Soulless: An Enemies-to-Lovers Romance (Starcrossed Lovers Trilogy Book 2)

by Jade West

  I could see him thinking about it, trying to work out when that was, and it made me smile at him.

  “Don’t worry, Lucian, you don’t have to justify yourself to me. Bully people all you want. It’s just a shame. I’m sure plenty of people would do things with you just because they wanted to.” I couldn’t resist turning the knife even though he couldn’t feel it.

  He still hated me, I could see it all over him. I still hated him, my eyes must have told him right back.

  “You don’t have a clue what you’re fucking talking about,” he told me. “Plenty of people have done things with me because they want to.”

  I stared straight at him. “Who? Tell me.”

  He could have choked me right there and then and wiped me out for good. My heart was racing, thinking he might well do it and preparing myself for the end, but the end didn’t come. His eyes were fierce as he propped himself against the counter, wrapping his hand up in a fresh towel.

  “Right from the beginning people have done things with me because they want to,” he said, and then he told me.

  Lucian Morelli stood against his kitchen counter, and he told me about Bethany Fryers, the very first girl he punished and how she cried out for him in pleasure as well as in pain. It gave me tingles where it shouldn’t, and my heart was still racing as fast at his descriptions, and that was about more than what he did to her. It was about the dirty sparkle in his eyes as he relived the memories.

  He’d had feelings for Bethany Fryers.

  Even if he didn’t want to admit feelings for anyone or anything in this world, Lucian Morelli had had feelings for Bethany Fryers.

  I found myself wondering what she looked like, and what she sounded like and just what it was about her that drove him so wild. Because she did. She drove him wild. Beneath his evil walls, and his callous ways, and his not giving a shit for anyone, that blonde little girl drove him wild.

  “There you go,” he told me when he’d finished recounting her story. “She fucking wanted it.”

  I had flutters when I spoke next. “So if you liked her wanting it so much, why did you stop choosing people who wanted to enjoy it?”

  His voice turned to spite. “Because I like power. Because I take whatever I fucking want. It’s about my fucking pleasure, I don’t give a shit for anyone else’s.”

  “Good for you, Mr. Selfish,” I said and knew as soon as the words left my mouth that I’d pushed the cheek too far. He was on me in one of my frantic heartbeats, his bloodied hand tight around my throat, towel cast aside.

  I felt his blood on me, still hot. It gave me chills, picturing how it would be my blood feeling like that if he chose to cut me.

  “I like power,” he snarled. “Remember that.”

  He forced my thighs apart enough to press himself against me, and even in my choked state I found I was moving against him.

  I wanted to be Bethany Fryers. I wanted to be the little blonde girl who drove him wild.

  His eyes were evil, but there was depth in them, a curiosity that danced with mine.

  “You look like her, you know,” he told me, and it gave me a whole new wave of shivers. “Right from that masked fucking ball, you looked like her. I should’ve known you were fucking trouble then.”

  I tried to speak, but his choke wouldn’t let me. He freed me enough to take in breath, and I sucked in a decent lungful before I found my voice.

  “You didn’t realize it, did you?” I asked. “You hadn’t thought about me looking like that girl, not until tonight. I can see it.”

  “Fuck you,” he snarled. “You can’t see shit about me.”

  But he was wrong. I could. I was getting to know him and his monster ways, even if he didn’t want me to. Just as he was getting to know me and my crazy ways right back.

  I was still moving against him when he spoke next, still desperate as he pressed his mouth to my ear.

  “Now then, little girl,” he whispered. “Seeing as you know some of my filthy secrets, it’s time you told me some of yours.”

  18

  Lucian

  I felt like someone had scraped my insides out and laid them on a platter on the counter. I’d never felt like it before. Exposed, like parts of me had been spewed from my center.

