He did it without thinking, or maybe without thinking enough. He reached for Annie in a way that was both desperate and familiar, a move you make when you think the person is still yours. His hand closed around her wrist, not hard, but insistent. I saw red.
The world contracted. I was out of my chair before the screech of wood on tile finished echoing. My hand wrapped Seth's throat, not gently, not with any attempt at subtlety. I felt the pulse against my palm, the dance of fear beneath the skin, every muscle in his body going slack as the oxygen started to drain. I lifted him off the ground like he weighed nothing—because he did, to me.
The entire patio went silent. All the humans, the demons, the staff—everyone watched me, watched Annie, watched stupid Seth dangle like a sideshow prop in my grip. I could have crushed his trachea in a blink. I wanted to. I started to squeeze.
Not hard, not at first. Just enough for Seth to realize who held him, to let the certainty travel up his spine and register in the pupils blown wide with panic. He scrabbled at my wrist, nails biting skin, but I barely felt it—my hand was three times his, and it was built to break, not to be broken. I squeezed harder, the way you test a piece of fruit for ripeness, until his face went blotchy and the veins at his temples bulged and fluttered. His feet left the ground. The sound he made was small and ugly, a child’s whimper squeezed through a grown man’s larynx.
“Samiel!” Annie’s voice split the air, sharp and unafraid. “Let him go.”
I didn’t. I watched Seth’s eyes roll, watched his hands flail for purchase, watched the way the bakery staff dialed 911 but didn’t dare come any closer than the window. The world had gone silent; even the cars on the street slowed to see who would win.
This was what I was built for. Not the house, or the sourdough, or the novelty of a girlfriend who made me laugh and fucked me raw and wore my shirts with nothing underneath. This was the real me, the one made for violence, the one who’d spent eternity learning that the only way to be heard was to leave a mark that never faded.
“Sam.” Annie’s voice again, closer, and this time there was no fear, just a low, steady current of command. “Put him down. He’s not worth it.”
I looked at her. Really looked. She stood there, hair snapping in the wind, hands curled into fists, but she wasn’t afraid. Not of me, not of the scene I was making. She was angry, yes, but she was also pleading—for me, not for the sack of shit dangling in my hand.
“If you kill him,” she said, “he wins. Is that what you want?”
I hesitated just long enough for Seth to make a desperate, wet gasp. His lips were blue now, the whites of his eyes a bloodshot maze. I wanted to keep squeezing. I wanted to snap the little column of bones and watch the life drain out of the first and last man who ever made Annie feel small.
But I wanted her more. I wanted what we’d built, the house, the running track in the yard, the stupid cat and the even stupider hope that I could be something other than what the world had always told me.
So I loosened my grip. Just barely. Seth collapsed to his knees, coughing and retching, spittle running down his chin. I watched him crawl, watched him clutch at his throat like he thought the damage wasn’t permanent. He looked up at Annie, not at me, and I could see the fresh terror there, the knowledge of how close he’d come. I wanted him to remember it every time he swallowed, every time he tried to speak in a room that wasn’t his.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Annie
Ididn’t see Samiel’s face at first—all I saw was the human shape of Seth, retching on the bakery tiles, and the impact that my boyfriend’s handprint had left on his neck, already staining purple. For one cold second, everything in my body collapsed inward. I’d always known what Samiel was, but some desperate, soft part of me had needed to believe in the boundary between monsters and men, and now I wasn’t sure there was one.
The rest of the world came back in pieces. The clatter of an overturned coffee cup. The echo chamber of silence as everyone on the patio stared, waiting for the post-mortem. Seth staggered upright, clutching his ruined voice box, and spit something at my feet that might have been blood or just humiliation. He didn’t look at me as he turned, lurching out of the bakery straight-legged and angry, disappearing around the corner in a daze.
I rounded on Samiel as soon as he let go, voice barely above a whisper but shaking with everything I was suddenly, violently aware of. “What the fuck was that, Sam?”
He looked at me, eyes two open wounds. “He touched you.” Like it was a full explanation, as necessary and obvious as breathing.
I felt my hands shake, but not from adrenaline—terror, maybe, or just the understanding that this was the real him, the one who’d warned me from the beginning. “You could have fucking killed him. In front of all these people.”
“Only if you’d asked,” he said quietly, and I saw the ugly truth—he meant it.
For a second I wanted to run, wanted to get in the car and keep driving until the world fell away on both sides. Even now, even with everything I’d already seen, it stunned me how thin the line was between love and annihilation.
But this was what I’d chosen. This was what I wanted, wasn’t it? The honesty, even when it sliced.
“He’s not worth it,” I said, the words tasting like blood. “I told you. I don’t want you to protect me from myself. Or from him. I want you to trust me.”
His jaw worked, the muscles rippling under his skin, and I saw he didn’t know how. He didn’t know how to let go, any more than I did.
We left the donuts half-eaten, the coffee still hot in the cups. The car ride home was a mutiny of silence—Samiel gripping the wheel so hard I thought it might snap, me staring out the window, counting the seconds until the ache under my ribs became something I could name.
When we got home, he killed the engine and just sat in the driveway, head bowed, hands locked at ten and two on the wheel. I didn’t wait for him to speak.
“I said it at the coffee shop and I’ll say it here,” I said. “I didn’t tell you Seth came by because I knew you’d do exactly this. I knew you’d hurt him or scare him or worse. And I didn’t want to see that. I meant what I said. I love you. I don’t want this… possessive whatever it is you have going on to ruin it.”
He turned, slowly, the veins under his skin black and rising like he was about to break the glass just by looking at it.
