“I’m the angel who’s been dragged down to hell, but it’s up to me to decide if I will burn in its flames or if I will reign. For no one willingly follows the devil to hell.”

SCARLETT

There is an evil that surrounds us. It suffocates even the most virtuous of people. The deadliest of sins that continuously tempts even the strongest of believers to stray from the path of goodness. Immoral vices, turning the righteous into fiends. Monsters lurking in the shadows of Hillcrest Hills. Demons infiltrating the halls of Servite Academy. Devils caging us behind steel gates.

They are all around me. Tempting me. Haunting me. Suffocating me.

He believed I was an angel.

Maybe at one point I was, but his world corrupted me and drew me to the darkness.

I saw him kill a man. I saw him stare the poor fool in the eye right as he pulled the trigger, and the bullet went straight through him. The worst thing about it all is that I’ll never say a word.

ACE

I know she saw me, watched as I pulled the gun out from the holster around my waist and pointed it directly at him while his head flew back from the intensity of the blow, and his lifeless body fell before my feet. I stood beside two heinous monsters, and in her eyes became one. She knew I was a sinner. It doesn’t matter that the bullet never came out of the barrel of my gun. That’s what she saw.

It was then, as the violent cries erupted from deep within her, from the innermost part of her heavenly soul, that I knew I had lost her.

An angel once fell from the highest peak of the heavens, only to burn in the harshest depths of hell’s inferno, but she will rise from within the flames we’ve cast her in.

She will be my salvation, even if I must turn against everything and everyone I’ve ever known.

My angel, my goddess. I will watch you rise, even if it’s me who burns.

Hers To Keep is a New Adult Enemies to Lovers Dark High School Bully Romance. It is Book Two in the Servite Academy Series. Book One His To Claim must be read before HTK. HTK does end in a cliffhanger and is continued in Book Three Believe In Us, available now.