  Realizations are a shocker of a thing. The realization that Elaine had reminded me of Bethany Fryers from the very first sight of her at Tinsley Constantine’s masked ball was still a hammer in the pit of me. That’s where the fixation had come from so early. The curve of her pretty little chin. The slope of her neck. The blonde waves cascading from her, and those pretty blue eyes. Yes, she reminded me of Bethany, of course she did.

  I’d done my best to blank out my early memories of that sweet little bitch for as long as I could remember. Somehow, I knew she was a weakness in my perfect strength. I’d long since lost track of the girl who’d first captivated my fetishes, and I’d wanted to. I didn’t want even a hint of her in my life.

  That’s why I should’ve killed Elaine in the very next heartbeat, to wipe her out of my senses, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I just stood looking at her in my kitchen like a fool.

  I was uncomfortable with the swing of the balance – her knowing more about my innards than I knew about hers. I didn’t tolerate any form of weakness in myself, and that’s what it felt like. I felt weak. It made my words lash out at her as they came.

  “I’m serious, Elaine. It’s time for you to reveal your dirty secrets. I want to know every filthy little part of you. You owe me now.”

  She shifted on her feet, as uncomfortable as I was. Still, she couldn’t hide that addictive curiosity in her stare.

  “I owe you fuck all, Lucian,” she said, but again there was no venom in it, she couldn’t have mustered any if she’d tried. I could smell her temptation to talk to me. It was ripe in her shallow little breaths.

  “You owe me your fucking life,” I spat at her. “You’d be dead by now if I hadn’t taken you from your apartment like a weak little bitch that night. The Power Brothers would have taken your blood already.”

  “And I don’t give a fuck,” she said, but again, there was no venom in it.

  She should be dead. I should have had my fun with her and killed her already.

  The standoff was sizzling between us, laced with a concoction I didn’t understand. Hate, disgust, retribution, want, need. I damn well hated need. Need was something I could usually snuff out with a click of my fingers, getting whatever I wanted in a flash, but not with her. Not with the crazy bitch Elaine.

  “You’d better start using that tongue of yours,” I said to her, “or I really will make you pay for it. I’ll make you pay for it in ways so vile, you could never imagine.”

  She raised her chin at me, proud, even though she was a wreck, standing in my kitchen, with crusty bloodied thighs, swamped in my shirt.

  “You’d get off on my secrets,” she told me. “You’d do nothing but laugh in my face. You’d like them. You’d like what they did to me.”

  I’d have usually agreed with her. Her stories should give me nothing but inspiration for how I wanted to make her suffer in my grip, but somehow I wasn’t feeling it. The twist of something in my guts was another one of those crazy sensations that made me want to retch. What they did to me. Even the thought of what those men had done to her made me prickle with rage.

  “Who did things to you, little girl?” I asked her, and her chin dropped, eyes on the floor.

  “It’s none of your business,” she said, and yet again, her impudence was nowhere to be seen. “I’m not having you laugh at me like that. Fuck me up all you want, but I’m not having it.”

  I stepped closer and tipped her face up to mine.

  “You know I’ve got congenital insensitivity to pain. You know things that nobody else on this planet knows about me. You’d better start talking before I redress that imbalance between us with blood. Secrets or blood, Elaine. Your fucking choice, but make it now.”

  Her eyes were s
o sad when they met with mine. “Yeah, well at least I get a choice for once in my life. I didn’t think it would be Lucian damn Morelli who’d be giving me one.”

  My stare was solid on hers. “Who did things to you, little girl?”

  She took a breath and the strength in her shoulders collapsed, leaving her just a tiny slip of a creature against the counter. Her fight was leaving her in the most beautiful of ways. Her butterfly wings were deathly still as she gave up her flickering attempts to fly away. She was calm in a way that surprised me, and it was strangely attractive.

  “You wouldn’t want to know,” she said, and her lie was pathetic. She knew full well I’d want to know.

  “Blood or secrets?”

  She let out a sigh. “Seriously, Lucian. I don’t want you laughing at me. I’d rather take blood than that kind of humiliation.”

  “Blood. Or. Secrets?”

