Page 66 of Kat Bethel

More deaths on my hands.

He was only here because of me.

It would be stupid to expect a shadow of ruin to be anything but what he was.

Chapter 24:

Iwaitedinsidethelocal fast food chain for my food. A notification popped up while I tried to open the message from Willow, bringing me to my social media.

My darling husband tagged me in a post featuring a picture with a bunch of younger women surrounding him with a caption;Back to single life.

I closed the application with a roll of my eyes. He wanted my reaction so fucking bad, as if I’d ever let him have that pleasure.

And he wasn’t the only one watching for how I’d respond. Abiel’s eyes were locked on me. I could feel it. If I freaked out, so would he.

That was the secret sauce I’d been missing.

His rage had two solid triggers. He needed to forget that he couldn’t protect Margaret, and he needed to prove he could protect me.

That was how I kept his destruction contained.

I couldn’t account for random hiccups, but I could stop flirting with topics that I knew would lead to the obliteration of innocents.

When I opened the messages from Willow in our group chat with Esme, the air relaxed, proving me right.

Willow: Bitch. Check in.

Me: I’m alive.

Willow: Why did it take so long for you to answer me?

Me: I had to turn my phone off.

Esme: Let me guess. That idiot put on the waterworks already.

Me: Yep.

Esme: I hope his dick gets stuck in barbed wire.

Me: Anybody got anything?

Willow: After endless research, the best I’ve got is an arcane ritual to remove shadows. But there isn’t a lot of information about it, I’ll keep looking for the spell’s origin. Check your email.

I opened the email and frowned at the image of the text she’d found. The paper was made of skin, and I was pretty sure it was dated from long before the colonization of America, which meant this wasn’t a Rinah document.

The weirdest part was how imprecise the spell was. The altar ritual was basically made out of whatever was available. Ingredients were the butter of a spell, it shouldn’t have so much wiggle room.

Something wasn’t right with it.

I glanced down at the light shadow on the ground. It was bright in here, so it was barely noticeable on the ground. Without a shadow, I had a chance to escape.

The idea of doing that made me nauseous.

It wouldn’t work anyway. For all we knew, it was the scribbles of a madman.

Was that because something inside me knew he’d find me eventually, or because I couldn’t see myself running away from him?

“Rinah!” Was yelled over the speaker.