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The voice is like cashmere and chocolate. Like a gentle kiss on the cheek, a warm bath on an icy night.
It’s a ray of sunshine through an open window, a cool breeze on a hot day. I want to die to its soundtrack. I want to hear it again.
Under the next streetlamp stands a girl. No—an angel. Not one of those biblically accurate ones they’d draw on the whiteboard to scare the shit out of us in Sunday school, but one from the movies. The human-shaped, heaven-sent kind with outstretched wings and a halo hovering over flowing blonde hair. She’s also wearing a fuzzy pink jacket and matching earmuffs, but fuck, who am I to question what angels wear these days?
This isn’t how death is supposed to go. I’m meant to die in the dark, not under her light, and the last thing I need is to be seen like this. Remembered like this.
Her laugh is warmer than the wind. It’d feel good in a different timeline; tonight, it feels bittersweet.
She’s heaven-sent, I’m hell-bound, and here we are, crossing paths in the middle.
But for once in my goddamn life, I don’t want to know. The moment’s too perfect, she’s too perfect. I ruin everything I fucking touch, and I don’t want to ruin her.
A short, sharp tug on a memory I didn’t know I had. Perhaps an alternate me has seen them in an alternate universe or in a dream that slipped from my mind the moment I woke up.
In real life, monsters don’t live in the dark; they live in the light. They hold your hair back when you’re puking.
They bake cakes, make signs, volunteer in hospitals. And sometimes, they even wear pink. I stick my tongue out toward the black horizon, turn on my heel, and run back inside.
This is true love, and Christ, how I crave it. Dangerously so.
There’s something strikingly inhuman about him, as though he’s clawed his way out from the underworld.
“If you stick your tongue out at me again, I’ll cut it out of your head.”
The Devil’s Coast is safe. Leave-your-car-unlocked, offer-a-ride-to-a-stranger kind of safe. Unlike Seattle or other big towns, there’s no crime, no gangs, no mysterious murderer with a sinister nickname on the loose.
Angelo Visconti was born to lead. He was born to look good in a suit too, which is why he got away with cosplaying as a law-abiding citizen for so long.
A tightly packed ball of emotion clogs my throat, swollen with joy and heavy with the worst part of me: hot, bitter jealousy.
Love hurts. And in this moment, I know with every fiber of my being, it’s worth the pain.
It suddenly dawns on me like a new day: he’s not a creepy local legend, the man’s a psychopath. He has to be.
I squint at the bar behind them to see if I recognize the redhead Rafe is talking to. Oh, it’s Penny Price. She used to live down the road from me. Click.
I’ve saved everything for it. Every first, from my first date to my first kiss, and beyond, for it. I can’t simply date—there’s no maybe-so’s, no settling, and definitely no friends with benefits.
He’s playing mind games with me. Dangling hope, only to snatch it away and give it back again. I’ve seen it played out before, in another lifetime, orchestrated by a different psychopath. I’ve seen grown men cower, then cry with relief. Rinse, repeat, repeat again until they’re dizzy and weak and desperate. There’re no rules and no chance of winning: the outcome is always the same.
wish more than anything that guilt didn’t riddle me like a disease. That I could slide into the warmth of a taxi without muscle memory twitching my hands, and the anger, betrayal, and injustice flooding my vision red. That I could leave the memory of what I did about it under the dust sheet in Uncle Finn’s workshop, like I did with the weapon, or bury it six feet under like I did with the consequences.
Darkness has never scared me, but the freedom it brings is terrifying. In the dark, I could be anyone. Even my real self. And if whatever I did didn’t happen... Christ.
Hearing her name aloud, through someone else’s mouth, stings.
“Yeah, well—” Rory huffs, reaching for a hammer. “You made her cry, so now I’m gonna make you cry.” She swings it into the wall with so much energy, yet so little strength, that the impact doesn’t even crack the bricks.
My sister-in-law is a psychopath. She’ll smile and swear she didn’t key your car, or serve you a coffee and not even flinch as she watches you drink her spit. She’s a flawless liar. Until she’s not.
My skin is fucking fizzing. The driving, the volunteering, the sudden niceness. There’s a linear story there, a secret, one more depraved than petty theft, and I’m so close to finding it out I can taste it on her strawberry lip gloss.
the age-old appeal of bad boys. Just being touched by a man like him has me breathless and out of sorts. It feels like I’m riding a motorbike in the rain with no helmet, the roar of the wind louder than the threat of danger.
Because Gabriel Visconti wants to keep this a secret. This. Us. Here, alone, under the stars.
“Why’d you teach me how to get out of a trunk?” “Because you piss me off,”
I’d fired the first shot because the thought of another man seeing what I was seeing made me feel violent. The second shot was at the light because I wasn’t worthy of seeing it myself.
It eliminated the ability to see the fear in her eyes and her seeing the Devil take over mine. You’re scaring me.
But that’s the problem. The Devil himself couldn’t claw Her from me.
Doesn’t fill me with the same heat either. He feels safe. He makes me feel nothing at all.
“There are two types of dangerous men in this world, Wren. The ones you run from, and the ones you run toward to escape the first kind.”
she wraps hers in black and one-night stands, and I bury mine under pink and good deeds.
Being good is tiring, and when it’s not in your nature, it’s goddamn exhausting.
Here I am, again. Alone in the dark, with the Boogeyman.
I’m all heat and hedonism instead of self-preservation and common sense. Maybe that’s why I tilt forward, just enough to feel my next breath clash with his own.
The dark doesn’t just hide all sins; it makes you forget what fear is supposed to feel like. Standing there, dripping in the color of blood, Gabriel Visconti embodies
That scar on his face is the only fault line in something otherwise indestructible.
Oh, my God. He’s here because I’m here. Guess I’ll see you there. It wasn’t an empty threat, it was a promise.
“Oh, my God. You really do have a crush on me.” His eyes narrow. “What?” “Gabriel Visconti,” I announce, loud enough for the entire restaurant to hear. “You have a crush on me.” He barks out a laugh laced with unease. “You’re out of your fucking mind.”
My date is dying, and I’m too ugly to care. Too distracted, too captivated by the monster beside him.
His attention is addicting. It burns through my veins, settles in cells of my DNA, and brings the world to rights. Gabriel Visconti has just poisoned a man for me. Me. A river of calm trickles through me. I wouldn’t cave for love or money.
He wants me. Gabriel Visconti wants me.
