Page 160 of Lured By Shadows

I loved that. The clinginess, the possessiveness. All the things that would’ve sent me running if it had been anyone else. With him, it reminded me that he was different because he was something more to me than just a passerby. He was my soulmate, and I was finding out that soulmates weren’t meant to be soft. They were meant to make you feel complete, and he definitely did that without a doubt. His scent still clung to my sheets, and his voice was a low hum in the quiet hours.

I just didn’t know yet if I was ready to carve myself into his world in that way.

By the time I decided to return to campus, I thought I was ready. Ready for the whispers, the stares, the questions I couldn’t yet answer. Ready to walk the line between who I’d been and who I was becoming.

I wasn’t ready for Sienna.

She hit me like a force of nature, arms wrapping around me so tightly I nearly stumbled backward, breath knocked clean from my lungs.

41

“Oh my God,” I gasped, the breath knocked straight out of my lungs as Sienna slammed into me hard enough to nearly send me stumbling backward. “Sienna, what’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer. She only clutched me tighter, her fingers digging desperately into the fabric of my jacket like I might disappear if she let go. Her whole body trembled against mine in sharp, uneven waves that made my chest ache instinctively in response. Behind her, Oliver hovered close with one hand pressed gently to her back, anchoring her while his own face looked frighteningly pale, stripped completely of its usual warmth and humor.

The playful boy I knew wasn’t standing in front of me anymore.

Someone quieter had taken his place.

My gaze moved uneasily between them as dread began tightening around my ribs.

“Seriously,” I said again, my voice thinner now, stretched taut with anxiety. “What happened?”

Sienna finally pulled back just enough for me to properly see her face, and the sight nearly made my stomach drop out beneath me. Her cheeks were soaked with tears, her nose raw and red, her eyes swollen and rimmed with misery. She tried to speak, tried to gather the words together, but they broke apart somewhere deep in her throat before they could fully form.

“Carter was murdered,” she whispered at last.

My body went completely still, my breath snagging painfully between my ribs like I’d forgotten how to use my lungs. For one suspended second, I genuinely wondered if I’d misunderstood her somehow, if my brain had twisted her words into something impossible because the truth felt too tangled.

“A lot of uni students were,” she rushed to add, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks as her voice cracked apart. “A whole lot. They were found... The photos…” She squeezed her eyes shut hard, like she could force the images back into darkness. “The photos were sick.”

Something heavy sank slowly inside me, like a stone disappearing beneath dark water. My pulse turned strange and uneven.

And then I turned.

I didn’t think about it. My body simply moved, sluggish and dreamlike, until my eyes landed on Culver standing a few feet away.

Still. Silent. Untouched by the grief suffocating everyone else around him.

His gaze was already fixed on mine. And he was smiling.

Not openly. Not enough for anyone else to notice. Just the faintest curve at the corner of his mouth, something subtle and sharp and deeply wrong. Something controlled enough to become terrifying.

And instantly, I knew. God, I knew.

The second I saw that expression, cold certainty settled deep into my bones. That look wasn’t horror.

It was satisfaction. No… worse than satisfaction. Possession.

Like he’d torn the world apart with his bare hands and laid the wreckage at my feet.

He’d done it.

My throat tightened painfully as I swallowed, the motion scraping like sandpaper. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel, and the uncertainty hollowed me out from the inside. Relief hovered somewhere at the edges. So did revulsion. Numbness sat trapped between them, cold and distant, like frost wrapped around a burn.

I should’ve been furious. I should’ve looked at him with horror twisting through me and demanded to know how he could do something so monstrous. I should’ve screamed or cried or shattered apart beneath the weight of it.

But I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even upset.