A Secret In The Garden – Jeneane ORiley

“An enemy is defined as a person who is actively opposed or hostile to another. Would you listen to an enemy if they told you what to do?” he questioned. “No, but—” I wanted to leave the room. The manor. The world. My skin felt hot and tight. He had somehow managed to reach in and take the troublesome, uncomfortable thoughts that were too hard to address out of my head and turned them into a passive conversation. He glanced up and locked his deep mahogany orbs with mine.

If he could read secrets from my eyes before, he’d just gotten a whole library full in one look. “Sometimes our saviors are simply enemies cloaked in white robes,” he stated, leaning back from the desk. “You cannot depend on anyone but yourself in this world. You must carve your own path or else someone will cut into your flesh, slicing through every part of your soul and leaving nothing behind. You need to have boundaries, or else everyone, including the saintly clad enemies, get in.”

His words struck so sharp against the tender parts of me that I wanted to cry. And yell. And hit something. Lash out. So I did. “I would much rather have no boundaries and allow others in than to have fortress walls so high no one can ever get inside, so I’m all alone like you,” I snapped.

He seemed completely unbothered as he looked at me, the most passive expression on his lightly stubbled face, but a soft flare in his intelligent eyes suggested he wasn’t as calm as he projected. A tingle of fear tickled at the base of my neck. What would he do when I angered him? Would he hurt me?

I inhaled and the scent of masculine power and leather filled my head, tightening my stomach. “Socrates says sometimes people put up walls, not to keep others out but to see who cares enough to break them down. What’s in your necklace?” he asked, leaning into my space to get a better look. My smart retort fell into the ether when I noticed he was so suddenly in my personal space.

I could make out every one of the faint vertical lines decorating his soft pink lips when he was this close, the tan skin of his face including the taut indent where his skin had been torn open and forcibly reshaped in a jagged, angular way. The scar was bold and asymmetrical, like an unfinished sketch or the markings of a road map, cutting through the smoothness of skin. On anyone else, the scar would have been everyone’s first impression, but on Jasper, it was hidden in the shadows of his dark confidence.

It only added to his face, balancing his almost too strikingly beautiful looks with a hint of male barbarism and danger. My hand twitched to reach out and touch that scar.

How Does It Feel? What Did You Do? Where Did You Go? Can You Take It? Copyright © 2026 by Jeneane O’Riley Cover and internal design © 2026 by Sourcebooks Cover design by Antoaneta Lisak/Sourcebooks Cover images © fotograzia/Getty Images, Artemisia1508/Getty Images, Volodymyr TVERDOKHLIB/Shutterstock, Abigail210986/Getty Images, Tarzhanova/Getty Images, naropano/Getty Images, Jackyenjoyphotography/Getty Images, GarryKillian/Getty Images Internal design by Diane Cunningham/Sourcebooks Internal image © pichet khunchiang/Getty Images Sourcebooks, Bloom Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book. Published by Bloom Books, an imprint of Sourcebooks 1935 Brookdale RD, Naperville, IL 60563-2773 (630) 961-3900 sourcebooks.com Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the Library of Congress. Printed and bound in the United States of America. WOZ 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For those who have carried a pain no one can see, who have buried wounds in the depths of your shadows—this story is for you.

Playlist “Michelle”—Bear McCreary “Some Dreams You Never Wake Up From”—Valerie Broussard “Fragile Thing” (acoustic version)—Winona Oak “Dancing with Your Ghost”—Sasha Alex Sloan “Punish”—Ethel Cain “his land”—Paris Paloma “A Dangerous Thing”—AURORA “Devil I Know”—Allie X “Für Elise”—Faouzia “God Needs the Devil”—Jonah Kagen “Broken”—Jonah Kagen “trouble”—Camylio “over me”—Camylio “Another Love”—Tom Odell “I Found”—Amber Run Trigger Warning This story, at its core, is about healing and contains themes that may be difficult for some readers, such as guns, bones, dead bodies, loss of a loved one, ghosts, blood, mental health issues, abandonment, grief, narcissistic behavior, abuse from a parent, spiders, suicidal concerns, mentions of chiseled jaw clenches, sex scenes, heights, and violence.

Help is available 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: Call 1-800-273-TALK (8255) National Domestic Violence Hotline: Call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) Love is Respect: Call 1-866-331-9474 or text LOVEIS to 22522 Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network: Call 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) ADAA, Anxiety & Depression Association of America https://adaa.org/find-help/support/support- groups NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness https://www.nami.org/ 1kitap1.com/en Chapter 1 Eliza Needing to beg a murderer for a favor was hard enough without worrying about a lack of guardrails.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 232b6cb0a7281ffb
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 3,590,928 bytes (3.425 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 320
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 611.3 minutes
• Total Words: 122,260
• Total Characters: 660,160
• Average Words per Page: 382.06
• Average Characters per Page: 2063.0

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