Skye Warren

Prologue
Damon

The winter air seeps into the cracks of my bones, the seams of my skin. There are a million places where my body has broken and reformed. A million times that I remember with each gust of wind.

Despite the temperature I have my coat open, my hands on the rail. Showing weakness isn’t an option. My heart would stop beating, my lungs would stop breathing before I shivered even once. Any hint of weakness was stamped out of me a long time ago.

The man who approaches me looks left and right. God, he’s a sitting duck if anyone wanted to shoot him. The very picture of weakness. His cheeks are ruddy, eyes red. His puffy coat must provide decent warmth, but still he rubs his hands together in his cheap knit gloves.

He comes to stand beside me, looking out over the water. “Some weather,” he says.

A sitting duck, but he’s under my protection now.

On the other side of this river is a college teaming with bright-eyed kids. Brightly colored banners decorate the staid green lawn. This far away I can’t read them, but I can guess what they say. Welcome to Orientation. Join the math club. Sign up for this sorority.

“Some weather,” I say, because I’m as much of a sitting duck as he is.

At least when it comes to this girl.

“I saw the dorm room,” the man offers. “Kind of small, but I guess that’s the way of it. Got her moved in okay. She didn’t have much stuff.”

“You’ll send her extra money,” I say softly.

Knit gloves rub together. “Right. Of course. And I’ll be doing some work for you, then?”

broken.
“I think you did know, but you walked away.”
He looks furious. And despairing. “It was never simple between us.”
“So don’t you dare show up now and tell me who I can touch. If I want to let him press me up against the wall, if he gets down on his knees and puts his mouth on me until everyone on this floor knows what we’re doing, that’s my business. You had your chance.”
My body heats at the words, at the remembered pleasure of Sutton’s mouth on my sex. Christopher looks down at me, as if he can feel the heat emanating from between my legs. His expression turns stark, as if he’s in pain. That’s only fair, because I’m in pain too.
“You deserve better than that,” Christopher says, but there’s no way to pretend he’s talking about Sutton. He’s talking about himself and we both know it.
“He gives me what I want, which is something you might try next time you like a girl.”
“It wasn’t that,” he says, harsh again.
“No?” I step forward and place a hand on his chest, feeling the way his heart beats strong and fast. He may want to be unaffected by me, but he isn’t. I tilt my face up toward him. “You didn’t imagine me naked in the cabin later?”
He sucks in a breath. “You were too young then.”
My words come out as a whisper. “What about now? Will you do what Sutton said—imagine me in this dress when you go home after this?”
“It’s not fucking decent,” he says, even though the silk covers every part of me. It’s a perfectly respectable dress, when it’s not hitched up around my waist.
“You can thank Sutton for this,” I say, because it’s true. He’s the only reason I lean forward and place my lips against Christopher’s, touching them in some terrible attempt to show him what he gave up, to prove to myself that I don’t care about either of them.
Christopher sucks in a breath. For a second I think he’s going to pull away. He stiffens and grasps my hair with his fist. Easy enough for him to stop the kiss. Instead he dips my head back and deepens it, exploring my mouth with his teeth, his tongue. Opening me wider until I whimper. Pulling me close until I can feel how hard he is beneath his slacks.
His other hand fists in the gauze of my dress, and I realize he’s holding me

quitting?”
“Because you aren’t going to let us screw this up.”
My skin prickles with that sense of a role reversal again, that Christopher is always trying to save me. That Sutton thinks I can save them both, instead. “I’m serious, though. This place is like magic. You can’t turn it into a mall.”
“We aren’t a charity,” he reminds me, but his voice isn’t a reprimand. Instead it’s like we’re brainstorming, so I let him lead me deeper into the library. “This has to make money or we just took a two-million-dollar bath.”
“No one needs to be that clean,” I agree, secretly shocked that they had poured that much money into this place. No wonder Christopher’s so bent on starting construction. It would take a serious overhaul to turn this place into a shiny mall with luxury shops.
Sutton pauses to look at a row of plaques that has the names of old families. The brass is tarnished and green now. This is what’s become of their legacy.
I walk past him to a great hall that contains books in rows and rows. The dust is dense here, without even the broken stained-glass windows to let in fresh air. It tickles my nose until I sneeze, disturbing the layer of gray on a book beside me. I touch the old cloth spines as I pass, taking away a smudge of dirt with my forefinger, leaving a trail where I’ve been.
The rows are even enough to follow, but the signage less clear. There aren’t any signs above each row to say what’s inside. You’d have to ask one of the long-gone librarians to find anything. I keep walking, gradually coming to understand the system for things. Fiction and nonfiction. Memoirs and reference materials. There’s a large section on history, which is super meta considering this building has become a slice of the past.
My finger touches books that haven’t been read in years, their pages silent in this tomb of a library. Books about the medieval times and the ancient Vikings.
There’s a section about Greek and Roman history. There are a few books I skimmed through in Smith College’s library. Ancient history doesn’t change that much.
One catches my eye. The Goddess of Egypt, it says, with a stylized painting that could only be Cleopatra. At least they’ve drawn her without the asp wrapped around her arm, but she has the classic heavy eyeliner and seductive