  My gaze was firm. Her resolve was breaking. Those butterfly wings parted for me, just wide enough for me to see that the caterpillar between them was an innocent little baby of a bug who’d never been seen before.

  Nobody had seen Elaine Constantine before. Not the real, true broken core of the beauty.

  “It’s a long story,” she told me and I didn’t doubt it. “It’s a long fucked-up story that’s never been told. I tried, when I was young enough to think my words actually meant something to the people around me, only to be branded a sneaky little liar.”

  I was disgusted by the way her words meant something to me.

  “You’d better start talking then,” I said.

  19

  Elaine

  Of all the people in my life I could have told my secrets to, I’d have never believed for a second it would be one of the Morelli assholes. If you’d have asked me to put money on the least likely person I’d have ever told my secrets to, Lucian Morelli would have been pretty high on the list. I’d have laughed in your face then spat at your nerve for even suggesting it. He was my enemy. My monster. The man who wanted to take my life for his thrill.

  I should never have been standing there in his shithole of a kitchen contemplating telling him my story, not even one tiny little part of it. I hated myself for even thinking about it.

  My mind was spinning through the memories, and my stomach was in knots, physically painful without the haze of drink and drugs to blot them out. I didn’t want to relive them. I’d spent almost every waking moment of my life trying to run away, trying to bury it all underneath my bullshit world of escaping. I wanted to escape, at any cost – even if that meant losing my life.

  So why the fuck was I about to spill my soul to my nemesis and live those memories all over again?

  Holy hell, those memories came roaring when they called.

  I’d long lost track of exactly when my hellhole of an existence sprang from the picture perfect life I had been living. I had everything that little girls should be grinning about. Toys and games and attention, green fields and palomino ponies and brothers and sisters bickering all around me. Maybe if I hadn’t been such a sneaky little cow and had everyone tutting at me, they wouldn’t have branded me as a naughty girl. Maybe if I hadn’t been such an instinctive liar, the beasts wouldn’t have counted on my dishonesty to keep them safe in their perverted games.

  Dad was way too busy with the Constantine world to give me all that much of his time. He’d see us at dinnertimes, but it was barely more than a snippet of family life, and I had to share it with my brothers and sisters. I spent much more time around my bitch of a house mistress and the teachers in my class as they tried to get me to be a good girl.

  Mom was cold, and always had been. I was nervous around her. She would always curse me and tell me I needed to learn my lessons, so I guess it was natural for her to agree with Uncle Lionel when he first suggested I have extra schooling. Religious schooling, he said. Reverend Lynch, he said.

  I was sent over to Reverend Lynch and his schooling with one of our drivers. He dropped me outside the manor church in the rain one day, leaving me staring up at the towers on the driveway.

  It was Margaret, his maid, who came outside to collect me. She was as stern as the rest of the people I’d come to know – taking hold of my hand and rushing me inside like I was already due a punishment.

  The hallways were filled with huge sprawling paintings of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. I felt tiny and inferior as she marched me upstairs to my dorm room at the end of the corridor. The door was huge and oak and made a deep, dark creak as she opened it.

  “This is where you’ll be staying,” she said.

  My bed was a tiny single with a wrought iron header and footer. There was a bedside table with a plain white lamp, and a tapestry on the wall over it. The Lord’s purpose will prevail. I found myself wondering what the Lord’s purpose would be for me in this place.

  They left me alone until dinnertime. Margaret came for me. She led the way downstairs to the dining hall, and I expected there to be many other girls like me there, but there were only two. Neither of them looked at me. I sat in the seat Margaret pointed me to, feeling edgy and scared. The other girls leaped to their feet and bowed their heads as a man joined us at the head of the table. I jumped up to join them, not quite sure what I was doing.

  “You may be seated,” he said.

  His voice was so firm it gave me shivers. He was an older man – much older than my father. He had gray hair and a beard and small eyes, and had a religious collar on, in deep, dark burgundy. He looked stern. Really damn stern.

