Page 49 of She Walks with Broken Things

11

NYSSA

A sound dragged my gaze away from the page. A shift. A thud. A knowing. I lifted my focus from the final lines describing the quiet of the moors and the strange peace left behind after ruin. Death. Love. Haunting. All of it settling into stillness.

Boots echoed beyond my door.

Slow.

Measured.

Alaric.

Then silence.

I lowered the book to the seat beside me. I glanced at the stack of books in front of me. I was starting to know him now. The real him. The forgotten him. What did he want? I rose, wincing at the ache as my weight settled and slowly made my way to my bedroom door.

The hallway was empty. The faint thud of his steps gone. Still, he lingered. I inhaled drawing in the faint scent of woodsmoke and control.

He’d been here.

Standing outside my door.

A blur of darkness drew my gaze.

I looked down. A book was on the carpet outside my door.

One glance upwards. My pulse thudded.

He placed it here… for me?

I bent a little too fast, grasping it from the floor and pulled it against my chest. The cover still warm from his hands. I gripped harder and stepped backwards, closing the door behind me.

Only then did I turn it over to read the title.

Phantom of the Opera.

Like the play?

I walked fast, returning to the seat under the window.

My pulse was racing as I opened the cover and found the inscription. It wasn’t the words that hit me first. It was the alignment of his scrawl. Not perfect like the other books. Sloping down. The words more elongated. The cross of the t’s a little too far to the right.

Still—

I read… then re-read the words.

This is where your attention belongs.

I swallowed hard, then gently flicked through the pages.

Paper whispered beneath my fingertips until something made me stop.

A woman stood in candlelight beneath the pages. Young. Beautiful. Unaware she was being watched. Not hunted. Watched.

A man hidden behind walls and shadows listened to her voice like it was the only thing keeping him alive. The words curled deeper the more I read. Not obsession born from cruelty. Loneliness. A terrible, aching loneliness that’d twisted into something possessive because it had nowhere else to go.

My chest tightened.