Page 45 of The Madness Within

And I hated the way I stared at it. Not because I was afraid. But because I wasn’t. And that terrified me more than anything else.

Chapter Seventeen

??Obsession, Tension, and Something Wicked

Dorian

Ember Carr had a voice like a slow blade.

Smooth.

Lethal.

Seductive in its certainty.

I listened to one of her recent podcast episodes with the lights off, sprawled in a leather chair that still reeked faintly of old blood and sin.

The title:“The Ones Who Never Went Away.”

Clever.

Her voice crackled through my speakers, low, calm, curious. But there was an edge beneath it.

A hunger. One I recognized.

“They want you to believe he vanished,” she said. “The man who murdered my mother. Who carved me open and left me to die. But people like that don’t vanish. They rot in place. They burrow into systems. Into suits. Into courtrooms.”

My jaw clenched.

I leaned forward. The shadows curled tighter around my legs like they sensed the shift in my pulse.

“And here’s the part they never reported. My mother was onto something when she got a phone call. A warning. Someone told her to drop what she was searching for. Said:‘If you go through with this, they won’t even see the body before the vultures get to it.’”

My fingers twitched.

That line.

That exact line.

Kreed said it. To me right before I took his case.

Cocky bastard. Thought he was being clever. He didn’t know I’d seen what he left behind.

Didn’t know I could smell the death still clinging to the air long after the crime scenes had been scrubbed.

He said it like a joke. She’s quoting it like scripture.

My fangs pressed sharp against my tongue, drawing blood. The shadows pulsed.

She’s too close. Too fucking close.

I rose from the chair and vanished through the walls like smoke. It didn’t take much effort to get into her building. Her wards were human. Alarms. Deadbolts. A lock that took me less than two heartbeats to break.

Her apartment smelled like books, dried herbs, coffee, and paper cuts. I wanted to see what she was without performance. Without the teeth in her voice.

What I found?

Was obsession.

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