Page 1 of Claimed By Her Monsters

Chapter One

The Thing With Feathers

There’s blood under my nails when the man says, “This is a terrible idea.”

His voice is smooth, cultured, private-school vowels, money in the consonants. I don’t have to see him to know he’s polished. Nineteen years old and three of those spent in this sinkhole they call extended foster care has taught me to read people by how they shape a word.

The fluorescent above me gives a sick buzz, then blink, stutter, steady.

I pick at my chipped black nail polish, ignoring the rust-colored stains wedged in my cuticles.

I washed my hands quickly but couldn’t get those out.

I should feel bad when I see them, to regret what I did to the older resident who cornered me in my group home, but I don’t.

Fucker had it coming.

Bored with my nails, I push my long dark waves out of my face and sigh.

The hallway where I wait outside my social worker’s office is ugly.

Scuffed white walls and lime-green floor that was probably cool back in the ’70s but looks like puke now.

A bulletin board across from me has about a million flyers stapled onto it.

Pottery classes, greasy takeout menus, missing kids.

All of them tacked on top of each other until it’s noise.

Clutter. Lost faces no one came back for.

Today was supposed to be cake and a candle pilfered from the rec room. Instead, I got a knife, a lot of yelling, and me proving I’m not a victim. Happy birthday to me. Being born on October 31st has always felt like a curse. Guess the universe wanted to prove it.

The light hums louder, as if it can hear my thoughts. I stare at my hands and the little half-moons of someone else’s blood. The older girls in the home call me a hurricane. The staff call me “noncompliant.” I call myself…surviving.

I tilt toward the cracked door of my social worker’s office, listening hard.

The man’s words slip out in fragments, jagged and incomplete.

“Highly inappropriate…not equipped…are you certain?” I try to figure out what he’s saying but it’s like the bulletin board, random phrases slapped on top of one another. Never the full conversation.

Then the man’s voice cuts through, clear and strong. “Of course I don’t want her to go to jail.”

My stomach lurches. I see the flash of the blade, the red stain on his shirt, the creeps face when he realized I wasn’t playing. I didn’t kill him, and it was self-defense, but intent doesn’t keep you out of prison. Paperwork does. Evidence does. Strangers with expensive voices do.

For one reckless second, I want him to help me. To take me away from here. I shut that down fast. I don’t trust that emotion.

Hope.

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson wrote, but my birds always get shot. They fall from the sky.

Footsteps coming closer. My caseworker’s door opens another inch. The man says something too low for me to hear as his shadow breaks across the tiles, tall, precise. The kind of person who casts straight lines.

I stand, smooth my thrift-store skirt, and wipe my palms down the sides even though nothing will rub off. The bulletin board stares with its collage of faces. I stare back and make a promise I can actually keep.

I’m not going to be one of you.

Not today.

***

My caseworker, Mrs. Hernandez, steps out into the hallway first. She’s short, middle-aged, and one of the few adults who’s ever been kind to me.

Guilt tugs at my chest. I’ve made her life a nightmare since the crash that took my parents three years ago.

All the transfers from one foster house to another.

The complaints from my schools, six different ones.

A mountain of paperwork with my name on it.

The man comes out next, and my breath freezes, unmoving in my throat when I see him because, holy hell, he’s hot.

He looks like he belongs on a movie screen, not in a county office that smells like old coffee and lemon cleaner.

Black hair slicked back neat, clean-shaven jaw sharply angled, eyes the color of winter.

He wears a black suit so perfectly tailored it probably costs more than my entire group home. White shirt, black tie, everything crisp, controlled. Too clean for this place and too clean for me.

“Madison,” Mrs. Hernandez says, stepping farther out into the hallway.

“This is Mr. Crane.” She gestures toward him, and I swear her gaze drags over his broad shoulders and his trim waist like even she’s not immune.

“He’s your closest living relative on record.

Distant, but confirmed through your adoptive father.

” She frowns, shakes her head, then waves a hand like it’s all too complicated.

“The court signed off on a temporary kinship placement with him while they decide whether to file charges.”

“Relative?” I repeat, dumbfounded. I thought my parents didn’t have any other family. That’s what they always told me.

“Yes,” she trills, blushing ridiculously.

She doesn’t even glance in my direction.

Her eyes stay locked on the stranger, dreamy and glazed, like she’s been bewitched into playing the part of a lovesick teenager.

“It took forever to track him down, but his emergency background check is the cleanest I’ve ever seen.

Paperwork properly filed. References polished. Not a single infraction—”

“She’s nineteen,” Mr. Crane interrupts, each word clipped. His gaze passes over me, cool and uninterested. “I still don’t understand why I’m here?”

