Chapter 18
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
Samiel
Annie and I were brushing our teeth side by side, staring at each other in the mirror when something shifted in my chest. Annie caught my eye, foam at the corner of her mouth, and winked.
My toothbrush froze mid-stroke. I was totally and completely in love with her.
The realization hit with such force, I nearly choked on mint.
I'd never been in love, not even close. And now I was standing in my house—our house if she decided to stay—plotting ways to move mountains for her until the heat death of the universe.
I hadn't gotten up the courage to ask if she'd decided to stay at the end of ninety days.
I didn't want to pressure her. And though I was almost certain the answer would be yes, she'd been.
.. distracted for the last few days. I'd catch her looking out the window, lost in thought or petting Fluoxetine while gnawing on her lip aggressively.
She'd started leaving half-drunk cups of coffee around the house, something she never did before.
Twice I'd found her phone face-down on the porch, like she'd set it there deliberately to avoid checking it.
Yesterday, she'd jumped when the mailman came, then laughed it off too loudly.
Was something bothering her? Was she trying to decide if she was ready to say yes to forever?
In what I thought was an excellent display of personal growth, I finally decided to ask her if something was bothering her, rather than ruminate on worst case scenarios.
I rinsed, spat, then met Annie’s eyes in the mirror. “Breakfast?” I said, aiming for casual, but I could see she already knew something was coming.
She grinned, but it went weird at the edges. “You’re not making me eat another breakfast casserole, are you? Because I still haven’t recovered from the last one. My pancreas is staging a protest.”
I grinned back, forcing a brightness I didn’t feel. “We’ll go to the place in town. The one with the blueberry donuts you said were better than sex.” I said this with a straight face, which made her snort toothpaste foam out her nose and half the tension in my chest evaporated.
We dressed—she in a faded band shirt and my softest flannel, me in jeans and a T-shirt that somehow still smelled like her after the wash—and walked out to the car.
The GTO roared to life, satisfying as ever, and she did the thing she always did, cranking the radio to something loud and forgettable and rolling the window all the way down.
The wind blew her hair straight back, and she turned to me with cheeks pink from the cold, looking so alive it almost hurt.
I parked us in front of the bakery and walked Annie up the ramp so she wouldn’t slip on the dust-slick tile steps.
The place was full of morning—sugar and yeast and strong coffee in the air, and a clatter of voices from the counter and patio.
Annie headed for an outside table, dragging me by the hand like a kid desperate to stake out the playground.
Her hair whipped around her face, wild and perfect, and I wanted to eat her more than anything on the menu.
We sat, and the server—human girl, barely of age, eyes rimmed with glitter liner—brought menus and stared at me like I was the first demon she’d ever seen up close.
Annie ordered for both of us, two blueberry donuts, an iced coffee for her, an Americano for me.
She didn’t let go of my hand the whole time.
I waited until the plates were down, the server gone. “You’re acting weird,” I said, going for gentle but missing the mark and landing more on the side of interrogation.
Annie blinked, then snorted, “Wow, thanks, Sam. Most guys just tell me I look tired.”
“You don’t look tired,” I said. “You look like you’re waiting for the ground to open up and eat you.”
She smiled, but it was all teeth, no warmth.
“That’s because it’s Valley of the Damned.
The ground does that sometimes.” But she was winding herself up for something, I could tell.
She was spinning the spoon in her coffee so hard the handle vibrated, which wasn’t her usual nervous tic.
She was about to say something, maybe confess the thing that had been ghosting between us for days, when a shadow slanted across the table and a voice cut in—thin, nasal, and absolutely unwelcome—cut in.
A guy, human, wearing a rental car windbreaker and a haunted, sunburnt face.
As soon as I saw Annie’s body language—stiff, then a snap to angry—I knew who it must be.
I didn’t recognize him, but he looked like the kind of guy who’d collect Funko Pops and wear ironic socks to funerals.
He was carrying himself like the idea of confidence, without any of the substance.
“Annie.” He stopped right in front of the table.
Annie’s whole body jerked, like she’d been zapped. Then she went steel-cold, the way I’d seen her in the split second before she decided to run or punch. She set her coffee down, slow and deliberate, and folded her hands on the tabletop.
“What are you doing here, Seth? I told you we are through,” she said, voice so flat it could have been a warning label.
He looked like he’d practiced a speech but lost the script. “I couldn’t leave,” he said, then darted his gaze to me, lingering on my veins, arms, face, then back to Annie. “Not after seeing you in his house. This isn’t what you want.”
Now I was doubly shocked. Not only was Seth here—but he had been to my house.
And Annie had kept it from me. I could see Annie’s jaw flex, a twitch at her temple like she wanted to take a swing at him.
But I didn’t care about that—not right now.
What I cared about was the fact that this loser had been in my house. Our house.
I wanted to believe he was lying, that this was just human drama, not what it sounded like. But Annie’s face did a thing—a tiny, almost nothing spasm at the corner of her mouth—that told me he wasn’t.
“When were you at our house?” I said, as calmly as I could manage. My voice came out low and cold, nothing of the human-friendly rumble I practiced for customer service or the driveway block parties.
“Last week,” Seth said. “She didn’t tell you?”
