Cracked Doll (Haunted Doll Duet #1)
Prologue
Rain doesn't fall in Whitby. It attacks.
I feel it before I hear my own breath tearing out of me, before I feel the cobblestones bruising through the thin soles of my boots. My dress — heavy, sodden, dragging like a hand around my ankles — I fist the skirt in one hand and run.
Behind me: footsteps. Unhurried. That's the worst part. He isn't running. He doesn't have to.
I've felt him for weeks now. A shape at the edge of my vision that vanishes when I turn. A weight on the back of my neck while I sweep the shop floor. I told myself I was imagining it, the way I imagine so many things that live behind glass. I was wrong.
The street gives way to trees, black and dripping, and I don't think, I just go — because the woods are dark, and dark means no windows, no puddles catching lamplight, no wet shop glass to throw me back at myself. Dark is the only safety I've ever known.
I don't hear him close the distance. I only feel it — a hand, closing around my wrist like something that's been waiting its whole life to do exactly that.
I go down. Or I would, if he didn't turn me first, spinning me into him so hard the breath leaves my body in one white shock.
I look at his collar. His throat. The line of rain sliding off his jaw. Anywhere but up.
"Look at me." His voice doesn't shout. It doesn't have to. It's low, and it's certain, the way the tide is certain.
I shake my head, once, hard. My hair is a black rope stuck to my cheek, my throat. "Please." The word comes out in pieces. "Please, don't — I can't—"
"You can." His hand finds my chin. Not cruel. Worse than cruel — gentle, like he has all the time in the world, like the rain isn't screaming down around us. He tips my face up, degree by degree, and I feel my whole body go taut as a wire. "Open your eyes, my little cracked doll. Look at me."
"I can't." I'm trembling so hard my teeth click. "You don't understand what you're asking—"
"I know exactly what I'm asking." His thumb drags once, slow, along my jaw. "That's why I'm asking it."
I keep my gaze fixed just past him, at the black tangle of branches over his shoulder, at anything that isn't his face. My heart is trying to climb out through my throat.
"Ophelia." My name, in his mouth, sounds like something being unwrapped. "I am not going to hurt you. But I need you to look at me. Now."
And God help me — I do.
I drag my eyes up, past his jaw, his mouth, and into his eyes — and for one suspended second I think I'm safe, because his eyes are just eyes, dark and unreadable and his —
And then I see it.
Small. Perfect. Impossible.
Me.
My own face, reflected in the wet black of his iris, staring back at me like it's been waiting there the whole time.
The scream that comes out of me doesn't feel like it starts in my throat. It starts somewhere lower, older, in the part of me that's been twelve years old and screaming for seven straight years. My knees buckle. My hands come up to claw at anything, at him, at air—
"Fuck—" The word cracks out of him low, almost startled, like he wasn't ready for how hard I'd break. His arm locks around my waist a half-second before my legs give out entirely.
And he kisses me.
It isn't soft. It isn't a question. His mouth crashes over mine like it's the only way he knows to keep me from shattering apart in his hands, one palm fisting in my soaked hair, the other locked hard at the small of my back, dragging me into him like he can press the scream back down my throat and swallow it himself.
For one heartbeat, I stop seeing anything at all. Not his eyes. Not my reflection. Not the woods, the rain, the years.
Just him. Just the terrible, devouring heat of him, undoing me faster than any mirror ever could.
When he finally pulls back, I'm gasping, shaking, my fingers fisted in the front of his ruined shirt like he's the only solid thing left in the world.
He looks down at me like I'm something he's already decided to keep.
"There she is," he murmurs, thumb sweeping rain — or tears, I can't tell anymore — from my cheek. "Now. Was that so hard?”