Lies That Sinners Tell (The Klutch Duet 1)

My heart stuttered with his words, the permanency behind them. He was never going to leave me. It was an oath. A sentence to a life of chaos. Of darkness. And there was nothing I wanted more.

THREE WEEKS LATER

“What do you think about meeting my friends?” I asked, unable to hide the trepidation from my voice. It had taken me all afternoon to work myself up to asking this. My body was a ball of nerves, my throat dry despite the dirty martini in front of me.

Jay looked up from his chopping board. He was cooking me dinner. I was sitting across the kitchen island, watching. I didn’t have a book in front of me. No phone. Just my drink and my man. If he was my man.

His gems were around my neck, my wrists. His grip was around my heart. There was something more between us now. He cooked me dinner. Every night I was here. He cooked for me. First, he’d mix me a drink, putting my favorite music on low. When he wanted me to read, he’d take the book from the bedside table and place it in front of me. When he wanted my attention, not always conversation, just attention, he wouldn’t put the book in front of me.

Sometimes I’d talk. Tell him about my day, even if he hadn’t asked about it. I’d talk about Karson and Wren, joke about what their children would look like, about how much danger they’d pose to the world.

Jay didn’t offer up many responses, but he didn’t tell me to stop talking either. Something told me he liked this. Being in the kitchen, cooking for me while I talked about normal things. Everyday things. I didn’t think he’d had that before. Not with the other women, the ones I did my very best not to think about.

I wanted to beat them. Those women. The ones who I shouldn’t consider myself in competition with. I wanted this to be different. I wanted Jay to be more than some shadow in my life, casting his presence over everything but touching nothing. I wanted my best friends to meet him, wanted him to become real to them. As if by meeting them he’d be anchored in my life in some kind of way.

Meeting girlfriends a pillar in a relationship. It was a recognition that these women were my soulmates in many ways.

“No.”

Jay’s voice rippled through my thoughts, ripping through my dreams.

“No?” I repeated in that same weak voice. I fucking hated that voice.

“I only have two days a week with you, Stella,” Jay said. “I do not intend to share them with anyone.”

Arguing with him was pointless, though I was itching to tell him that he shared me plenty when we were at one of the many events he’d taken me to. I had to share Jay with plenty of people.

But then again, he wasn’t really mine, was he?

I was his, and he called the shots.

So instead of arguing, I just nodded once, sipped my drink and tried to swallow my pain.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I don’t know what woke me up. They weren’t being particularly loud, and once I was asleep, I usually slept deep when I was at Jay’s, but something jerked me awake.

Jay’s arms weren’t around me. He wasn’t in bed. Maybe his absence had woke me up. Or just some kind of vague and terrible feeling that something was wrong.

That’s when I heard the voices. The bedroom door was closed, but light spilled in from underneath it. Jay always slept in total darkness. My hand scrambled for my phone on the nightstand. It illuminated, showing me the time. 3:00 a.m.

My stomach dropped. For as long as I could remember, whenever sleep abandoned me, whenever my vivid nightmares jerked me in to consciousness, it was three in the morning. No matter what.

Something about this time chilled me. There was something malevolent about it. Something wrong. I’d done the research, because there had to be an external reason for my body waking me up at that exact time for so many years, for the chills on my bones. For the fear I felt for no explicable reason.

There had to be a reason.

Luckily, the internet had plenty. It was supposedly the ‘Devil’s Hour’. When demons and black magic were the most powerful. Where sinners committed the darkest of deeds.

Nothing had happened to me at this time over the years, beyond what I saw in my own mind, in my imagination. But something was happening now. Not in my own mind. It wasn’t the devil, but it was some kind of sinner.

My feet were chilled when they touched the heated floor. I put my phone back on the nightstand before I grabbed the hand painted kimono Jay had given me the night before. The most beautiful, luxurious, hand painted kimono that I’d ever laid my eyes on. The one that I had seriously been considering buying for the past six months but had never been able to bring myself to buy because it was outrageously expensive, even for me.