Page 89 of The Carnage We Keep

16

DAMIANO

It pings in the back of my head, like a check engine warning light I can’t ignore.

Three days ago, I locked Bella in a basement for six hours, and not once since has she tried to murder me.

I’ve been waiting for the retaliation: checking the shower before I step in. Looking under the bed for a stabby little goblin waiting to slash my Achilles tendons. Tuning my ears when I walk the campus at night, listening for the crunch of leaves behind me.

Nothing.

No Bella lurking in the shadows ready to cut my throat, no pipe bombs under my seat in the lecture hall, no poison in my food. Well, apparently, given that I’m still breathing.

But the fact that it’s been three days without a counteroffensive isn’t remotely comforting. Because it’s not that she hasn’t hit back. She just hasn't hit back yet.

Because let’s be real: there is a zero percent chance Bella has let this go.

I’ve replayed her reaction to being locked up a few dozen times since that night, and each time, I find myself more concerned by it. Bella wasn’t just pissed about being lied to, tricked, and kept from her kill.

It wasn't anger, it was different. And the more I think about it, the more I find myself coming dangerously close to the word “panicked”.

It was the sort of panic I understand all too well. The kind that comes from being forced to face something that poisons and immobilizes you. Something that pulls at the fibers of who you are until you’re unraveling on the floor.

Maybe I’m reading more into this than I need to. But I recognized the look I saw in her eyes when she was throwing herself against those bars.

It’s how I look when I’m forced to face my own demons.

Now, though, she appears to be fine. If you didn’t know her and didn't realize what a truly psychotic little demon pixie she is, Bella looks like your average smiling, joking, carefree college girl, if a little on the gothy side.

From the third-floor window of a study room in Ashford Hall, I watch as she and Galina sit gabbing and laughing away together on a bench.

Strange.

She looks nothing like the girl who was slamming herself against the bars the other night in sheer animalistic panic, like a fox preparing to gnaw its own leg off to get out of the trap.

Galina says something and the two of them erupt in laughter. I press my forehead to the window, watching as they lean in conspiratorially and then shift their gazes over to St. Aldric’s Chapel—specifically to the tall, dark-haired, brooding man in dark jeans and a henley working in the garden there.

Father Dominic Hale is a relatively new face here at Knightsblood as the new chaplain. He’s also the new favorite eye-candy for half the campus, as demonstrated by Galina and my wife eye-fucking him from across the quad.

And no, I won’t be looking too hard inside myself as to why that pisses me the fuck off so much.

She’s my wife in name alone.

I don’t even like her.

Fuck it, stare at Father Hale as much as you like. It’s not like the celibate motherfucker is going to stare back.

I say that to myself to calm the sudden gallop of my pulse, but it doesn't work.

Great.

As a recent arrival to Knightsblood, I obviously looked into Father Hale. But there’s nothing to look at.

No history. No discernible past. Nada. It’s like the ruggedly handsome, churchly motherfucker appeared out of thin air last year and showed up as the new chaplain of St. Aldric’s. I might be Catholic, but I’m not ready to believe this fucking guy and his ridiculous bone structure are an act of divine manifestation or creation ex nihilo.

Anyway. Dominic Hale is not my focus today.

I frown as my gaze shifts back to the way Bella's pushed her uniform skirt up her thighs to enjoy the unusually warm fall weather. The way her foot bounces as she crosses one knee-sock-clad leg over the other. She’s wearing a black hoodie over her uniform with the words “peace was never an option” and a drawing of a goose holding a switchblade.