Page 31 of Thane's Demon
I stepped back just enough to give her space, though every instinct screamed at me not to. The sudden loss of her warmth felt like stepping out of a heated room into cold air, wrong and unwelcome. I did not like it. I did not like how quickly my body missed the feel of her pressed close.
“Come,” I said, turning away before I could change my mind. “There is a place near the edge of campus.”
She fell into step beside me without hesitation, her footsteps light on the paved path as we walked back toward the main buildings. It was still daylight, students scattered across the lawns and benches, conversations drifting through the air in adozen different languages. Normally, I moved through this place alone, a shadow people gave a wide berth without knowing why. Yet here she was, freely choosing to walk at my side, small and bright in her pastel clothes, and I felt the weight of eyes on us.
The demon purred, satisfied.
‘She walks with us.
See.
She chose us.’
I ignored the stares and kept my stride measured instead of predatory, leading her past the main lecture hall toward a quieter wing of the campus where the crowds thinned. A small café sat tucked beneath an overhang there, with a row of outdoor tables overlooking a cluster of trees and a patch of worn grass, where a few students sat with open laptops and half-eaten lunches. The scent of coffee, broth, and fried dough mixed in the air, warm and comforting in a way I had never bothered to notice before.
She slowed as we approached, taking in the handwritten menu propped in the window and the simple plastic tables lining the stone terrace.
“I have never been here, it’s… nice,” she admitted.
Nice. That was one word for it. Ordinary was another. It was the kind of place no one important would ever think twice about, a corner of campus that existed purely for tired students and rushed meals. For the first time in a long time, discomfort pricked at me. I became acutely aware of how unremarkable it was, how little I had to offer her. No polished restaurants, no velvet chairs, no dim mood lighting or polished silverware. Just chipped mugs, cheap bowls, and the hum of an old refrigerator.
She deserves more.
She deserves better.
Of course, I had the resources to give her better, despite where I lived. A shit hole I had chosen to live in rather than beingforced into it. But that didn’t mean I was without money. I had a lot of it, in fact, and it had nothing to do with the sultan’s fortune my father had acquired over his many, many years upon the mortal plane. No, it turned out that being a killer for hire was a lucrative business and had allowed me to acquire my own small fortune.
I shoved the thought away, because it didn’t matter. She needed food, not a fantasy. I moved ahead to push the door open, letting her step inside first. The warmth of the room wrapped around us instantly, students murmuring at corner tables. An older woman behind the counter slid baked goods into brown bags for take-out customers, but her eyes flicked up when we entered, pausing for a fraction of a second on me with that familiar instinctive unease… then shifting to the girl at my side.
One I just realized, I still didn’t know the name of.
Something in her face softened.
“Ni hao,” the woman said gently, nodding to her before returning to her work.
I stepped in beside her, close enough that my arm brushed hers, unable to make myself move farther away.
“Order whatever you want,” I muttered.
She glanced up at me, eyes bright with something I could not name.
“Are you sure?”
“If I were not, we would not be here,” I replied sternly, something that strangely made her smile again. A small one, but real all the same, and I felt the demon stretch contentedly inside my chest. The feeling curled around the sound, as if it were something worth guarding. As she turned to study the board, tapping her finger lightly against her lip in thought, I watched her with a focus that felt too intense for something as mundane as choosing food.
I had brought her here because she was hungry.
But beneath that, a quieter truth pulsed.
I wanted her to sit with me, in the light of day, where the world could see her beside me and know she had chosen to be there. I wanted to see her eat, relax, and breathe without fear. I wanted, for one impossible moment, to pretend that I could be the kind of man who took a girl to a café on campus in the middle of the day.
The kind of man who deserved to sit across from someone like her. But now more than anything…
I wanted to know her name.
14
POWER OF A NAME
