Page 23 of The Blood we Crave

It’s cruel of me to let her keep doing this, to allow her to continue this sick obsession with me. What has it been—ten, eleven years since she’s been my little shadow? Always prowling around in the dark, believing she is so unrecognizable that I don’t know she’s there.

I’ll give her credit—there were a few times it took me a while to notice she was around. And she knew that.

She’s odd, but she isn’t stupid. She knows when I’m aware of her presence when her wide eyes land on my body. When I’m walking to my car, sitting in class, or eating, she’s always around somewhere. Watching. Stalking. Admiring.

However, I’ve never expressed my awareness. Never told her she isn’t nearly as sneaky as she thinks, not until recently. I’d once told her she needed to be a ghost, to disappear. I didn’t want to see her, feel her, or even hear her breath.

I don’t need a reminder of my one and only failure in life. The only person I hadn’t been able to kill. The incomplete piece of music is in my files. Blank sheets of paper sit inside her file, but the older we get, the more she involves herself in my life, the closer I come to finishing what I had started all those nights ago.

“I can’t tell if you’re getting worse at this or if you’ve always been this blatantly obvious and I’ve just been too bored to notice.”

Her footfalls stutter like she’s tripped over the sound of my voice, and it makes me smirk. So reactive to me, that darling phantom of mine.

“I—” Her voice is caught by the wind, fading away.

“You?”

I turn around, finding her a few feet behind me, her unruly hair blowing across her face. She stands there silently, chewing the inside of her cheek as if she’ll find the answer to my question there.

The pair of dark blue-and-green plaid pants matched with a black halter top makes me cringe. I’m fine with a bla-vey moment, but make it work, for Christ’s sake.

There isn’t a single thing about her that makes sense to me. Well, one thing. The only thing we seem to have in common.

My father.

But other than our childhood, which is tangled together in a web of blood, she makes no sense whatsoever.

There are unsolvable physics equations that have more rationality than her. This dark academic clothing style she insists on, paired with a weird hobby of bug catching. There are people who would call themselves an enigma, but they would not hold a candle to Lyra Abbott.

Scarlett.

Scarlett was the girl before my father, and Lyra is what was left after he’d ripped her life to shreds.

“Do I make you so nervous you can’t even speak?” I tilt my head. This is the behavior I’d come to expect from her, mousey and refusing to say more than a few quiet sentences towards me.

“Maybe if you didn’t enjoy hearing yourself talk so much and gave me a moment, I’d actually be able to reply.”

I don’t miss the bite in her voice. For a moment, there is a flash of that girl who’d sliced a man’s throat in front of me. Brash and fearless. Lyra had killed a man for me. Tosaveme.

But I think that’s a cover-up. One big excuse. She’d been waiting for a moment like that one. For an opportunity to release that creature that lives within her soul, a monster my father had created.

Lyra wanted to kill. Thirsted for it.

I just happen to be in the perfect position to give her a reason to act on it.

“Ah, there she is,” I hum in approval, a grin on my lips. “The girl you love to hide from everyone. I knew I didn’t imagine her.”

She swallows roughly, making her throat constrict. “I don’t hide anything from my friends.”

Sliding my hands into my pockets, I stretch my legs out, closing the short distance between the two of us, and the wind sends the smell of cherries straight to my nose.

It makes me nauseous. So sweet and sticky. A mess.

“Yeah? So you’ve told Briar and Sage about what you asked me? What youbegged”—I breathe the word as I drop my head towards her face— “me to do?”

Wide, pure green eyes stare up at me, too big for her face and so distracting that I almost miss the way they flick to my lips. My jaw tenses, and my stomach tightens. If she tried to kiss me right now, I’d make her mouth bleed.

“I did not beg you,” she whispers. “You’re the one that came to me at the mausoleum. You sought me out, not the other way around, Thatcher.”