Page 38 of Thane's Demon
Instead, I remained in the shadow of that tree, my hands curled into fists in my pockets as I tracked her retreating form with my eyes like I had been chained to the sight of her.
She glanced back once before going inside, a quick, nervous look over her shoulder that shouldn’t have meant anything. Butmy demon surged at the small act all the same. Satisfaction rolling through me like a dark tide. She looked for us, and it purred.
I pulled in a breath through my teeth, trying to shake the feeling off, but it clung stubbornly. When the doors to the building slid closed behind her, the city suddenly felt wrong, too quiet, too exposed, as if something essential had been taken away.
“Fucking stupid,”I muttered to myself as I pulled my phone from my pocket. This was precisely what I had tried to avoid. Attachment. Focus. Curiosity. All those human weaknesses that ended in one inevitable thing…
Pain.
I looked down at the screen anyway, at the contact that had not existed an hour ago.
Alora. I had typed her name without thinking, my fingers moving with the certainty of something primal, and now it stared back at me as if it had always belonged there. Just her name. No last name. No title. Nothing formal to keep a distance between us.
My Alora.
The first time I had spoken it aloud, it had tasted strange on my tongue, soft and bright and wrong for a mouth like mine. Yet now my demon curled around the sound of it, possessive. Like it had been waiting all this time for that single word to be given form.
‘Our name.
Our girl.’
It whispered. I closed my eyes briefly, annoyed that the simple act of thinking about her was enough to make the creature in me purr again. A low, content rumble that I had not heard before, as it had never felt this sated… this satisfied. But how? It wasn’t like I had fed it with what it craved the most,which was usually pain and suffering. No, it had simply been content to be around her, and even now, all I felt was a strange kind of peace I had never known before.
“For fuck’s sake, just send the message, you coward,” I scolded myself, deciding to send the message, if not for my sake, then at least for hers. She deserved that much. Because she needed someone in her life that she could call if something happened again.
Yes… that was all this was. A practical step. Nothing more. My thumb hovered over the screen for a moment before the words fell into place as naturally as drawing breath,
Thanks for the date, my little dreamer.
I stared at the sentence for a moment. It was more honest than I liked, a confession that this had been exactly what she had called it. No matter how I had tried to deny it out loud…
A date.
Time I had willingly given to her despite knowing the risks. Despite trying everything in me to walk away from her. But in the end, she had set fire to my will and danced in its ashes as I had given her more of myself than I ever had to another. Answers reluctantly offered, and in return, she had shared pieces of herself she had not meant to give away to someone like me.
I should have deleted the message, rewritten it into something cold and distant. Something that would keep her from thinking any of this had meant anything. I hit send instead…fuck!
The faint chime from her phone reached me even out here, my senses already tuned to everything that belonged to her as she stood in the lobby still, no doubt waiting for an elevator. The sound brushed against the edges of my awareness like a touch, and for a moment I imagined her expression when she saw it. The way her lips would curl into a tempting smile, the way hereyes would brighten. The thought should not have made my chest feel tight.
But it did anyway.
‘You will fall.
You can’t walk away.
She will be ours.
Time is mine.’
My demon murmured, its voice a satisfied growl inside my skull as if it had already won the battle against me. The question now was,why wasn’t I upset by the idea?Or more importantly, why was I still out here when she had already gone inside?
Because something was wrong.
The realization had been creeping up on me ever since she had said the word father with that tightness around her mouth, that thread of fear she tried and failed to hide. It had sharpened further when she had stopped me from walking her to the door. At first, I thought it might have been that she had been too ashamed to be seen with me. That I was some dirty little secret she wanted to hide from rich parents that would definitely not approve. But then she had spoken of her father in a way that told me this was not the case at all. That no matter who I was, he would react in the same way.
The proof of this had been when she stepped in front of me like a small shield between me and the building. The way she had told me I couldn’t come any closer. My kind were made for many things. Being told no was not one of them.
It wasn’t just protectiveness. She had been right about that. Protection was a choice. Control was a need. I knew the difference better than most. Because I had heard something familiar in her voice, something that had lived inside me for as long as I could remember. The awareness of chains others could not see.
