Page 73 of Thane's Demon
“No, you don’t.” I stepped closer, unable to stop myself, frustration and desperation tangling painfully in my chest. “You don’t know him. You don’t know how he treats me. You don’t know what he says when he thinks no one is listening.”
His jaw clenched so hard I swore I heard his teeth grind.
“Alora, I know exactly how he treats you.”
My breath hitched.
“How could you possibly know that?” He lifted his gaze, and for the first time, I saw something like guilt flicker behind the darkness.
“Because I have seen it for myself. I have been watching longer than you think, not just at your campus. Which means that I have seen the way he speaks to you, and in a way no father ever should. I have watched him try to break you down piece by piece.”
My heart stuttered painfully, not from fear but from something deeper and more complicated that I could name.
“I had to know you were safe,” he murmured, voice dropping into something raw.
“Even if it meant watching him speak to you with cruelty. Even if it meant fighting the urge to drag you away from him every time he raised his voice.”
My body felt weightless and heavy all at once. The idea of him seeing those moments, the ones I buried so carefully beneath excuses and silence, was too much. Too intimate. But I also questioned how it was even possible. We lived on the twentieth floor, there was no way he could have been watching me through the window. Yet the way he spoke told me that it was true. That he had seen far more than I would have liked.
“I can’t just leave my life,”I whispered, trying desperately to hold onto sense. “I have school. I’m trying to build a future I can afford, and to do that, I need an education. I can’t just throw that away.”
“You will have a future,” he said quietly. “I will take care of everything you’ll ever need and want.”
I glanced around the room before I fully registered what I was doing. The cracked walls, the battered crates, the makeshift furniture, the dim lighting. It was clean, yes, but undeniably small and worn. He saw the thought cross my face, wondering how he could afford that promise.
“Do not let my home fool you,” he said, stepping closer with a slow, controlled intensity. “Not everything is as it seems.”
I swallowed, my voice small.
“And does that apply to you as well?”
He stopped inches away from me, dipping his head so that he could hold my gaze captive.
“Most definitely.”
Instinct made me take a step back. He scoffed, not cruelly but almost with a dark amusement.
“It is too late for that.”
“I’m not afraid of you,”I whispered.
His eyes softened almost faintly, then darkened again, as though shadow slid through them from within.
“You don’t know what you’re saying. So I suggest you save that promise for when you know what I truly am,” he snapped, making me flinch.
“Then tell me what you are?”The question trembled through me.
He turned away, opened the hidden safe within the wall with a brush of his palm, and placed the jade Seal back inside without me seeing exactly how he opened it. The glow faded as the wall shifted closed. Only then did he speak.
“At the club… they call me Hei Mo.”
“What does that mean?”
He didn’t blink.
“Black Demon.”
Before I had a chance to respond, before the fear or disbelief could settle into my bones, the sound came.
