Love Her Ruin (Her Monsters, Her Crown #5)

Chapter 1

Sera

The cold fire in my veins is screaming. The kind that makes you want to run in every direction at once, but you arrive at none.

Daddy already poured himself out of the house like a black tide to search for Eddie, who is…not dead.

He’s not. Daddy will find him before it’s too late and save him just like he saved James. I have to believe that.

An engine sounds from outside, loud, pushed to its limit, the roar of a car being driven by someone who does not give a single solitary fuck about the transmission. Tires shriek on asphalt, then headlights blaze through the living room's tarp-covered bay window.

It’s James's van.

I see it through the front door, still open after Daddy’s departure because all I can do is wait for him to come back.

His stereo speakers blast through his open windows. "Twisted" by MISSIO. The bass shakes through the foundation and into the soles of my feet.

James drives his van straight across my lawn, over the sidewalk, and parks it so close to the porch that the bumper kisses the bottom step. The headlights die, the engine cuts, and the night goes deadly quiet again.

He crashes out of the van and fills the doorframe. His eyes are wild, flickering blue-black-ember in rapid succession like a strobe. Shadows trail from his fists, coiling and snapping, his body vibrating with violence that has nowhere to land.

"Prayer." He crosses the distance in three strides, his hands on my face, my shoulders, my arms. "Ye all right? Are ye hurt?"

I shake my head even though I’m far from all right. My hands are shaking. I didn't notice until his steadied them in his firm grasp.

James reads my face, and whatever he sees there makes his jaw clench so hard the muscles cord along his neck.

He pulls me against his chest, one arm crushing me to him, the other still trailing shadows that whip and coil around us both.

His heart beats fast and furious, and I realize he's as terrified as I am for Eddie.

Then he looks up, and his face changes. His expression sharpens into something colder as his ember-flecked eyes sweep from the tarp-covered bay window to the tarp-covered kitchen window.

"These arenae windows," he says. "These are invitations for Vincent. Who the fuck knows what he’ll do next, Prayer. These tarps wouldnae stop a determined child, let alone a man with a gun and nothing left to lose."

I shiver in his arms as my gut churns. He's right. Vincent just murdered his wife and staged it to look like Red Hands did it. He just shot a cop in a public parking lot. The man has crossed every line there is to cross, and a man with no lines left is a man with no limits.

My worry has stalled my brain and turned me into a fucking idiot. Without Daddy here, without James, I only have myself and my shadows. Would that be enough to stop Vincent if he's already here, already inside, crouched in a dark corner of this broken house waiting for me to turn my back?

The thought hits like a bucket of ice water.

"James." My voice drops. "Do you think he’s already here?"

His eyes snap to mine. The embers flare.

James releases me, strides to the front door, and hauls it shut.

The hinges shriek. The frame is still cracked from Daddy's assault during my kidnapping, the wood splintered along the grain, and the door doesn't sit flush anymore.

There's a gap at the top wide enough to slide a hand through and another at the bottom where the threshold has warped.

After he locks it, we move together in shared paranoia. James pulls the shadows tighter around his fists until they solidify into something that looks like gauntlets made of frozen smoke. I draw my gun. The weight of it is a small, hard comfort in my palm.

As one, we check the entire house from top to bottom.

When we come back upstairs from the empty basement, I let out a breath I've been holding since the thought first entered my skull. The house is ours. For now.

“I have boards, nails, and hammers,” I say, gazing at the hardwood.

James thumbs my chin so I look up at him. “The house isn’t your fault, Prayer. Let’s make it safe for ye, aye? Wait here. I have shit in my van to help.”

He goes back outside, and when he returns, he's carrying a toolbox, a drill, and plywood. What else does he have in the back of that van that can help clean up messes of all kinds? The man is a walking contingency plan wrapped in muscle and bad intentions.

After we’ve gathered more supplies from the shed out back, we get to work.

I hold the sheets of wood in place while he drives screws through it on either side of each frame.

The drill screams with each screw, a high-pitched whine that sets my teeth on edge, but the plywood holds.

It's not pretty. It's not even particularly secure against someone with a crowbar and motivation.

But it's better than tarps and duct tape.

And it serves as a speed bump. Speed bumps buy seconds, and seconds are the currency of survival at the moment.

I sit on the kitchen floor with my back against the solid wall. James sits beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch, his shadow-wrapped hand resting on my thigh. My gun is in my lap. The knife is in my boot.

"He'll find him," James says.

Then why is it taking so long?

I listen for something I can't hear—the pulse of my bond with Daddy, stretched across the distance that separates us.

He's out there. He's searching. The vast, hungry dark that chose to come back to its cage because I was in it is now tearing through the night to find the man who protects me with his mind.

“How long did it take to heal you, James?” I ask quietly.

"I dinnae ken." James's voice is quiet, not the playful lilt or the dangerous purr I’m used to. “I think it took a while.”

"Eddie held me in the hospital," I say. "He took the nail polish off my hands."

James's jaw works, and his throat bobs.

"If Eddie dies," I say, and my voice is a thing I don't recognize, flat and cold and filled with shadows.

"I will burn this city to the ground. I will start with Vincent's house and end with his bones, and I will not stop, and I will not be stopped, and whatever is left of me when it's over will not be worth saving. "

James looks at me. The embers in his eyes glow steadily, twin coals in the dark.

"Aye," he says simply. "And I'll hand ye the match."

“This is the same feeling I had when I thought you were dead, James,” I whisper. “And when I watched the video of Red Hands torturing you over and over.”

He squeezes my thigh. “I ken.”

“I’m sorry.” Those words are so shallow for what I truly feel.

He brushes his fingers over my cheek. "Dinnae apologize. You've never done one thing wrong."

I huff out a humorless laugh. I’ve done plenty of things wrong.

James's shadows pulse in time with my heartbeat, or maybe mine pulses in time with his. We're connected now, both of us tethered to the same darkness, and in the silence of this boarded-up house, I can feel the thread that runs between us humming with shared fear.

"When I was wee," James says, "and Da was on a tear, I'd hide in the cupboard under the stairs.

There was a crack in the door, just wide enough to see through.

I'd watch his boots go past. Back and forth, back and forth.

And I'd think, if I just stay quiet enough, if I just stay still enough, maybe he'll forget I exist."

He pauses. The shadows around his hands darken.

"He never forgot. But the waiting was always worse than the beating. The beating had an end. The waiting didnae, but I’ll wait with ye for as long as it takes."

My chest aches. The cold fire inside me dims to something warmer, something that hurts in a different way. I press closer to him, and he loops his arm around my shoulders and holds me.

We sit in the dark and wait for Daddy to bring our Mind home.

James’s right though. Waiting is worse. Waiting is its own kind of violence.

It doesn't cut or bruise or break bone. It just sits on your chest and presses down, slow and patient, compressing your lungs until each second is a year and the silence between heartbeats stretches into a void wide enough to lose yourself in.

But we can’t do anything other than wait.