Page 99 of Cruel Pleasures

She tugs at the hem of her blouse, blinking at me practically doe eyed. “Why would you care if I did?”

“You seem to be attempting to force some sort of confession out of me. You should know it’s a waste of your time.”

“I push people away too,” she says. Carefully, she eases over another jagged rock and finds a seat near mine. “That’s why it’s so important to me to find Lyra. I come from a large family. There were six of us. Five sisters. I was the middle child.”

Interest piqued, I lower myself to the rock I’d been perched on. Everything she’s said is information I’m well aware of, though hearing it straight from her lips provides better context. It adds a human element surveillance and reconnaissance does not.

“And what happened to these five sisters?”

She shrugs. “They’re everywhere. And nowhere. Some are still in Easton. Others are… I’m not sure.”

“You’d think you would have a sisterly bond.”

“Us? Please,” she snorts. “We were always so preoccupied with competing with each other for a morsel of my mom’s attention—that’s when she was stable enough to be a mother. Most of the time, she was having some perpetual midlife crisis. Job hopping. Bed hopping. Self-medicating in whatever way she could afford. Which was damn near nothing except cheap liquor and prescription pills off the street.”

“I’m guessing you are no longer in contact with her?”

“We talk once or twice a year. She lives in Northam. I don’t visit.”

“You’ve replaced your sisters with Lyra.”

She folds her arms, resting her elbows on the top of her knees. “You could say that. Lyra was always a loner around campus. I noticed her the first week of freshman year, just off by herself under a tree. Other people thought she had screws loose. But I didn’t really care once I found out we had a job together and we started talking.”

“Yet she left you.”

She scrubs a hand over her face as if suddenly pained. “If you knew something, anything… you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

The desperation etched into her voice almost provokes guilt from me.

Almost… until I remember the grim truths of what she’s asking for and I remind myself she can’t ever know.

It would destroy her.

Why do you care if it would? What difference does it make, really?

I stare ahead at the crashing waves. “What have I told you? It was a mistake coming here. Your best bet is to find a way off this isle. The Hostess is out for blood.”

“Which is why you were in my room last night,” she concludes. “You were protecting me.”

“It doesn’t matter either way.”

“Thank you.”

Before I can anticipate it, she swoops in and presses a kiss to the tip of my cheekbone. For the briefest second, her hand falls to my thigh as she leans closer and does it. Her slender fingers mere inches away from…

I tense up like I’m a moment away from turning into stone. If she notices, she gives no indication. She draws back, her disorienting scent all around me, and tells me she’ll leave me alone now.

“I just wanted to thank you,” she says. “I can handle myself. I can and have always stood on my own. But… you being there last night… it helped.”

And then she’s skipping back down the bed of rocks. She’s scurrying away like her warm lips weren’t just pressed against my cheek.

A gesture that might seem innocuous to some. But to a man who has had zero nonviolent human contact since Asami, it is its own awakening.

The primal, possessive urges that have already begun to uncoil are unleashed entirely. My chest expands not with more air but with more intense compulsions. These curses that will not be put back under lock and key easily.

…if ever.

I come home to the heavy shadows and the stench of copper in the air. My large rucksack drops from my shoulder and my hand goes to the arsenal of weapons attached to my belt. I edge deeper through the dark space with the keen sight of a nocturnal creature—I’m able to see all, make out everything.