The topaz that had been in my family for generations was the evil eye of Balor, king of the giants. My house had turned into the literal embodiment of death… a very beefy, veryhotdeath.
What the legend had failed to mention was that it wasn’t just the eye my family possessed. It was his entire freaking body.
I’dlivedinsidethis monster.
I’d moved from America for McCrum’s Curios. All my most precious memories were tied up in that building. My livelihood, my home. The only things I had left in this shit world,gone.
But the most fucked up part? It wasn’t really gone, because it had never really been there in the first place.
My brain was barely comprehending everything that had happened. First, I’d been assaulted by Conor. Then, the cultistshad broken in. Their bullet, which had been meant for me, had broken Balor’s curse.
Now, the few possessions I had were lying out on the wet street. Gilly was missing. And the monster responsible for it all loomed over me, holding out Conor’s scorched skull like some kind twisted glimpse into my future.
“Y—You murdered him,” I said stupidly. I didn’t know what else to say.
I kept hoping this was all some dream. Maybe my drink had been spiked at the pub and I was tripping. Maybe I would wake up in my warm bed to find Gilly snuggled next to me.
Balor scoffed. “I’ve murdered countless humans, what’s one more? Aw, don’t give me that pathetic wee pout. This pox of a male used ya to get his bollocks off on the bloody shmear of yer grandfather staining the counter.”
His accent was thick and strange, only vaguely possessing licks of the modern Irish cadence I recognized.
Balor’s greenish, sausage-like fingers closed around Conor’s skull, crushing it to pieces, and he flung the bone shards against the alley wall with a growl.
It was true that Conor was a creep. Did he deserve to die? Maybe. But it wasn’t this monster’s decision to make.
My attention slipped from the monstrous man to the butchered corpses of the cultists laying out in the open beyond the mouth of the alley.
It was getting late, and the foot traffic from the pubs had died off. Morning would come soon and someone would find them.
I had no idea what this monster had in store for me, but I knew from the murderous glint in his eye that he had no intention of giving my store back. Even if he did, how would I explain the bodies? What if there were more cultists?
And Gilly was gone.
Of all my problems, this beast of a man towering over me, his intentions etched clear as day on his face, was the worst of them.
He was going to kill me. Maybe worse.
I waited for fear to set in, but it never did. Instead, nothing but cold indifference turned the blood in my veins to ice.
I glared up at Balor, his flaming hair casting his features in flickering shadows. Beneath the scars, heavy slabs of muscle and swirling smoke, he was handsome. In an unsettling sort of way.
Jesus. Why, oh why, did I have to be attracted to the monster about to kill me? I could blame it on those eyes. Beautiful, bi-colored and mean. One with a glaring green iris, the other with a flipped up eyepatch revealing the cracked topaz set in his left eye socket.
If I was being honest with myself, it was probably all those monster romance books that were to blame for my attraction to him.
I liked monsters—at least in books.
Fuck me. Why does he have to be a red-head?If Conor was any indication, red-headed men were a weakness of mine.
Though, to call Balor a red-head wasn’t exactly right. His hair was literally smoldering. Each strand was black at the roots and bright flames blazed at the ends.
He was so hot. In every sense.
My unwilling attraction just had me hating him more. This monster took the one thing from me that I had left.
I couldn’t stop churning his words over in my head.Like it or not, IamMcCrum’s, girl.
I hadn’t inherited an antique shop from my grandparents. I’d inherited a monster. While he radiated smoke and violence, he still smelled like McCrum’s. Like dust and leather andhome.
