Veiled (Ada Palomino 1)

“I couldn’t.” He pauses, taking in a deep breath through his nose, trying to steady himself. “Because my willpower is weak when it comes to you.”

“It seems pretty strong right now.”

“Please don’t tempt me, Ada. I can barely handle it as it is. I won’t be able to hold back and I’m not sure who would come out.”

I want to tempt him. I want him to let go. I want us both to discover the hot-blooded man inside, the one with animal instincts. I’m playing with fire and I don’t care if I get burned. I want the flames to lick every inch of me.

“I want to make you feel,” I whisper into his ear.

He shudders, unable to supress a groan that I feel all the way down to my toes.

“You already do make me feel,” he says thickly. “Too much. Too soon. And it’s changing me, for better or for worse. But I can’t afford to be anyone but Jay to you. I’m in charge of your life, your future. And I can’t protect you otherwise.”

He grabs my wrists and pries my arms from around his neck. “And most of all, you’ve had an entire bottle of wine,” he says, his tone becoming jovial, pushing the distance from intimate back to casual. “And even more than that, I’m a gentleman. I’m not taking advantage of you. You would hate me for it tomorrow and I would hate myself.”

I squint my eyes at him, the room seeming bright, my shame brighter. “You’ve got it wrong, Jay. I’m trying to take advantage of you.”

He sighs and grabs my elbow, leading me over to the bed, placing the bottle of water on the bedside table.

I sit down and immediately fall back into the covers. He lifts up my legs and brings them around before slipping off my flats.

“How about we forget everything that just happened,” he says lightly, tossing my shoes on the floor. “Chalk it up to too much wine and sun. Get some rest. Have a nap. We can always eat later, I’m sure they have twenty-four-hour room service here.”

But I’m not really listening to him.

I’m feeling.

Reeling.

My heart is being dragged out with the tide.

And then I’m under.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Ada, dear.”

I expect to wake up with a raging hangover and a thousand regrets.

Instead I wake up in a cold, dark room. A single bed in the corner. A toilet half-hidden behind a curtain. A small shelf full of tattered books.

There’s one window, up high, with bars on it.

I’m in prison.

I gasp, as if I haven’t been breathing, and the air doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like air; it feels like a vacuum.

I try and get something into my lungs but there is nothing.

“It’s okay,” a tired yet familiar voice says from behind me.

I spin around to see a person standing in the shadows by a thick steel door. There’s a door with a sliding window open to the hall outside, the only source of light in this coffin of a room.

Everything is grey, even the person as she steps forward into the beam, revealing herself.

If I couldn’t breathe before, I definitely can’t breathe now.

It’s my grandmother, Pippa. A person I never remembered from life, who I only met after she died.

She’s staring at me with kindness in her eyes, looking to be about eighty or so, dressed in a long flowing gown straight from a classic film. Her hair is done up in victory rolls.

“Grandma?” I ask breathlessly.

“You’ll find it’s easier to not think about it,” she says. “That there is no air. It doesn’t matter. You’re fine.”

I swallow the lump in my throat and gesture to the room. “Why am I here? Where am I?”

“You’re in the Thin Veil,” she says quietly. “Not to where you’ve been going with that . . . Jacob. Deeper still.”

My eyes widen. “It’s not safe.”

“It’s safe,” she says. “This place is a place I constructed from my memories. It’s a place full of such pain and sorrow and torment that it has more power than anywhere else. The mental hospital where I was put away, the place where I died. It’s where I can be and no one, nothing, can find me. You put up walls without knowing it. These are my walls.” She pauses. “No one knows you’re here, not even Jay.”

I recognize it as the truth. I feel it in my bones. But even still, I’m on edge. The brief thought that this might not be Pippa crosses my mind. It would be an easy trap for a demon to set and make sure I could never come out.

But as I see her words as truth, I also know this is her. No tricks.

“Why did you bring me here?”

I try to think back to where I was before I woke up, though, and I come up with nothing.