Page 52 of Terror at the Gates

The Leviathan family invites you to enjoy a dazzling night beneath the stars.

I rolled my eyes. There were no visible stars in Hiram, but knowing my mother, she’d find a way to have them, even if it meant turning off every streetlight in the city.

I plugged my phone in and threw my bag on the floor,freezing at the sight of the dagger on my bed. The rubies in the hilt gleamed beneath my dim lamplight like little eyes, their color matching the bloodstained blade.

I thought Zahariev had said he couldn’t find it.

What the fuck was it doing here?

I reached for it but hesitated. It radiated with the same energy that had drawn me the first time, only now I felt…afraid. Whatever power it contained, clearly, it was dangerous. It had killed four people. I was counting Burke and Koval among the dead. I didn’t believe they’d returned to Nineveh to assassinate me. At least not by choice.

This blade was capable of possession, and it liked to send me into the desert, a place I wasn’t keen to revisit.

“What am I supposed to do with you?” I muttered, as if it might tell me.

I considered calling Zahariev, but I was so fucking tired.

I retrieved a shirt from my floor and took the blade by the hilt.

Opening my nightstand, I dropped it into the drawer and slammed it shut. I’d deal with it tomorrow.

Today.

Whatever.

I needed some fucking sleep.

***

When I surfaced from slumber, my head was pulsing, like my brain had developed a heartbeat. I kept my eyes shut, squeezing them tight when the pain sharpened. Someone could take a knife to my eyeballs, and that would literally feel better than this.

I lay there for a while before gathering the courage to openmy eyes. My room was dark, not a hint of light filtering in from the window near my bed. I checked the time on my phone.

It was 4:00 p.m.

I had a few texts, one from Esther and Gabriel asking if I was okay and if I needed anything and one from Coco saying she was headed to work and that she left food in the microwave. My heart squeezed. I’d never had friends in Hiram, not real ones anyway. From a young age, my father had taught me the power of my name.

You will never need an introduction, but you will need discretion, he would say.

When I started to attend social engagements, my father would stand with me in the shadows and tell me whom to befriend among the elite—high-ranking church officials, philanthropists, and a few favorable members of the five families. Zahariev was not among them, yet he was the only one who held my attention.

At first, it was because he looked different from the rest of us. He seemed more mysterious, and I wanted to know his secrets. As I got older, it was because he was hot.

What can I say? I was young, and he was an older man. I watched others watch him too and knew I wasn’t the only one feeling the effects of his attractiveness.

One night at sixteen, after my father had set me free, I ignored his instruction to befriend the daughters of Viridian and kept an eye on Zahariev. That was how I knew he’d left the party and wandered to the cemetery behind my house.

“You following me, little one?” he asked as I stepped past a massive headstone.

I whirled to face him. He was lighting a cigarette, theflame igniting the contours of his face.

He’d made me feel things I never had before. They were all forbidden desires, not only because of his name but also his age.

“I thought maybe you were going somewhere a little more fun,” I said.

He expelled a stream of smoke and looked off into the darkness of the graveyard. “I just came to commune with the dead,” he said.

“Did you really?” I asked, instantly intrigued by the idea, probably because Archbishop Lisk had spent several sermons declaring the practice of channeling and anything associated with speaking to the dead to be blasphemous. This was after he’d executed several women for witchcraft.

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