Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Esme

It’s him.

Sagan.

He’s in my bedroom, and now he’s carrying me.

But how?

“There’s no way you’re actually here,” I murmur as he marches us toward my en suite bathroom.

“Like hell I’m not.”

Like hell.

He said much the same thing when we met.

Like hell you’re getting a neck tattoo.

I remember everything.

If noticing the Latin phrase on Sagan’s neck had made me shiver that day, the possessiveness in that statement shook me in my deepest core.

“But I need a sigil of protection,” I’d told him.

I knew the next thing out of his mouth would be, “What the hell is a sigil?”

But I didn’t know the first thing about him, and that’s not what he said. “What do you need protection for?”

“I live in my family’s creepy old mansion and weird shit goes down every year between Halloween and Christmas.”

Sagan had scoffed. “You don’t need a tattoo. You need a gun.”

“Does that work on ghosts?”

He eyed me like a puzzle in need of solving. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

After a lifetime of people pleasing, of putting on the smiling mask, entertaining guests, giving speeches at charity dinners, waving to the crowds from parade floats, and representing my family name to an endless array of people who wanted something from me—after all of that, the mask was shattered by this person.

“Trouble?” I asked, desperately trying to laugh him off. To put the pieces of my mask back into place, like a person helplessly holding their body together after a traumatic accident.

“Are you OK?” Serious as a heart attack, that man was.

Finally, I let the mask fall completely.

I’d swallowed my pride and simply said it. “No. I’m not.”