My hands curled under the table, claws pressing into my palms. The world shrank to the space between Annie’s silence and my rage. The bakery noise went thin and tinny, voices fading until all I could hear was the echo of my own pulse, and the scratch of Annie’s thumbnail against her coffee cup.
“Annie?” I said, not trusting myself to make it a question.
She looked at me, and I saw her make a choice—fight or flight—but this time, she didn’t run.
“He showed up,” she said, not looking away. “He brought flowers and a speech. I didn’t let him in. He left.” She swallowed, and her voice dropped. “I didn’t tell you because I knew you would hunt him down and kill him.”
I watched Seth take me in. I wanted to rip his head off. I breathed through my nose, trying to rein myself in. I waited—long enough for the silence to go from tense, to brittle, to a vacuum that hurt your ears if you moved.
Seth broke first. I watched him really look at me for the first time, the way my shirt barely contained the mass of my shoulders, the black veins crawling up my forearms, the claws that could slice through skin.
I could see the moment he clocked the horns under my hair, the color of my skin, the eyes that didn’t quite work like a human’s.
He looked at me, then at Annie, then back at me.
I could see the math in his eyes—height, reach, bite force.
He blinked hard, then tried to compose himself, the way men do when they know the brawl is lost but want to salvage their pride.
“You don’t have to do this,” Seth said, voice low, as if he wanted to block me from hearing. “You don’t have to stay with… with him.” Not even the nerve to look at me when he said it. “I know you. This isn’t you. You’re afraid—”
Annie’s eyes went cold as she cut him off. “You have no idea what I want, Seth, and you never did.” Her voice was a deadly whisper. I’d never seen Annie so angry.
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “Not of him. I’m staying, Seth.
I’m in love with him. And before you ask?
He doesn’t need me to fix him, or pretend to be less, or apologize for breathing.
He actually likes it when I talk back. He treats the cat better than you treated me on your best day. ” She took a breath. “You can go.”
My mind was whirling chaos. Annie loved me. She loved me. We’d yet to say those words to each other. But now was hardly the time to tell her the feeling was mutual. Not with her ex-boyfriend standing there.
He stood there stunned, like he was waiting for a punchline. Then his jaw set. He looked at me, and for a second, I thought he might do the thing men do—try to assert dominance, square off, make a scene. But he did something perhaps even more foolish and grabbed Annie by the wrist.
He did it without thinking, or maybe without thinking enough. He reached for Annie in a way that was both desperate and familiar, a move you make when you think the person is still yours. His hand closed around her wrist, not hard, but insistent. I saw red.
The world contracted. I was out of my chair before the screech of wood on tile finished echoing.
My hand wrapped Seth's throat, not gently, not with any attempt at subtlety.
I felt the pulse against my palm, the dance of fear beneath the skin, every muscle in his body going slack as the oxygen started to drain.
I lifted him off the ground like he weighed nothing—because he did, to me.
The entire patio went silent. All the humans, the demons, the staff—everyone watched me, watched Annie, watched stupid Seth dangle like a sideshow prop in my grip. I could have crushed his trachea in a blink. I wanted to. I started to squeeze.
Not hard, not at first. Just enough for Seth to realize who held him, to let the certainty travel up his spine and register in the pupils blown wide with panic.
He scrabbled at my wrist, nails biting skin, but I barely felt it—my hand was three times his, and it was built to break, not to be broken.
I squeezed harder, the way you test a piece of fruit for ripeness, until his face went blotchy and the veins at his temples bulged and fluttered.
His feet left the ground. The sound he made was small and ugly, a child’s whimper squeezed through a grown man’s larynx.
“Samiel!” Annie’s voice split the air, sharp and unafraid. “Let him go.”
I didn’t. I watched Seth’s eyes roll, watched his hands flail for purchase, watched the way the bakery staff dialed 911 but didn’t dare come any closer than the window. The world had gone silent; even the cars on the street slowed to see who would win.
This was what I was built for. Not the house, or the sourdough, or the novelty of a girlfriend who made me laugh and fucked me raw and wore my shirts with nothing underneath.
This was the real me, the one made for violence, the one who’d spent eternity learning that the only way to be heard was to leave a mark that never faded.
“Sam.” Annie’s voice again, closer, and this time there was no fear, just a low, steady current of command. “Put him down. He’s not worth it.”
I looked at her. Really looked. She stood there, hair snapping in the wind, hands curled into fists, but she wasn’t afraid. Not of me, not of the scene I was making. She was angry, yes, but she was also pleading—for me, not for the sack of shit dangling in my hand.
“If you kill him,” she said, “he wins. Is that what you want?”
I hesitated just long enough for Seth to make a desperate, wet gasp. His lips were blue now, the whites of his eyes a bloodshot maze. I wanted to keep squeezing. I wanted to snap the little column of bones and watch the life drain out of the first and last man who ever made Annie feel small.
But I wanted her more. I wanted what we’d built, the house, the running track in the yard, the stupid cat and the even stupider hope that I could be something other than what the world had always told me.
So I loosened my grip. Just barely. Seth collapsed to his knees, coughing and retching, spittle running down his chin.
I watched him crawl, watched him clutch at his throat like he thought the damage wasn’t permanent.
He looked up at Annie, not at me, and I could see the fresh terror there, the knowledge of how close he’d come.
I wanted him to remember it every time he swallowed, every time he tried to speak in a room that wasn’t his.