Page 10 of Love Her Ruin
I like this Eddie better.
“I know Our Lady of Sorrows,” he says. “Old building, stone construction, minimal security. The main entrance on Fifth Street, side entrance on the alley, basement access through exterior stairs. Father Nolan lives above the church office.”
"This is the part where I ask if you're sure, Mind. Because once we're inside, once we've committed, there's nae calling it back. No arresting him, no reading him his rights, no due process. We're there to end him, your former boss, a former cop, just like we ended Red Hands, and if ye cannae do that, if you've still got enough cop left in ye to hesitate, tell me now."
He levels me with a long, weighted look, with embers and shadows flickering over the blue in his eyes. "He shot me twice and left me to bleed out in a parking lot. He raped Sera anddestroyed her life and wore his badge like it gave him the right. He killed his own wife to cover his tracks. So yeah, I'm sure."
The voice saying it isn't the detective's voice. It's the voice from the dark, and it's cold.
"Aye," I say. "I’ll go wake Prayer."
I gently kiss her awake, and those beautiful eyes find mine.
“Time to go. I’ve got his location. Ye stay behind me unless I say,” I tell her. “You nae invincible because Daddy loves ye. You’re precious. I like precious things. I keep them.”
She leans up, teeth grazing my lower lip, a benediction in bite form. “Keep me, then.”
I kiss her back like a vow I intend to kill for.
Four o’clock in the morning finds us standing outside of Our Lady of Sorrows, dressed in black, armed, and about to commit the kind of sin that gets ye a special seat in whatever hell's waiting.
Chapter 6
Sera
Thechurchdoesn'twantus anywhere near it.
I feel it before we roll up on it in James’s van. It’s like a pressure, not the blunt-force wall of a Seal of Dissolution, but something subtler, woven into the very ground beneath my feet. It hums at a frequency my bones recognize even if my brain can't name it, and the recognition comes with a single, unmistakable message:
You are not welcome here.
Daddy hits it first.
His shadows, which have been flowing around us like a black river, pooling in gutters, climbing walls, and swallowing streetlights, slam into something invisible at the edge of the church property and recoil. The darkness snaps backward like a hand jerked from a hot stove, tendrils whipping and curling in on themselves.
The sound Azhrael makes isn't a sound at all. It's a vibration in my sternum, a bass note below hearing. It’s something ancientand furious encountering something equally ancient that doesn't give a shit about fury.
His ember eyes flare magma-hot for a single instant, then dim. The shadows retreat to the sidewalk and churn there, agitated.
"Consecrated," he rasps.
“Let me try, big guy,” James says.
He steps forward, but his stride breaks, a half step that turns his forward momentum into uncertainty. His shadow-wrapped hands clench at his sides. The dark material Daddy wove into his wounds, into his bones, flickers like a candle in a draft.
"Fuck," he breathes. Then louder, through his teeth: "Fuck."
He takes another step. The flicker becomes a spasm. The shadows on his fists thin. The consecrated ground is pulling at the dark, making every shadow-threaded cell in James's body remember that it's borrowed, that it doesn't belong to him, that the thing powering his resurrection has no invitation here.
He stops. His jaw is clenched so hard I can see the cords in his neck from six feet behind him. He glances back at how far he’s made it, and his eyes are all ember now, no blue left, and they're burning with rage.
He definitely doesn’t like being told no by a building.
"I can push through," he says. His voice is gravel and broken glass. "It's nae a wall. It's resistance. I can—"
"I’ll come with you." Eddie approaches, and their shadows connect, merge, separate, and merge again, two dark currents meeting in turbulence. "Go slow. Don't just bulldoze."
Together, they start forward again.
