.
He's tethered now, part of us, remade.
Relief crashes over me, so intense it nearly buckles my knees. The cold fire in my veins, which has been screaming since I heard the gunshots, finally stills, replaced by a different kind of heat. I can feel him through the new connection, a steady presence beside James's feral pulse and Daddy's vast chill. Three heartbeats. Three threads. A completed circuit.
"Eddie," I breathe, the word breaking as I lunge for him and wrap my arms around his neck, burying my face in his chest.
The blood on his shirt is still wet, still smells like iron, but beneath it I can smell him—the same leather and coffee scent, now layered with something colder, darker, like the air after a storm.
