Mark of Damon by Eva Chase Page 0,14

chest.

Since lolling around in bed didn’t feel appealing, I got up, dressed, and headed downstairs to see if filling my stomach would settle my nerves. Ky’s voice filtered faintly through the door of the bedroom next to mine—my twin was chatting with one of his online friends, I guessed. Probably someone on the other side of the world where this was a more sociable hour.

Gabriel must have gotten up even earlier than me. When I came down the stairs, he was just going back out the front door, a croissant in his hand. At the rasp of my feet, he glanced up with a brief smile and a tip of his head to me before he ducked outside.

He still lived in the apartment over the garage where he’d grown up back when his dad had overseen all the maintenance on the estate’s fleet of cars. It meant he had more space to himself, but also that he was slightly farther from Rose. I was okay with my side of that bargain.

The savory smell of fried bacon drifted from the dining room. My stomach gurgled, but it tightened at the same time. As I strode down the mansion’s narrow hallway, I picked up my pace in the hopes that I’d find some company while I ate—and that talking to other human beings would shake off the weird mood that had come over me.

I was halfway there when the walls collapsed in on me.

They weren’t actually the walls I’d been walking past. I registered that even as a startled gasp broke from my mouth and my arms jerked up defensively. The gold-patterned wallpaper blurred into bright pine boards; an unfinished frame was crashing down all around me, splintered wooden edges clattering violently together with a smack as one of them hit human flesh. A thud and a pained grunt filled my ears. I caught a glimpse of a figure slumping, a flash of scarlet blood. My heart nearly lurched up my throat. Dad!

Then the scene fell away. I was standing in the first-floor hallway again, one hand braced against the wall that was definitely still upright and unbroken. The breakfast smells seeped back into my awareness, chasing away the tang of raw sawdust.

No one had crumpled in front of me. There was no one around at all—except Rose, slipping out from the dining room now in her silky dressing gown.

She frowned when she saw me. I pushed myself off the wall, straightening my posture, but alarm still jangled all through my body. I doubted she needed any magic to pick up on my fading distress.

“Good morning,” she said cautiously. “At least, I hope it’s good.”

“Yeah.” I found I was a bit breathless. With a slow inhale and exhale, the clenching in my chest started to subside. “I just—it was nothing.”

Not nothing, really, but nothing that affected us right now. That scene had been real more than a year ago. An addition Dad and I had been working on had collapsed on him—he’d ended up in the emergency room. We couldn’t have proven it, but I knew how careful he was with his materials and measurements. It hadn’t been a mistake but a magical attack.

He was all healed up and back at work now, of course. I just hadn’t done much work with him since that day. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the knowledge that he’d been hurt because of me and my relationship with Rose always made me hesitate.

Rose was still studying me. “Are you sure? It seems like something’s—I don’t know—off in the atmosphere around here these days. If you’ve noticed anything specific we should be worried about…?”

I shook my head. It’d only been a random flashback, presumably brought on by my restlessness this morning. And by the claustrophobic vibe to this whole building. I glanced around us, feeling the closeness of the walls even more than usual.

“Have you ever thought about renovating this place to modernize it a little?” I asked abruptly. “We could knock down a few walls, open up the downstairs so the air and light travel better. Nicer to have a few big living-slash-sitting-slash-whatever rooms than however many cramped ones, right?”

Rose took in the space around us with an expression as if it’d never occurred to her that changing the layout of the house was even possible. She opened her mouth and paused, knitting her brow.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “It’s hard to imagine.”

“I could draw up some potential plans so we could talk