  I was given soup and ate it slowly, watching the way the other girls were so neat with theirs. I patted my mouth with a napkin and sat up straight in my chair when I was done, and tried to be like them, even though they looked nothing like me. Neither of them looked anything like me, they were both so quiet and meek as my mother would say.

  I guess that’s what they wanted me to be like – meek. But I wasn’t meek. I was Elaine.

  The other two girls were dismissed and scuttled away after dinner was done, but I was still sitting in my seat. The man at the head of the table cleared his throat and stared at me, and then he spoke.

  “I’m Reverend Lynch, Elaine,” he told me. “I’m here to be your teacher and your connection to our Lord.”

  I found myself nodding, but I was too scared to smile, and definitely too scared to speak to him.

  “The lessons in this school are very strict and very soulful,” he said. “You’ll most certainly learn to be a good girl here.”

  I should’ve been happy to be a good girl, I thought, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want to spend another minute in that place. The very last thing I wanted was to be like the other two girls.

  Reverend Lynch held out his hand to me, and he had a big golden ring on one of his fingers.

  “Kiss me,” he said, and I felt weird doing it. I didn’t usually kiss people’s hands.

  His fingers were thick and warm. I didn’t like the way they felt against my lips, so I pulled away as quickly as I could. I felt strangely icky as he kept his eyes on me, like he was soaking into me somehow. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  “You’re excused now,” he told me, and I gave him the natural thanks with a smile I didn’t want to give him.

  He called Margaret in, and she led me back upstairs. I tried to ask her questions, like who the other girls were and who else would be staying with us, and where I could go in the building outside of my room.

  “You’ll go wherever you’re told,” she said, and I didn’t ask her again, just headed back to my room and sat on the edge of my bed.

  She clasped her hands behind her back as she spoke.

  “There are rules,” she told me. “You only speak when you are spoken to, and you do whatever you are told. If you want to go to the bathroom, you must raise your hand and ask like a good girl, and you must always try your very best in your lessons.”

  I nodded, but it was already weird, just how stupid those rules were. Nobody e
ver stopped me speaking, and I never had to ask to pee.

  “Good night, Elaine,” she said, and I heard the key click in the lock as she left.

  I was locked in.

  I tried the door handle, but it didn’t open. I banged on the door, but nobody came.

  I’d never been locked in anywhere, and I was already scared of a night alone with no way out.

  There was a nightdress in the wardrobe, but I didn’t want to wear it. There was a glass of water on the bedside table, but I didn’t want to drink it. I wanted to go home, to my own bed in my own room, screw what a bad girl I was.

  I thought it was a nightmare as I stared up at the ceiling that night and tried to sleep in that bed. I was nearly crying like a little baby as I thought about more nights in here, and how Uncle Lionel had promised such good lessons for me. I didn’t want good lessons. I wanted home.

  The first night really was a nightmare. I had barely slept when Margaret came calling for me next morning and cussed me for not wearing my nightdress to bed.

  I ate my porridge for breakfast and tried to tell myself it was only one stupid night, and I’m sure it would get a bit easier – meeting some other girls and not being so locked up when they knew I could behave enough not to run away.

  If only that first night really had been the nightmare.

  If only that first night hadn’t been a light of fucking Heaven, compared to the true depths of Hell.

  20

  Lucian

  I’d never heard of Reverend Lynch, but he made my hackles rise as soon as Elaine spoke his name. Her stance shifted, scared even after all these years.

  “He touched you, didn’t he?”

  She looked away from me as she answered with a nod of her head. It took her a few long seconds to speak again.

  “First of all, it was punishment. I had to write lines out for him in my neatest handwriting on my very first day in his lessons. He let the other girls leave when they were done, but he made me stay, saying I hadn’t done well enough.” She took a breath before she continued. “I was writing them until late, until I was falling asleep in my chair since I was so tired from the night before. That’s when he came up to me and slammed his hand down on my desk.”