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This can’t be random.

I trail behind them like a stray puppy they forgot to claim. Their laughter carries ahead of me, full of a kind of happiness I don’t know how to grasp. I want it anyway. I want it so badly it aches.

Instead, I focus on the people around us. Couples. Families. Everyone smiling with the ease of a town that believes life is perfect.

But things happen here, terrible things, and no one questions them.

Then my breath catches.

In the shadow of an alley, a man stands motionless, dressed in black. Round, mirrored sunglasses hide his eyes. The rest of the street blurs around him as he stares at me, like he’s been waiting for me to notice.

“Don’t.” Calista’s voice pulls me back. Her hand clamps onto my arm and yanks me to stay with her. “Don’t even look at him. Stay away.”

“Why? Who is he?”

Wayne follows her gaze, his expression shifting with a tension I can’t decipher.

“Edwin Crotavere,” Calista says. “Way too old and way too fucked up for you. Case in point—aiming a gun at you in the cemetery this morning. My mom says there’s something wrong with that whole family.”

She looks at Wayne, and he takes the cue.

“The Crotaveres get away with a lot of shit here.”

“Yeah, like killing people.” Calista’s eyes widen for emphasis. “The police don’t do anything about it. Not like there’s much of a force here. But the few cops in town have their own agenda.”

I turn back towards the alley. Edwin is gone.

They speak about him as if he’s some dangerous monster, but he looks broken to me. Lit from within by a sadness no one else bothers to see. Edwin seems like a man who has already survived the worst part of his story, wounds still fresh.

I remember the weight of his gaze this morning before he raised his arm, the hesitation when I became a willing participant. He didn’t seem like danger then. He was someone suffocating.

And for the first time since arriving in Shadow Bluff, I’m not lost.

I’ve been found.

CHAPTER 6

EDWIN

At this end of the house, darkness gathers in corners and settles over the walls, unwilling to be disturbed. It’s been nearly a year since I’ve ventured down here.

Dust stirs when I open the door to the library, dragging a cough from my lungs. No entry allowed if you’re still breathing.

A faint trace of jasmine clings to the tapestries beneath the smell of old books. Floor-to-ceiling shelves rise around me, a gallery above, every inch of the room still carrying my mother’s devotion. A shrine no one had the courage to dismantle.

This was her refuge. She could open a book anywhere, start in the middle, and vanish into another life.

Standing here amid thousands of lives, I can think only of one. My angel. Thief of my extinction. She stopped me from killing myself, which means I owe her my life. Certainly a dramatic debt, but small obligations are too often overlooked.

Since my little trip downtown, I haven’t been able to pull my thoughts from her. Those thrifted rags she bought today haunt me, and the sight offends me on a spiritual level. She should be dressed in something treasured, not a garment discarded by strangers with no taste for the extraordinary.

I barely held myself back from touching her. Hunger has settled into me, a sinuous, patient predator intent on consuming her, tearing her apart, and preserving what remains in gold. When the time comes, I will wonder how I ever restrained myself.

I move to the shelves. Some books are missing. My mother’s favorites by Hawthorne and Dickens. I trace through dust until my fingers land on the Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Naturally. I pull the sheet from her favorite chesterfield, a ghostly form taking shape as it floats to the floor. When I switch on the lamp, the weak glow barely cuts the gloom.

Cold air brushes my nape like a hand reaching through the veil.

My mother always understood solitude. She carried the weight of being Seraph of the Order as if it had been carved into her bones. Our world demanded she shine, that she command and submit all at once, the only woman left to manage the most powerful of men. My grandmother thrived in that glare. My mother bent beneath it until she broke.