Page 292 of Fatality

Riven

Reflections - The Neighbourhood

The only people who had seen our faces were dead, and the guards chasing us had only caught a glimpse of a man carrying a woman over his shoulder before jumping out of a window.

Once we hit the ground, Evren drove off without even bothering to put me in the passenger seat, he kept me on his lap.

I was still in shock from the jump, and then he drove like a complete maniac, only making it worse.

He just kept laughing, telling me how fucking fabulous it had been to jump from the window and make the platform descend.

I slapped, punched and bit him for scaring me to death with the jump.

He just bit me back.

There are some advantages to being a Laordie even if I hate using it so Ren helped me use my father's access to delete every second of footage from the corridor.

The media is calling it a slaughter, but without any faces to identify, the investigation is at a standstill.

The bruise on my temple from the elite guard has faded from deep purple to sickly green.

But that's not what bothers me.

What bothers me is that I keep dreaming about my heel sticking out of that man's eye.

Like I needed that on top of the nightmares Kyle’s death already left me with.

For a week, Evren kept breaking into my loft in the middle of the night, covered in blood or pacing like a caged animal before eventually coming to lie down beside me, saying absolutely nothing like the damn creep he is, only to disappear again at dawn.

I know because every single morning, he'd leave behind a note with comments about my sleep—how I snored, how I screamed, how my breath stank, how much I drooled all over him... shit like that.

But he hasn't touched me since the ball. I don't know why and I'd rather keep it that way.

I've been a complete wreck since then, the blood, the stabbing, my parents daring to arrange a marriage for me.

The kiss.

That kiss just turned everything upside down, in my head, in my chest.

This morning, I woke up to find a box sitting on my kitchen counter with a note.

Next time you stab someone, do it with a proper weapon. See you, troublemaker.

I can't just get normal gifts, of course not. It has to remind me of what I did to save his ass.

I open the box and freeze. I thought I'd find anything but an actual dagger.

I reach inside and trace a finger along its razor-sharp edge.

It's beautiful.

I lift it from the box and turn it over in my hand, the light glides beneath its transparent crystalline surface.

It feels impossibly light and impossibly strong.

I glance back into the box and notice a small device with a single button.

Press me.