Page 56 of Creeping Lily
“You’ll have a visitor soon,” he says, the words curling around me like sin. “Send him away. And stay out of the Walkers’ business. I only ask once.”
“Why—”
“Shhh.” His fingertip presses against my lips. “Stay.”
And then he’s gone.
The blindfold falls away. The window is still open, the night gaping wide, but the only thing left of him is the echo in myblood and the scent that says he’ll come back to finish what he started.
I don’t moveafter he’s gone.
The silence feels heavier than the air—thick, suffocating, pressing in from all sides. The blindfold hangs limp around my neck, the knot still warm from where it gripped my skin. I should rip it off, throw it away, scrub him from every inch of this place.
But I don’t.
The room reeks of him—sandalwood and something electric, something sharp enough to cut—and I can’t bring myself to hate the way it skates over my skin. I want it here. I want him here. I want the scent to cling to the curtains and the carpet and to me, so that when I wake up at three in the morning, I can breathe him in and remember exactly how it felt when the world narrowed to nothing but his voice in my ear.
I should be terrified. I should be dialing the police, reporting a break-in, a threat, a man who touched me without my permission. But my phone sits silent in the other room.
Because what would I even say? That I wanted him to keep going? That I leaned into his hand when it closed over me? That my knees went weak when he said he’d drown me in his scent?
No. Some things you don’t confess—not to them, and not to yourself.
But here in the quiet, I can’t ignore it. The truth is, I wanted him to kiss me harder. To pull the blindfold tighter. To press his mouth lower. I wanted the thing he promised without saying it aloud, the thing I know will break me.
And if that makes me weak, then maybe I’m done pretending to be strong.
The clock ticks on my dresser, a metronome to my ruin. I wrap the blindfold around my wrist, winding it until the fabric bites into my pulse. It looks like a mark. It feels like a claim.
He told me to send the visitor away.I don’t even know who this visitor is.
He told me to stop digging into the Walkers.I haven’t even started.
He told me he only asks nicely once.I don’t recall him asking - ever.
But the worst part?
I don’t want to do a damn thing he asked me to.
Because I want him to come back.
I want him to ruin me.
And I want him to finish what he started.
29
LILY
The air changes before I even realize why.
It’s subtle—just a soft draft that slides across my skin, lifting the fine hairs along my arms—but the effect is instant. Something in me knows before my eyes do. The untouched chai in front of me grows cold, its steam long gone, but I barely notice. My gaze drifts to the café door as the bell chimes, that deceptively delicate sound heralding something I can already feel in my bones.
And then I see him.
My smile dies before it reaches my eyes. My chest tightens, heart slamming against my ribs so hard it’s almost audible. For a second, the whole world shrinks until there’s nothing left in it but me—and the man in the doorway. Everything else, the tables, the customers, the murmur of conversation, fades to paper-thin background noise.
There is no fucking way that my eyes are not deceiving me.
