The way he said it, I knew he understood the difference between being kept and being wanted. Between possession and care.
I stood at the window until Samiel’s shape blurred to nothing on the dust road, just a dark thread unraveling over sun and distance. I waited for myself to feel relief—some click of “finally, he’s gone”—but the second the door shut, the silence struck so hard I actually whimpered, a noise I hadn’t heard from myself since childhood.
I tried to fill the space the way I always did: rearranged the mini fridge a full three times (alphabetized by seltzer flavor, then by color, then back to flavor), put my books on the desk and stacked them and restacked them in order of least to most embarrassing. I sat on the bed and scrolled my phone, but there was nothing to scroll. My friends wouldn’t understand, my family was on another planet, and the only person whose notifications mattered had made it explicit I could ghost him at will.
I wandered the little house, which smelled like bleach and empty, and tried to remember the last time I’d really, truly been alone. Not the kind of alone where someone was a text or a shout down the hall away, but isolation, pure and perfect, where the only echo was your own heart and fear. I let myself have the panic attack, right there on the floor. My brain spun every worst-case scenario: Samiel furious, Samiel gone, Samiel snapped and turned into the kind of monster people braced for when they heard a demon moved in next door. But the real horror was that I couldn’t stop picturing him—not as the brute with his hand around a throat, but as the man who’d left me in this house with every comfort and none of his own, just to prove he could try to give me what I needed.
I didn’t sleep much that first night. Maybe an hour. I walked the perimeter four times, made up three different elaborate cereal recipes, read the entirety of a romance novel I found in the closet (Bride of the Blood Moon—so, so bad), and then watched the lake go from onyx to the same red-gold as Samiel’s eyes when he let his defenses down and just looked at me. I spent the first day furious. The second day, I cried so hard I thought I’d give myself sinus damage.
On the third morning, the cat arrived. Fluoxetine, tail up and confidence high, stalked up the path and headbutted the door until I let her in. She sniffed the walls, pawed at the blanket, thenflopped on the end of the bed and glared at me like,Get a grip. I tried to make her leave, but she just bit my ankle, so I gave up and let her have half the cereal. She was better company than most people I’d known.
I spent that day really thinking—about Samiel, about me, about the way I kept running from one version of love to another. What scared me most wasn’t the violence—it was the way that, with Samiel, the violence wasn’t the point. I knew what it felt like to be the target of a man’s anger, and this wasn’t it. What he’d done to Clem, to Seth—yeah, it was pure animal, but if I was honest, what I’d felt from Samiel was something closer to instinct too, the wild protective urge that made you want to take a bullet for a friend or throw yourself between a kid and a moving car.
But that was the problem, wasn’t it? That I kind of craved being wanted in a way that bordered on dangerous. The idea twisted in me like a knife: I didn’t just want to be chosen, I wanted to be kept.
I hated myself for it. I hated that deep down, I wanted to run right back home and crawl onto his lap and let him cage me in with his arms and his body and the shadow of his wings. I wanted the impossible—to be free, and to be claimed. I wanted to have it both ways, and I knew the world did not actually work like that for girls like me.
The cat glared up at me as if to say,get over yourself.
So I did what I always did when my emotions threatened to swamp me—I went looking for the edge, the line I could walk until I either fell off or learned to balance. I put on my shoes and just started running, tracing the cliffside above the lake, until the air in my lungs was sharp and every muscle in my legs howled for mercy. It wasn’t about exercise, not really. It was about beating the storm in my head into something quieter, smaller, a set of problems I might eventually be able to solve.
I ran until the sun was high and the sweat had dried salt in my eyebrows. When I finally slowed to a walk, the world felt different. I’d outpaced the worst of the anxiety, leaving a more manageable, solid core beneath. I stood at the brim of Hell’s Valley and looked back at the sprawl of human houses, the faint glint of glass where the demon enclave started, the GTO still parked crooked in the drive, a mile and a half below. I stood there for a long time, arms wrapped across my belly, and wondered what it would take to hold both parts of myself at once.
When I finally went back inside, I crashed face-first onto the bed and slept for six hours straight. I dreamed of nothing, which felt like a gift.
Day four, I called my mom. I hadn’t expected to, but I found myself dialing her without thinking, as if some vestigial survival instinct needed reminding that the past I’d run from wasn’t all bad, or at least that it existed out there, waiting for me. She picked up on the first ring.
“Are you alive?” she said, skipping hello.
“Definitely alive. Just… decompressing,” I said, and realized my voice sounded normal. Like me, not like someone drowning.
“Well, that’s something. Is it the demon? I’m not against alternative lifestyles, sweetheart, but if you’re being held against your will, cough twice.”
I laughed, hard, and felt the last of the tension melt out of me. “He’s not holding me hostage, Mom. He’s actually giving me space. Which is more than can be said for certain ex-boyfriends.”
She went quiet for a beat. “Is that what this is about? The pest ex?” She meant Seth, but she never said his name if she could help it.
“Kind of.” I sat on the bed, pulled the blanket over my knees, and looked out at the stitched-together patchwork of lake and sand and demon-warded suburbia. “He showed up. I told him toget bent, but it… complicated things.” I hesitated, then decided to just say it. “Samiel almost killed him. I mean, he didn’t, but he wanted to. And I thought I could handle it, but—I don’t know.”
My mom inhaled, a sound like the start of a verdict. “So you left.”
“Not exactly. I’m just… in a timeout,” I said. “I needed to figure out if I was actually safe, or just addicted to the drama.”
She laughed. “Oh, honey. Those are the same thing.”
There was a pause while she no doubt lit a cigarette and exhaled a perfect ring. When she spoke, her voice was wickedly clear. “Let me give you some motherly advice,” she said, and I braced myself for either the worst or best speech of my adult life. “If he ever puts a hand on you that you didn’t ask for, you call, and I will drive straight to Nevada and blow his head off. No questions asked.”
“Jesus, Mom?—”
“But if he never does, and you love him, who cares if the rest is a mess? You do not have to fix his wiring. You just have to decide if the risk is worth the heat. Men like that, they’re all or nothing. They don’t do safe.” She paused as if she might sob, but of course she didn’t. “You’re my daughter, Annie. You were never going to be happy with a guy who just listened and made you chamomile tea and sent you Valentine’s jokes on Instagram. You need a man who can take it and give it right back.”
I lay back on the bed, phone clamped to my ear, and pictured Samiel in the kitchen, pummeling bread dough or dropping oranges for the cat to play with. “He scares the shit out of me sometimes,” I said. It was a confession and a prayer.
She snorted, delighted. “Good. Keeps you sharp.”
We were quiet awhile, both of us chewing on it. Finally, she said, “I know you, Annie. You don’t want normal. You want someone who will burn a city down for you and expect youto rebuild it with him. If Samiel’s that guy, stop trying to be someone else’s version of safe.”
I breathed in, out, and realized I was crying—not the ugly kind, but relief, given permission to exist exactly as I was. “Thanks, Mom.”
