Page 16 of Unholy Nights

"What iswrongwith me?" I mutter to myself, pressing my free hand against my lower abdomen where a dull ache has settled.

Everything feels amplified—it's like all my nerve endings are raw and exposed, hypersensitive to every sensation.

I stumble toward my bathroom, my reflection in the mirror stopping me the second I step through the door and flip on the light. I look... wrecked. My cheeks are flushed, my lips slightly swollen like I've been biting them in my sleep, and my hair is a tangled mess around my shoulders.

A knock at my bedroom door makes me jump, and my heart launches itself up into my throat.

"Miss Delacroix?" Kendra's voice filters through the wood. "Your mother expects you downstairs in thirty minutes."

Of course she does. Because God forbid I get to have a sick day.

"I'll be down soon," I call back, my voice raspier than usual, like I've been screaming or crying or something.

Maybe I really am sick.

I take stock of my symptoms. Despite my flushed cheeks, I don't feel feverish. No stuffy nose, cough, or stomach problems. I'm going through a mental checklist and nothing's adding up.

Not that it would matter if Iwassick. No doubt my mother has my entire day already planned out, sickness or not.

I turn on the shower, cranking up the heat until steam fills the bathroom. As I peel off my nightgown, I notice more brownish stains on my underwear. Definitely my period then. Though something doesn't feel quite right about that, but I don't know what else it could be.

The hot water helps ease some of the soreness in my muscles, but it can't wash away this strange sense that I'm missing something huge. This sense that the world tilted on its axis while I slept.

While I rinse my hair, my mind drifts to Cohen. It's been doing that a lot lately, my thoughts wandering to my stepfather at the most random moments. But this morning, thinking about him makes my body react in ways I don't understand. My skin flushes with heat that has nothing to do with the shower, and mystomach does this weird flip-flop thing that's becoming way too familiar when I think about him.

Or when he walks into a room.

Or speaks.

Or does anything, really.

Like exist.

Ugh.

I remember how he defended me yesterday at the boutique, the way his hand felt on my back, strong and steady. Warm.Tingly.How safe I felt with him there, even though I probably shouldn't. He's my mother's husband, for crying out loud. I shouldn't feel anything when I think about him.

But I do.

And that terrifies me more than this unexplained soreness, more than these half-remembered dreams, more than the idea of spending the rest of my life under my mother’s thumb.

Because the way my body responds to even the thought of him? That's not normal. That's not okay. That's not something I can explain away if anyone were to find out—say, my mother or any of her horrible friends.

Or worse, Cohen himself.

I press my forehead against the cool tile of the shower wall, trying to quiet the whirlwind of thoughts spinning around in my head. "Get it together, Emerald," I whisper to myself. "You're just tired. Or sick. Or hormonal. Or all of the above. Youwill notobsess over your stepfather."

I step out of the shower and wrap myself in a fluffy towel, ignoring the fact I'm lying to myself. Who am I kidding? Pretending I haven't spent at least eighty percent of the last three days thinking about Cohen is an exercise in futility. It's like trying to ignore a fly buzzing around my head.

It's so much easier to just deal with getting dressed and pretending there's not something seriously wrong with me.

Yep, I'm just a normal girl.

Nothing to see here.

When I step into my closet, something feels off. I glance around, expecting to see my outfit laid out like every other morning, perfectly arranged and ready to go. But today? Nothing. I blink at the empty space where my clothes usually hang, a weird knot forming in my stomach.

No waydid she forget. I've had a long-standing debate with myself about whether Kendra's a human or one of those AI chatbot things wearing human skin.

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