Page 26

As a tired breath left his lips, his bangs softly danced against his forehead, fluttering in the wind, almost as if invisible fingers had caressed them out of his face.

Evan side-eyed the closed windows, then the unmoving fan blades above. A wave of chills spread up his arms before he shook it off.

Paranoia…probably.

“So, did you complete the exorcism?” Aaron asked. “What exactly happened upstairs that set the whole place on fire?”

With a tired huff, Evan pinched the bridge of his nose as he tried to rearrange the jumbled events in his head in order of their occurrence. A part of his memory, a tiny part, was still hazy.

“I went to inspect the…suspicious room on the first floor. Found the source of the dark energy in a mirror with a…containment array,” Evan tilted his head up, searching his memory. “While I was inspecting it, Bruce and his men charged in and—”

“Wait, they found you? So they hadn’t fled the mansion like I’d told the authorities?”

Evan’s throat closed up, eyes narrowing at the dull, dark ceiling of his living room. There was no use in speaking about what Bruce and his men had tried to do to him. It wasn’t something new. And if they weren’t found, their shriveled bodies were probably consumed by the fire.

A sick sort of satisfaction laced through Evan’s chest before he mentally slapped his morals into place.

He straightened and dipped his spoon in the soup. After a beat of silence, he muttered. “They are dead.”

Aaron’s gaze bore into the side of Evan’s face as he quietly took in the information. He wasn’t particularly fond of that lot of people either.

Seeing how Evan showed no signs of elaborating on the topic, he knew better than to press. “I see.”

Evan kept his eyes fixated on the soup. When Aaron didn’t push him for an explanation, a soft sigh left his lips. “I didn’t kill them.”

“Obviously. For all your tough-guy act, you couldn’t swat a fly if your life depended on it,” Aaron muttered, rising to his feet and disappearing into the kitchen.

Evan snorted.

That—right there—was one of the reasons he still kept that idiot around.

Aaron belonged to that rare breed of people who wouldn’t judge a friend for failing to do the right thing, butalsowouldn’t judge that friend for doing something wrong either.

Not that Evan believed he’d done something wrong. He’d tried to warn Bruce and his men, even while they were trying to shove their hands down his pants.

Their deaths weren’t on him. The true culprit was their own ignorance.

And a red silhouette.

After arguing back and forth about it with his own conscience, Evan found little to no reassurance over the guilt that would occasionally resurface inside him.

With no appetite in sight, he pushed around the cubes of meat and leaves in the soup, aimlessly stirring through its contents. It was obviously made by Rhea.

After every exorcism, Evan visited her shop to regain his stamina with her special chicken soup.

Whatever secret recipe—or spell—she used, the soup worked like a rejuvenating syrup straight to the soul. And right now, he needed it badly. That thing in the mirror room had almost sucked his core of spiritual energy dry.

Evan’s shoulders slumped as he stared at the soup.

Aaron emerged from the kitchen and placed a glass of chocolate milk beside the soup bowl. “That’ll probably spark an appetite.”

A glint sparked in Evan’s lifeless eyes. He grabbed the glass, stars bursting in his irises as he chugged down half of it in one go. Then said, giddily, “Thanks.”

Oh, how little it took to cheer up a fool with a sweet tooth.

Aaron’s phone buzzed in his pocket just as he was chuckling at Evan. With a quick excuse, he stepped outside.

The moment the door shut behind him, the temperature dropped. Slightly, but noticeably. Like a blanket that’d been protectively hovering over Evan was suddenly ripped away.