Unwanted Blood (Harper) novel Chapter 29

Chapter 29

My phone gave a soft, dull pulse against my thigh.

Ryder: “Are you watching the sunset?”

I looked toward the line of trees behind the grass, but the shadows were already too deep to see a car. “How do you know that, Ryder?”

“Ethan posted on his Moments. I just gave it a like.” A short pause followed, the cursor blinking for a long time before the next text arrived. “Did you like it?”

I looked at the water. The light was doing something extraordinary to the surface, gold breaking into orange breaking into pink at the edges. The kind of thing that didn’t look real.

“Yes,” I typed.

“Next time…” the text read. “Can I watch it with you?”

I read it twice, then stared at the screen until the white light began to hurt my eyes, the orange on the horizon slowly dipping below the dark rim of the sea.

Down on the rock, Ethan had reached over slowly and taken Lily’s hand. She hadn’t pulled away. They stayed like that while the sun finished sinking.

I clicked the keyboard twice.

I typed: “We’ll see.”

Ethan drove us home after the sunset. The blush hadn’t faded yet from Lily’s cheeks. She floated through the front door and didn’t even take off her shoes before she collapsed face-forward onto the small sofa, her hands tucked under her chin, a wide, empty smile fixed on her face.

“He held my hand,” she said, her voice muffled by the fabric of the cushion. She rolled onto her side, lifting her right arm into the light as if she were inspecting an old scar. “Right when the sun hit the lighthouse. He didn’t say anything. He just reached across the stone and closed his fingers over mine.”

“And then?”

“And then…” she whispered, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. “We just held hands until the sun sank

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Chapter 29

into the sea”

288 Vouchers

I sat down next to her and let her talk, listening to her run through every minor shift in the wind. every time his shoulder had bumped hers during the drive back. The room was warm and she kept stopping to smile at nothing and I listened to every word.

Then the screen of my phone lit. It wasn’t Ryder. It was an incoming attachment from an unknown number.

The knot in my stomach returned with a force that made my breath catch. I slid the lock open.

I tapped on it and there was a photo. Taken from the second floor of the mall, looking down at the atrium. Lily and I were on the ground floor, Ryder a few metres behind us, all three of us caught mid-conversation without knowing it. The angle was clean. Whoever took it had time to frame it properly.

One line below the image. “The three of you really look like a family. Have as much fun as you can.”

There was no name listed on the number. It was unknown. But, I didn’t need a name to know who it was. It was Marcus.

He hadn’t gone quiet because he’d stopped watching. He’d gone quiet because he’d found a different way to do it. While I was relaxing, while I was laughing in a fitting room and watching a sunset and letting myself feel almost normal, he had been right there. He watched my every move, waiting for the exact second my shoulders dropped to shove the fear down my throat.

My fingers began to vibrate against the glass casing, a cold sweat breaking out across my palms.

Lily noticed the sudden silence, her smile faltering as she sat up on the cushions. She reached over and pulled the phone out of my hand before I could turn it over.

She went still the moment she saw the screen. “Call Ryder,” she said, her voice shaking as she pointed at the screen. “Call him right now, Harper.”

“And say what?” I put the phone down on the cushion face-first. “He didn’t threaten anyone He didn’t come near us. There’s nothing to report.”

“Harper-”

“I’m fine,” I said, snatching the device back and slamming it face down on the laminate table. “I’m not going to give him the evening, Lily. And I’m not going to think about this tonight. I’m not doing it.”

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