Kissed by Claw and Fang novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Cold Hands

I did not go back to lot C.

My hands were still tingling, and a ring of gold in my eyes was not something I could sleep next to.

So I drove to the library instead and used the staff door.

The reading room on the second floor stays open all night in November, because of exams.

At four in the morning it held a boy asleep on a physics textbook and nobody else.

I took the long table by the window and pushed up my sleeve.

I turned my palm over under the lamp, again and again.

Nothing.

"You look like you're trying to read yourself," a voice said.

I jumped so hard my chair squeaked.

Lucian Ashgrave stood on the other side of the table with a book under his arm.

I had not seen the door move.

"You're following me," I said.

"I'm a student," he said. "The library is open."

He sat down across from me and laid the book on the table.

It was a thin black volume with no title on the spine.

He did not open it.

"You healed," he said.

He said it the way a doctor says a lab result, not a question at all.

"I cut it on a phone," I said. "It was shallow."

"It was to the tendon," Lucian said. "I smelled it from the arch."

I put my hand in my lap.

"Okay, that's a weird thing to say."

"Yes. I'm told I'm not good at the opening of a conversation." He looked at the window, not at me.

"May I say something rude, Miss Pengelly?"

"You've been rude since the quad."

"Then I will continue," Lucian said. "You are bleeding in front of the wrong people."

"What people?"

"Hungry ones."

"That's the most cryptic thing anyone has said to me this week," I said, "and I live in a Honda."

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