Page 44 of Virgin Sacrifice

I didn’t know why I was explaining myself to him. Despite what he and his brother believed, I didn’t actually owe them anything.

“Please, just tell me what you want.” My voice was softer than usual as I took a different approach. I would rather die than beg Nixon Blackwell, but I didn’t have it in me to square off with him again tonight. Snacks, sweatpants, and scary movies were all I wanted.

I could feel him shift behind me, and I suppressed the urge to shiver as he grazed the side of my face with his hand, collecting the strands of my hair that had fallen loose and carefully pulling them back behind my ear. He repeated the process two more times until he had smoothed back all the hair on that side.

For all his condescending and vaguely threatening banter, Nixon was far less physical than his twin, or at least he had been. This close, I could smell his expensive cologne, although I couldn’t place it. It was intoxicatingly lush and masculine, with heavy notes of tobacco and cinnamon.

“No Halloween festivities for you, then?” he asked. He sounded sincere. Suspiciously so.

“No, like I said, my friend is sick. I’m staying in with her.”

“The Morgan girl?”

I should have expected that Nixon would know who Autumn was. While they didn’t run in the same circles, at least according to Autumn, the twins had been following me for long enough that it made sense they would have dug into my friends. Well, friend.

“Yes, the Morgan girl,” I replied, trying to restrain the sarcasm in my tone. “Can I go now?”

He didn’t release me.

Instead, he reached back with the hand that had been playing with my hair, and I felt him shuffling it around behind me.

“Found this on your door, puppy,” he said, then paused for a moment. “Alister said that it’s happened before.”

There was no question there, but it was clear from his tone that he was expecting some sort of explanation.

I looked down to confirm that it was what I so dearly hoped it wasn’t.

Another small, sparkly heart sticker sat on the tip of one of Nixon’s fingers. It had collected some lint from sitting in his pocket and was looking worse for wear, but there was no denying it was identical to the other ones I’d received.

“Want to tell me what that’s all about?” he finally asked, irritation creeping into his voice.

For a moment, I briefly considered trying to flee. It had been one thing to blurt out what was going on to Alister in a fit of rage. It was another thing to be forced to articulate my worries and vulnerabilities to his volatile doppelgänger.

“Don’t even think about it,” he hissed, reading my body language.

I gritted my teeth and took a deep breath as my frustrations started to rise to the surface.

He was right, though. Not only would I never make it into my room before being incapacitated by the much larger man standing directly at my back, but even if I did, what then? Was I going to spend all night locked up in my room to avoid Nixon when Autumn was sick next door?

I forced myself to turn around and, as a result, found myself staring directly into his chest, my body caged in between him and the door.

“What’s going on, puppy? Catch another admirer?”

I snorted. “Is that what they’re calling stalkers these days?”

I lifted my eyes to see a scowl on Nixon’s face, which made me feel a mild tingle of

satisfaction, but also, a little worried.

“You’re supposed to be a smart girl, Luz,” he growled.

“I a—‍”

“You know that we’re interested in who left you the heart, so why wouldn’t you tell us about this?”

“There was no way of knowing if the stickers were from the same person,” I argued passively.

He rolled his eyes. “Do you really think it’s a coincidence that someone left a bloody pig’s heart nailed to your door, and now you keep finding these stickers all around campus?”

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