Lights Out (Into Darkness, #1)

by Navessa Allen

On principle, I didn’t trust anyone who didn’t like cats, so they’d never be around to judge me anyway.

What would happen if I actually broke into her house? In reality, she’d either shoot my dumb ass or run away and call the cops, and then my entire life would blow up when I got arrested and the headlines started screaming that I was just like my dad.

What would it be like to break into her house? I knew I could do it. Along with hacking, I was pretty good at skulking around at night. I’d always been a night owl, which was especially true lately when there was less risk of anyone seeing me in the darkness than in daylight. I did my shopping at a twenty-four-hour grocery store. My workouts were saved for 2 a.m. when there wasn’t anyone in our apartment’s gym.

😭😭

An unholy yowl split the air. Fuck! Aly had some sort of demonically possessed canine after all, and it would probably rip through my pant leg and splash my blood all over the goddamn house for the cops to find.

LOLL

A cat. Aly had a cat. We eyed each other in the darkness. It was pretty runty despite the long black and white hair. If push came to shove, I could take it. “Don’t fuck with me,” I warned.

Without warning, the cat deflated and sauntered forward. Oh, fuck. What was it doing? I stepped back and flattened myself against the door, weirdly mesmerized by how its eyes glowed in the darkness. This small fluffy creature would be so easy to kill, yet I had no desire to harm it. That had to be a good sign, right? Or was this such a new experience that whatever horrible response I might normally have was muted? “No scratching,” I told the cat. There was still a chance that some monstrous craving for blood was stirring beneath the surface, undetected, and if it attacked me, those murderous instincts might roar to the forefront of my psyche and do something terrible. I’d been taught not to trust myself, and this seemed like the perfect setup for learning just how alike Dad and I really were, once and for all.

i am living for josh’s inner dialect 😭😭

“Sorry if I fuck this up,” I said, lifting a hand to scratch the cat between the ears and then stroke down its back like I’d seen other people do on TV. This was the first time I’d ever pet an animal, and my fingers shook. Thankfully, it was from unspent adrenaline and not the rising desire to strangle Aly’s furbaby. Crisis averted. For now, at least.

and spend the rest of the night doing things with him that would make the Devil blush.

what I planned to do when I caught her would make even the Devil weep.

Aly was fucked up too. Hallelujah.