Her sad smile is a fist squeezing my heart. “Hello, Eric.”
3
Wraith
The day I turned eighteen, the Unholy baptized me in blood, and I was reborn as Wraith. Hearing the name Eric on Jamie Ellis’s lips is both a benediction and a blasphemy. Spoken in a place that’s an endless nightmare, where I’ve become more monster than man.
She’s a fantasy come to life, pulled from a corner of my mind reserved only for her.
It’d be too easy to find out if her mouth still tastes of apples.
Do it,the devil taunts.
Unfortunately for us, we’re in hell, and there’s no angel to counter the evil perched on my shoulder. Its incessant voice is a buzz in my brain, reminding me how Jamie left me hanging for eight goddamn years like I was nothing. Not even an afterthought. There’s no one to stop me from lifting her skirt, ripping off her panties, and sliding into her. Nothing to prevent me from stealing one moment of pleasure in this world of pain and misery.
Nothing but my conscience.
Fuuuck.
“You’re crushing me.”
Jamie’s breathy whisper sounds too intimate with her under me. My dick throbs in empty anticipation of what I can’t have. Of what’s never been mine to take.
“Bullshit.”
But I climb off her anyway. I may be a monster, but I’m not a rapist.
Disheveled, Jamie sits up and adjusts her skirt. Tendrils of hair have come loose from its knot. That thing’s wound so tight it’s givingmea headache. She sweeps away those stray hairs and sits there, a portrait of tousled dignity.
She owes me a shitload of answers.
I start with the most crucial question. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
In this twisted kingdom. In this cell. With me. Out of nowhere, like a fantasy pulled from a fever dream.
To Jamie’s credit, she cringes. “It’s complicated.”
I gesture around the cell. “Seriously?”
She crisscrosses her legs, the position childlike, her spine achingly rigid. “It goes back to what happened after the acquittal.”
“Since we’re not doing a whole lot of fucking, we got nothing but time, sweetheart, so you better start talking.”
Jamie focuses on the floor. Then the wall. Finally, back at me, her expression unreadable, but her eyes spark with an intensity she can’t shield. Not from me. Never from me. “Right after, I stayed with my grandmother. The one in Reading. My father’s mother. Obviously, it couldn’t work, so she sent me to live with my aunt in Florida. That arrangement didn’t go well either, so I moved out at eighteen. After that, I bounced around between Orlando and Ocala, and now I’m here.”
Yeah, no.Jamie and I may not have been an official couple, or sleepovers-and-hair-braiding BFFs, but we for damn sure were more than casual. Because it was me who she ran to when daddy fucked her up and she needed comfort. I was the one who held her hand and walked with her in the woods for hours, dreaming of the day when she’d be free. I never treated her like trash when any other guy would have taken advantage of poor broken Jamie Ellis. So for her to sit there and gloss over the details of where she’s been and what she’s doing here is a slap to my face. Especially after her vanishing act sent me into a two-year pity party that ended the day I became an Unholy.
I think I’m more than justified in wanting to shake the shit out of her until a few answers come loose.
I grit my teeth as ket sends a fresh wave of razor blades skating through my veins. “I expected at least a goddamn phone call.”
Her cheeks flush. “I didn’t think you cared.”
“That’s a crock of shit, and you know it.” I narrow my eyes at her, making a conscious effort not to strangle her. “Why the hell were you with Crane last night?”
She looks guilty as sin, and it doesn’t take a genius to fit the pieces together. But I need to hear her say it—say the actual words to hammer home the nails in her coffin. “That’s even more complicated.”
“Then explain it to me like I’m a goddamn two-year-old.”
