I clenched my thighs, digging my nails into my skin, focusing only on the pain, and forced the air to rip through my chest. Every drag of the stale air where death had once permeated awakened my body.
Focus came in sharp, fragmented memories.
My skin was slick with sweat, and the deepest of my memories surfaced. Something I vowed to never speak of again.
I’d let something evil in that night.
I didn’t know what, or how, but I knew this—it was something no one should ever let in.
It came on the heels of my anger, my selfishness, my doubt.
Doubt in her words. Doubt in her ability to protect me. Doubt in my love for her.
And with my doubt came darkness.
A darkness that had killed her.
I had to get out of here.
I left the cabin, hands shaking, but the stillness of my old home, so devoid of life, lingered. I descended the stairs of the deck, the gravel crunching beneath my boots. The fresh air was like another world. It tore through my lungs like a gale wind. I looked up, my eyes beginning to focus.
Someone was there.
Was it someone from that night? Had they come back?
I was rooted to the ground as my vision finally focused. No. This was… my fear dissipated, leaving disbelief.
My eyes had to be deceiving me. It’d been three years since I last saw him. The day my mom died.
He loomed like a ghost, hauntingly unchanged despite the years that had passed. Clad in black from head to toe, he looked like a warrior that had stepped straight out of a gothic novel—his boots strapped tight, his coat fitted like armor, and at his hip, the same sword he’d used when he trained me from dusk ‘til dawn all those years ago. My own had been auctioned off after that night. Now, I only had the training sword I used in Taekwondo—nothing like the sharp steel blades Derrick and I once trained with.
Derrick was a handsome, stoic man. Eiryn and Katie had seen him once, and Eiryn wouldn’t shut up about him. I never saw him like that, though. He was something else to me. A mentor. A friend. A guardian. Still, I saw why Eiryn had the reaction he did. His face looked like it’d been carved from marble—the chiseled jawline, smooth skin, and stoic expression. The only thing that didn’t fit was the deep blue eyes. The sightof him sent a sharp, twisting pain through my chest, and anger flashing hot across my skin.
“What’re you doing here?” I snapped.
Resentment coiled in my muscles, and my body tensed.
Derrick was motionless as he watched me.
“Anna.”
I directed the wrath I felt in my bones toward the man who’d curated it.
He was exactly as I remembered him.
Stoic, collected, and impossibly controlled.
It irritated me to no end.
“Fight me,” he said.
He drew his sword from its sheath at his hip, the sound of steel scraping steel quickening my pulse.
Adrenaline rushed through my veins as I watched the blade slide. My hands shook as they tightened reflexively, itching to feel the heavy fibers of the hilt against my palm.
Without warning, he tossed me the sword. My arm shot out instinctively, catching the hilt and grasping it tightly.
A wave of satisfaction came over me.
