Page 61 of SIN Bone Deep

** Trigger warning – Violent rape **

The bath was a grand one set next to a floor-to-ceiling window so that as I lay within it, I had only to turn my head slightly to look out upon the city. The complementary bath salts were orange and clove scented. The aunts liked to make a similar scent at home and use it to cleanse surfaces after casting a spell. If we were feeling low, we would use orange salts in the bathwater as they soothed the spirits and healed the body. If someone came to us unlucky in love, out would come the oranges…

I needed the healing properties of oranges, that was for sure, I thought as I sipped the champagne and lazily used my big toe to stop the drip of water from the bath faucet, watching as the water oozed past the imperfect plug of flesh and ran down my calf connecting beads that clung to the skin.

So much had happened, and so quickly. I did not know how to begin to accept the changes that had been wrought overnight.

Ender was… gone. Lost to me. In invoking Mal to be my demon familiar, I had unwittingly entered into something that was far more complicated than I had imagined. A marriage, of some type. Maybe not a marriage, but certainly a commitment. I did not know what would happen if I broke it. I was furious with the Grimoires for not being clearer, and with the aunts for not warning me if they had known – and surely, they knew. They spoke frequently of their mother’s familiar. And fondly. As if he had been a father figure to them…

Mal believed that I had agreed to his terms and that he had agreed to mine all because I had been foolish enough to get into a conversation about it when I was drunk. I could not even remember what had been said between us.

But my romantic problems with Mal and Ender could wait.

Someone had tried to kill me, and I was certain that person was Warren Jackson. I had to find a way to stop him before he hurt my family. I set the champagne down and pulled the plug. Mal had said he would be a couple of hours. It would be tight, but I could get to Mortensby and return. I needed to tell Warren that I knew he’d knocked me off my bike, and that if he didn’t leave us alone, I would… What could I do? I did not know precisely.

Well, I’d work it out once I got there. If I could charm a jeweller out of a pair of diamond earrings, I could charm Warren into leaving my family alone, I decided as I pulled on my clothing. Mal’s keys were on the table by the door. I took them with me as I left.

“Hold the elevator!” I called out as I saw a man in a suit enter one down the hallway. His hand caught the doors, and I ran, sliding in between them, slightly out of breath. “Thank you.”

“Any time,” he smiled down at me. “You’re running late?”

In the gold-tinted glass, death’s heads dwelt in the deepest shadows. I looked away, refusing to acknowledge the omen. “Yeah, I guess,” I was distracted. I had been seeing death’s heads since the little girl had died. Were they an omen, or a sign that Ender was watching? What did it mean if he did?

I was not ready to let him go. As exciting and vivid as it was with Mal, and as angry as I was with Ender for not helping as I lay dying, my demon familiar was not wrong. Ender owned the shadows of my heart.

“You smell…” The man in the suit was standing too close. Closer than the elevator, small as it was, warranted and he leaned in, audibly inhaling near my ear. “Divine…” He rumbled the word on a hummed exhale of desire.

Shit. I wasn’t hungry, but thinking of Ender… I couldn’t help but ache for him.

The elevator pinged as it opened on the ground floor and I leaped out, my heels clacking across the marble foyer as I hurried to the exit and out onto the sidewalk. The valet smiled as he saw me, his expression hopeful.

I dangled the keys. “I need the car, please.” I saw his pupils dilate as he inhaled. Fuck.

“Now please,” I insisted, thrusting the keys at him, wanting to get him away from me quickly. “Quickly.”

He reluctantly took them and went to retrieve Mal’s Porsche.

“Hey,” the man in the suit had followed me out. “What a coincidence. Fate, I’d call it, that we’re both waiting for the valet to bring our cars out.”

I doubted that he had a car. “Mhm.”

“Here’s my card,” he offered a subtle off-white card with a watermark. “What’s your name, beautiful?”

“Nyx,” I glanced anxiously to where the valet had gone. Please hurry, I thought to him. The card was still there, held out expectantly. I didn’t want to take it, but I was also wary of openly rejecting it. Charity Vossen was evidence of what became of Vossen women who injured a man’s pride. I took the card. Owen Paul was written elegantly across it.

“Nyx. What an unusual name. Is it short for something?”

“Elenyx,” I held the card in one hand. I did not want to put it into my purse. If he saw me do so, he might take it as a sign of interest.

“And where are you off to, Elenyx?” His hand rested on my elbow. I moved it subtly away, breaking the contact, but the heat of his palm immediately returned.

“I have to run an errand before my boyfriend returns to the hotel,” I said, trying to discourage him by offering another man that I belonged to. It was also, sort of, the truth, though I didn’t want to think of the relationship with Mal being one of ownership. It wasn’t meant to be. In the Grimoires, the witch was supposed to control the relationship with the familiar.

“What sort of man leaves a woman like you to wander the streets?” Owen Paul didn’t believe me that there was a man.

“There you are Nyx,” Ender appeared from the shadows. He crossed to stand beside me and looked down at Owen Paul, his expression neutral but his eyes intense. “Who is your friend?”

I wanted to be mad at him. I wanted to hate him. He had watched me bleed out onto the ground and begged me to let myself die. Even more, he had not warned me that I was in danger, that my time was running out. Someone who loved you was meant to look after you, to save you.

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