Page 106 of Nanny and the Beast

We clean up the warehouse and step out into the morning light.

It’s a beautiful day. As we walk toward our car, it feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

“Jesus,” Alaric mutters under his breath.

“What?”

“You have a spring in your step,” he says. “You have no idea how concerning that is.”

“If you had let me kill him, I’d be skipping right now,” I say.

“Don’t you think I know that?” he says.

I smile at the ground. He’s joking, but there’s a truth behind his words.

Ever since the war, violence has become a part of me. It’s who I am now—someonewho can only breathe in the darkness.

“Brunch?” I ask.

His eyes light up. “I know just the place.”

We drive to a rooftop restaurant that serves brunch. We spent the whole night at the warehouse, so we’re famished.

“Did it work?” Alaric asks, reaching for the waffles.

“Did what work?”

“The distraction.”

“It helped.”

But who am I kidding? As soon as this is over, I will go back to obsessively thinking about her again.I will go back to watching her through the cameras and counting every breath she takes.

This is an affliction of the mind. A disease of the body. A haunting of my soul.

“Man, you have it so bad,” Alaric says, drowning his French toast in maple syrup. “Do you think she’s into you too?”

Visions of her assault me—the desire in her eyes when she looks at me, the way she arches into my touch without even realizing it, the way she seems to trust me implicitly.

“I think she is,” I reply, taking a sip of the freshly pressed orange juice.

“Then you know what you need to do.”

“I don’t have the faintest clue, actually.”

“You should get her out of your system.” When I continue staring at him, he adds, “Have sex with her.”

“I’ve already considered that a million times. And something tells me it won’t work like that. Not with Emma.”

“She’s not the only girl in the world, man,” he says.

It really feels like she is, though.

I put miles between us. I kept myself busy. I did everything I could to keep myself from thinking about her.

But she still plays in my mind as if on a loop.

I’m tormented, but also, I never felt more alive.

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