“Because in this state, Madison qualifies for extended support,” Mrs. Hernandez explains quickly. “She doesn’t have the financial resources to live on her own yet.”

What she means is that I’m broke. My parents had nothing when they died, and now even with two jobs, I still don't have enough to cover rent. What little money I do make pays for night classes I take at the community college.

Mr. Crane’s eyes land on me, and I almost wish they hadn’t. Heavy. Unyielding. Faintly menacing. “Back in the day,” he says, tone cutting, “children worked as soon as they could stand. Farmhands by seven, mill workers by ten, soldiers by fifteen.”

“Yeah, well,” I mutter, shoving my hands in my pockets. “Welcome to the twenty-first century. We’ve got Netflix and Uber Eats now.”

One dark brow arches. “So I’ve heard.”

Mrs. Hernandez gives him a pleading stare, and I’m grateful for it. That she’s never given up on me, even after all this time. “Mr. Crane,” she says, “Madison cannot return to that group home. If you walk away now, she goes to secure custody, and I think we both know what that means for her case.”

The room hums. My pulse trips.

Secure custody. An orange jumpsuit and lights that never turn all the way off. I swallow hard. Orange has never been my color.

He exhales slowly, deliberating.

Mrs. Hernandez adds a final plea, “Please, it’s safer for Madison to stay with you.”

“I assure you it is not,” he says, but when Mrs. Hernandez doesn’t back down, he sighs, “Fine. She can come home.” He pins me with a narrow-eyed stare. “Temporarily.”

His message is clear. I’m not wanted.

Not by him. Not by anyone.

***

His car is pure luxury. Real leather. Ventilated seats. The interior so hushed it's like the inside of a tomb. I push every button on my chair, leaning it back, cranking the heat, fiddling with the seat belt so it doesn’t strangle me.

Apparently my fidgeting pushes Mr. Crane’s buttons too. Five minutes into the drive, he jerks the car onto the shoulder with a sharp flick of the wheel.

“You need to get in the back seat,” he grits out, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose like he’s in physical pain.

My stomach drops. “What?” I don’t care if I piss people off, honestly, they usually deserve it, but this has to be a new record. “I’m sorry,” I mumble, staring down at my hands knotted in my lap. “I’ll stop messing with the seat.”

“It’s not that,” he says, eyes clamped shut, jaw tight. “I just…like my space. You’re too close up here.”

Oh. Okay. Weird.

“Sorry,” I repeat. I pop the door open and climb out, cars whipping past in a blur. Shame heats my cheeks, turns them scarlet. I keep my head down, hair falling forward to hide the color, and slide into the back seat like I deserve to be put there.

The breeze whips a candy wrapper across the road. It slaps against my window, sticks, then peels away as the sky goes a shade darker than it should at this hour. Clouds gather, clustering on the horizon, the beginning of a storm.

A few minutes later, we pull off the freeway.

My adoptive dad used to deliver pizza on weekends for extra cash, and sometimes I rode shotgun to keep him company.

I learned the city that way, tracing neighborhoods from crust to crust, so I know this area.

It’s fancy. Legit mansions rise around us, beautiful and imposing enough to make me forget, for a moment, the awkwardness in the car.

I press my face to the glass, watching ghosts and goblins drift along the sidewalks as twilight darkens the sky.

Their laughter rings out. Pillowcases swing from their hands, the sides bulging with candy.

For a second I hate them, for the full bellies they’ll have tonight.

For the parents that wait for them, smiling on the curb.

“Were you going to dress up?” Mr. Crane breaks the silence. “Before…uh…everything.”

I almost snicker at it. This perfect man stumbling over his words. “Oh, you mean before I stabbed that guy five times because he attacked me?”

A strangled sound tears from his throat. My lips curl.

God, he’s fun to rattle.

I carry on like I didn’t just say something unhinged.

“I turned nineteen this morning. Worst. Birthday. Ever.” I tip my nose in the air, fake haughty, like I’m above it all.

I almost add that if he has to keep me, it’ll only be for a little while.

Once the court decides I wasn't at fault, I’ll be gone.

Surely even he can stomach me that long.

“So yeah,” I add, “I’ve aged out of trick-or-treating.”

He snorts, and even without seeing his face, I can hear the eye roll in his tone. “Oh yeah. You’re ancient.”

“How old are you?” The question slips out sharper, hungrier than I meant. I can’t help it, being curious about him.

A pause stretches, elongates. “Much, much older.”

“That’s a lot of muches,” I observe.

“Indeed it is.”