Page 112 of Touched By Darkness

“It’s simple.” Amenadiel watches my struggle, his eyes twinkling in the darkness. “I want you to belong to me.”

My eyes fly up, but the hand encircles my ankle before I can reply. It pulls so roughly that I fly off the bed.

I fall to the floor with a hard thud, my breath knocked from my lungs. I scream, clawing the floor as I’m dragged to the gaping mouth of the door.

I scream, but no one hears me.

I scream, but no one comes to my rescue.

I wake with a start, frantically brushing my hair away from my face before scanning the room. I’m alone, and it’s early morning.

I look away from the clock on the nightstand and move the quilt down to inspect my stinging ankle.

Several long scratches that ooze blood decorate my skin. A surprised gasp leaves me and my hand flies up to my mouth. I breathe in a few deep breaths to wrangle my panic. It doesn’t help. The fear mounts and mounts and builds in intensity, until I fly out of bed, too frantic to sit still and do nothing.

I pace the room with my hands buried in the long strands of my hair. I pull and tug, but despite my best efforts to make my scalp prickle, it does little to soothe me. I can’t survive another round of tormenting doors and nightmares.

I turn to leave my room, but my eyes land on the crumpled note on my nightstand. It wasn’t there last night, was it?

A sense of trepidation washes over me as I slowly make my way over. Something is wrong. Very fucking wrong.

I stop, staring down at the note.

Is that smeared drops of blood?

With a trembling hand, I reach out to pick it up, despite the voice in my head that tells me to leave it alone and make a run for it. My wings flutter with unease beside me as I read the scrawled handwriting.

You’re not safe anywhere.

Dropping the note to the floor, a fearful whimper dances on my lips. The stalker was in my bedroom, watching me sleep.

He could have killed me as I lay defenseless.

“Are you okay?”

I whirl around. Daemon leans against the doorway, staring at me with a furrow between his dark brows.

“I’m fine,” I blurt as his eyes glide to the note on the floor.

He pushes off the doorway, eats up the distance between us, then bends down to pick up the note. His eyes fly over the scrawled handwriting. He reads it over slowly again before looking up at me with a clenched jaw and murder burning in his gaze. “He was here? Watching you sleep.”

The first line is said as a question, and the second part is a statement accentuated by the vibrating anger in his voice.

I don’t know what to reply, so I stay silent, praying the trembling in my limbs settles down.

“Why is the air so tense in here?” Ronan half-jokes in the doorway as the others join us. Daemon hands him the note without taking his eyes off me.

Silence descends once again before Ronan breathes out, “Shit.”

“What?” Dariana steals the note.

“We need to tighten security,” Ronan tells Daemon with a pointed gaze.

“How the fuck did he get in?”

I sit down on the bed, tuning out their tense conversation. “I can’t do this anymore,” I whisper.

Their conversation falls silent. They turn to face me as I stand up. “I need to leave.”

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