Page 1 of If I Stopped Haunting You

Prologue

PEN

FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

Pen wondered how drunk she must have been when she accepted this invitation, because it was a disaster in the making. Her sales had never been great, but she couldn’t simply revitalize them with a Book Con appearance and some plastered-on smiles, not whenhewas in the room with her.

She sweated through the polyester of her blazer as she fiddled with the warped corner of an annotated copy of her book. The edges had since yellowed, and the flags denoting her favorite passages poked out from between pages that were bent and ripped. She’d thought it would make a nice giveaway, but the audience didn’t even care that she was there.

All they cared about washim. She peered nervously down the table at the other participants in the Indigenous Fiction panel, at their smiling faces and stacks of books. Unlike her, the other woman on the panel wore beaded earrings that dangled and tangled in stray strands of her hair, and many of the men had long, thinning hair twisted back into slim braids. The only other author who stood out was Neil Storm.

While Storm’s dark curls barely reached his ears, Pen’s hair was long and thick, pulled into a messy bun at the back of her head. She wasn’t proudly representing her heritage with beads orbraids. She couldn’t even slip out a Cherokee tribal identification card to prove her Nativeness. Pen didn’t belong among them. But Storm? Storm belonged everywhere he went, and he knew it.

“Neil, this question is for you.”

He leaned forward on his elbows, smiling. “Of course.”

Pen had once fallen for that smile, for a grin that felt like it was just for her. But she knew better now.

“You’ve found your groove, so to speak,” the moderator continued. “You have mastered dark, Indigenous modern horror that features men looking for their place in a world taken from them. I’m sure you hear this often, but what inspired you to writeFor What Savages May Be? Where did this idea come from?”

“Oh, here and there. I’ve always wanted to reclaim the cowboy stereotype, you know. Trent is a man searching for something, and it’s not until he crosses the reservation line that he realizes what it is he’s searching for.”

“A whole lot of nothing,” Pen muttered, too low for the audience to hear.

“Penelope Skinner,” Neil drawled. “You’ve been awfully quiet today.”

Her head snapped up in surprise. He was everything she hated about publishing, manifested in one smirking, attractive man. Damn him, did he have to be attractive? Neil Storm’s gaze was steady, but his nostrils flared as he leaned toward his mic, dark curls falling into those emerald eyes.

“You haven’t exactly been quiet about your distaste for my writing, though. If I recall from a certainWriter’s Digestinterview, you think my writing is ‘pathetically palatable.’ You use that word a lot, ‘palatable.’”

Someone snickered in the audience, but she refused to look away from him.

She straightened in her seat, ignoring the curious glances from their fellow panel members. “I struggle to relate to your stories.They feel…” She hesitated. His eyes were a captivating green, and it was difficult to focus.

“It’s okay, you can say it.”

“You set up Trent to be a wayward Native in search of a home, experiencing the horrors off the reservation, but instead you wrote a—”

“Let me guess, palatable?” Neil interrupted.

“—tastelessbook that paints our people as the bad guys. You attempt to reclaim the word ‘savage,’ but only continue to promote its usage. We are not savages, we were never savages. That imagery is from a white lens. Why would you ever want to reclaim a word that has only done us harm?”

“Is that so?” he ground out.

Pen looked from his face to the table before him.For What Savages May Bewas propped up, a critically acclaimedNew York Timesbestselling dark horror about what the world expects of modern Indigenous populations. But his main character, Trent—a play on the traditional white cowboy—was cocky, sexist, and racist, all wrapped up in a bow and quiver full of arrows. Neil Storm had played into every stereotype possible in a book he claimed shattered them all. He was a joke, a phony, but to the white book world, he was palatable.

Pen, on the other hand, was simply too much. Had always been too much. Too much prose, too much Nativeness, too much whiteness.Too much.

Grinding her teeth, she said, “Yes. Trent is supposed to be the hero, but you literally titled itFor What Savages May Be. You don’t care if we are painted as the hero or the villain.”

“That’s a serious accusation,” the moderator warned.

“Great, because it’s true.”

“Why do you get to say that?” Neil demanded. “What entitles you to that opinion? We should be supporting one another, not tearing each other down.”

“Maybe if you cared more about your people than your wallet.”