Chapter 8 Sam #3
I’d taken the first step by visiting Naomi.
Hell, that was riskier than I’d intended.
And now maybe Kyle would be willing to help me?
It was definitely phrased as a question in my mind, but I was running out of options.
Maybe he’d already shown he might have a small soft spot for me.
No one had made him stop Eddie, after all?
No one had tortured him into spending a whole evening with me.
Yeah… it all fit so everyone thought he was really my boyfriend, but the kiss just now?
Surely, there’d been no one around to see…
I grimaced. I was clutching at straws.
But men didn’t just run around playing superheroes for women, right?
Not without something more being at play.
And it had felt bigger than just the act of warning Eddie off, bigger than playing to Esmé’s demands, like somehow something mattered.
At times, Kyle looked at me. Just a glance. And something else was there.
Enough to make me think I might be able to convince him to help me out, even though he owed me nothing.
I shrugged at my own thoughts. At this stage, it was worth a shot.
By the time I arrived home, I was pretty much resolved to needing Kyle as part of my escape plan.
I just wasn’t sure how I was going to get him.
I sat in the car for a few minutes, gathering the courage to go inside.
Something had changed recently, and I didn’t feel as resolved to my fate at Esmé’s hands.
I didn’t want this stinky hovel of a place to be my last memory.
For tonight, I didn’t have any choice about going inside though. Esmé would only track me down and drag me back here. I was her pet. That was her right. I sighed and grabbed my purse, throwing it over my shoulder as I left the car and slammed the door closed.
When I entered the house, Esmé was waiting for me as expected. Except she was drunk again, and humans littered the couch alongside her and the floor at her feet.
“Shit, Esmé.” I said the first words through my mind.
But she just cackled her amusement as I rushed forward to check if the people were still alive and breathing.
The last thing we needed was a clean-up request. Brock wouldn’t like that at all, and it would place both of us under a lot of scrutiny — scrutiny I didn’t need.
Scrutiny I assumed Esmé didn’t need if she was colluding with the Duponts, or at least their sympathizers.
I pressed my fingers to the wrists of each unconscious person in the room, leaning my ears over their noses as I felt for a pulse and listened for breath sounds.
My final exhale was a sigh of relief as I dragged my cell from my back pocket and scrolled to the number for a couple of Brock’s goons — the ones who usually followed me.
It didn’t take long for them to arrive, and they laughed as they saw the people Esmé had fed from, but it wasn’t fucking funny.
Every time she did this without creating the soldiers Brock seemed to hunger for, she left us wide open to discovery.
I couldn’t even be sure how good Brock’s men were at the compulsion to make people forget. They were all I had right now, though.
Hot damn, what a fucking mess. I looked at Esmé, contempt and disgust for her uppermost in my thoughts. When had my feelings become like this?
She’d been my best friend but now all she seemed to do was steal from me — the rest of my life, experiences, even the ability to think or feel.
She sprawled out on the couch now that she had more room without her discarded snacks, and her delirious noises increased as she yelled instructions to humans who were no longer there.
It seemed like this had been a growing problem since I’d saved her life — she’d taken to binging often, feeding on the inebriated, chasing her only way to get drunk — like she was attempting an escape from reality.
The one time I’d tried to speak to her about it, she’d swooped in and bitten me, feeding with a viciousness I never wanted her to repeat.
My consent was always grudging these days, but that occasion, it had been absent completely.
I touched my neck and the skin throbbed in response like I could still feel the violence of that attack.
I hadn’t tried to speak to her again. It wasn’t worth risking my precarious safety for.
“Come to the couch.” Esmé lazily patted the cushion beside her as she issued the sleepy-voiced command. “I need this night to be over.”
“Why not wait until you’re sober, Es?” I sighed and watched her, but even that small question was too much to say.
Her attitude changed in an instant, her glazed eyes clearing as she narrowed her focus on me. The pale, ethereal blue bled to the deep red of her fury, and I froze as she flashed to stand next to me.
The atmosphere in the room changed, and helplessness bloomed inside me. This might finally be the night, the one where she drained me and ended this cycle of destruction we were both caught in.