Page 67 of The Blood we Crave

I will be the first person the police will look at for this. I’m the obvious suspect, the angry son avenging his killer daddy. I swear, if that gets printed on a newspaper headline, I’ll blow my brains out.

A groan erupts in my throat, thinking about having to deal with a police interrogation, which is inevitably coming. I need to call the guys. It should be my priority.

Except I set my sights on the decrepit building weathered by years of neglect and storms. My feet stop just outside the perimeter, where long ago a gate once stood.

Suddenly, calling anyone else, dealing with anything beyond this forest, doesn’t seem so important.

They all can wait.

The chaos. The Halo. My father.

All of it stops existing for the next few hours.

For right now, it’s just her.

The skeleton of a building used to be the mausoleum for the Harrison family, the original founders of Hollow Heights. Neglected and sordid, it’s a creepy place of refuge, and I could never understand why this place speaks to her.

It’s enveloped by tall grass and trees. Its Roman-style structure puts you in the mind of a church, with the identical twin towers in the front, or what’s left of them. One collapsed a long time ago, leaving one lone tower with a broken cross atop.

I walk up the short entryway steps, pressing the already cracked door fully open. My oxford shoes click against the damaged floors, the squeak of the door rustling, the birds hiding inside.

A shriek of crows echoes in the space, and I look above to watch a murder of them scatter out of the fractured dome roof. Only a few remain perched inside, pecking at breadcrumbs that are scattered along the floor.

I scoff.

Of course she would leave food for the birds.

“He’s back, isn’t he?”

Her voice is a quiet disturbance in the air, empty of its usual emotion, detached from the surrounding situation.

She sits tucked away in the empty granite window nook, arms wrapped around her legs, which are tightly nestled against her chest. Her head is facing the damaged stained-glass window, staring through fractures to the woods outside.

The sun radiates through what is left of the glass, striking her face in a kaleidoscope of color. Deep reds highlight the curves of her jaw, the slope of her nose brushed with vibrant blues.

She is ethereal, almost ghostly in this light.

A sight too powerful to be truly real, a brief figment of the imagination that you know will fade once you blink. For a heavy moment, I’m held in place, unable to do much other than stare.

I’ve never been affected by anyone like this. It’s as if I’m genuinely seeing her for the first time in our lives and recognizing just how hauntingly lovely she is.

Curls the color of silky raven feathers spill from her hair tie, dropping from the top of her head, and for the first time, I want to touch someone, to slip the hair between my fingers and feel if it’s as smooth as it looks.

Every curve, arch, and dip of her body is highlighted in this hour, the tight sweater accenting the slope of her breast and the softness of her stomach. Hunger pools in my gut at the dark green skirt wrapped around her thighs, the black pantyhose stretched across her pale legs, and I want to see just how silky her skin is beneath them.

Maybe it’s because my bare hands have touched her already, have curled around her arms in an effort of comfort. I know what her naked flesh feels like beneath my palm, and I want more.

To skin my teeth inside. To watch it turn pink. To make it bleed.

“He’s back, and he is coming for me,” she mutters, tilting her head in my direction and staring at me with those big green eyes, which sit vacant.

They are usually bouncing with energy, withfeeling.

All I want to do is fill them back up. Pour all the emotions she normally overflows back into her body because she isn’t meant to look like this.

Empty and hollow.

Walls are built high in her mind, a defensive mechanism to hide from the things that scare her. She has probably had them her entire life. It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what got her through the foster system.