Page 85 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

“You were just trying to protect me.”

“Poorly. You almost threw yourself off a cliff.”

I press her to my face then. I let her warmth flood through me.

“That wasn’t your fault, Phone. The only person to blame is the one who did all of this—his evil dad, probably. Somehow. Maybe. I just don’t know how he could have. What satisfaction he would even get out of any of this,” I say, but she’s clearly been considering this since she eavesdropped, because she jumps on it immediately. She even sounds kind of excited.

“Your suffering, Marley. Some people just can’t stand to see someone escape suffering. Doubly so if it defies them. I heard you say that he asked his son to kill you. And instead his son found the other half of his soul. It must have been a bitter pill to swallow and even more awful that Sten refused to let you go,” she says, her face abruptly becoming the angry emoji.

Though I don’t feel furious, too, once the idea is out there.

Instead I find myself thinking of the lengths this person must have gone to. How little they would be able to leave anything to chance. How carefully they must search for me—as carefully as I always thought Sten did, even though it’s clear now that it can’t have been that way.

Sten followed the trail of destruction without even knowing it.

He followed his fear for me. While this person—

“He must already be here. He must be disguised as someone in town,” I say.

But Phone frowns.

“Why would he need to be? You wouldn’t be able to remember him.”

“But Sten would if he saw him. Sten would know the second he did.”

“Oh, Sten clearly never notices anything but you. He only ever watches you. You are all he sees—well, that, and any immediate danger you are in. It wouldn’t take much to send threats and horrible things after you while staying on the sidelines. This shitbird wouldn’t need to be disguised.”

“So maybe he isn’t, then. Maybe he’s the same in plain sight. Sure that I won’t remember because something in his curse means I can’t. Possibly even uncertain who I am, until—” I stop dead there as it sinks in.

Halsten wasn’t the one who waited for the witch to emerge.

It was this man. This murderer. He was the one who needed me to be magical, to know where I was, to know where to find me and strike. I see it now so clearly—right down to it being the danger my witchy self was in that called Halsten to me, and not the need to kill. It was our enemy’s need to kill all along.

Though that’s not the only realization that comes then.

More come with it: the family I sent away so me being a witch with a killer on her heels wouldn’t harm them. The way I had to hide it, the way I’ve died so young, so many times, simply because this evil could not suffer a witch to live. And finally, finally, the thing my friend told me. Only a few days ago, just as offhand as I told her how weird it is to be hunted for what I am, when humans can’t even see my magic.

“Cassie,” I say.

And Phone jolts. She asks: “What about her?”

Then I just let it all out in a rush.

“She said that when she first started to grasp what she was, when she became a witch for real, he stopped her on the street. He grabbed her bike, he shouted at her. And she said—it was like he knew. But then he seemed to stop caring, he stopped being interested. She was a witch, of course, but the wrong one.” I gasp.

While Phone falls all over herself for the answer.

She practically yells, “Who, who?” So I tell her.

“Old man Hannigan. The head of the Committee for a Clean Town.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I try to resist immediately waking him up. It’s barely past noon, and he is clearly exhausted. When I go into the bedroom he’s sprawled on his back, arms and legs spread out like a starfish, completely nude. He looks near dead. I go over there just to check he isn’t—and I don’t love how much it strikes terror into my heart when I’m not immediately sure.

I swear, the sound that comes out when he suddenly wraps one massive arm around my middle. “Come back to bed,” he murmurs. Then as his sleepiness recedes: “Let me make love to you again. I have not yet had my fill.” And I have to say, it thrills through me like nothing I’ve ever known. It thickens my blood and quickens my heart, and I find myself lying on top of him before I can think.

But I manage to speak, in between loving the hand he has in my hair and that mouth on my throat. “I think we might know who did this to us,” I say as he reaches the sensitive place just below my ear. In fact I’m just starting to lean into it when he abruptly rolls me off him and rams himself to his feet.