by K. V. Rose
“This place serves gourmet meals and that’s what you’re working with,” I tease him. Trey is young, just a year older than me. He shaves his head, and a black stud glistens from above his eyebrow.
He grins. “Cheese is dank,” he says with a laugh.
“Why’d my brother let you off your leash?” I duck around the head night chef, Chasity, as she makes her way through, reaching for a spice on the stainless-steel counter. I glimpse meat browning in her pan. I sit down beside Trey.
He frowns at me, his bright eyes narrowing. “You’re a bitch, did anyone ever tell you?”
I shrug, slap him on the knee. He has a hole in his too-big jeans. I know he can afford ones that fit, but everything about Trey’s clothes are too big.
“Every day, pal,” I answer him, stuffing my hands back in my pockets.
I see his eyes flick to my throat, and he shakes his head. I thought I’d pulled up my hoodie enough to cover the bruises but apparently not.
“Kristof is a dick bag,” he says, then he chomps off another bite of string cheese.
I frown. “You know, you’re supposed to peel off strings of the cheese, not bite it off like a wild animal.”
He pops the rest of it in his mouth and chews with his mouth open, right in my face. I laugh, jerking back. He crumples up the plastic wrap and tosses it in the trashcan beside him.
“Did you come here to piss me off or to eat?”
I watch a flame shoot up from Chasity’s pan and she whistles. So do most of the staff. I’m not into meat, but it does smell damn good.
My stomach growls, and Trey hears it. His eyes go wide.
“You motherfucker. There’s enough food in this place to feed Alexandria and you’re starving yourself?” He pinches my thigh, coming up nearly empty-handed. “Besides that, I could break you in half. What’s going to happen when Kristof comes for you again?”
I laugh at that. “He won’t. Or I’ll kill him.”
Trey winks, rubs his hands over his jeans. “That’s a good girl. But you’re right,” he sighs, “he probably won’t. Because if he does, you and Jeremiah will kill him. No one wants to die from both Rains.”
I roll my eyes.
“Seriously,” he says, punching me lightly on the arm. “What Kristof did was fucked up.”
“You mean what my brother ordered him to do?” I counter, brow arched. I cross my ankles, flex my feet in my white sneakers.
Trey suddenly looks uncomfortable. He clears his throat. I’ve never heard him say anything less than positive about my brother, even though I know he’s a monster. We all know. Trey looks down at his own shoes, slip-on Vans with holes in them. He really doesn’t give a shit about his appearance.
I can relate.
“Forget it,” I mumble, letting him off the hook.
He sighs. “Thanks. He’s with Brooklin right now, going to a goddamn drive-in movie like civilized people.”
“A drive-in at midnight?” I ask, shaking my head, surprised at both the time and the activity. But I remember what Nicolas had said. That Jeremiah loves Brooklin. Or something like it.
Trey nods. “He only took Kristof—probably to keep him off you—and the rest of us get off. Lucky assholes, huh?” He rolls his eyes.
My stomach growls again. I had planned to grab some cooked tofu from the fridge; I know Chasity always keeps some down here for me. But now I plan to grab something else.
Trey and I are quiet a moment as people work around us, sizzling and frying and washing dishes. It amazes me my brother funds all of this. He hadn’t been born into money, but he’d found it anyhow. I shouldn’t be surprised. I don’t know if he’d really killed his foster family, but I know he’d somehow fell into some money he didn’t really deserve and used it to get into the Unsaints. Although now he’s grown more of it. That, I guess, he does deserve.
“You heard about my big job?” I ask Trey, trying to keep my voice even, indifferent.
He blows out a breath. “Yep. How you feelin’ about it?” I don’t know what he knows about Lucifer and me, but the way he asks, he must know something. And I know he knows of the Unsaints.
I shrug. “I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies.” That much is true. I’m more terrified of the prospect of one day giving birth and—God forbid—raising a child, than I am about taking a life. Especially Lucifer’s.
Thinking of paying him back is exciting somehow.
“You know where he is?” I ask. It’s a direct question, and if Trey had thought the better of it, he wouldn’t have answered me. But he didn’t. Not until it’s too late.
He laughs, shakes his head, rubs a hand over his jaw. “Yep,” he says, nodding. “Motherfucker is making himself an easy target. He’s not at his fucking mansion, though. Knows we’ve got too many eyes there.”
I wait, my nerves on edge.
“Know a lot about Raven Park?” he continues, and I feel his gaze slide to mine. But I don’t look at him. I don’t want him to know how much this information means to me.
Instead, I only nod. “Everyone knows Raven Park.” And I know everything about it.
“There’s a weird ass house on the other side of it. Only one. I don’t even know if the place has indoor plumbing. He’s staying there.”
I can barely breathe.
“It’s not, like, his actual house. Nah, dude has a family. But he’s there for now. Him and the fucking Unsaints went back there after he burned down Brooklin’s house. We followed him. His gang is there too.”
Finally, I meet Trey’s gaze.
And he seems to see what I’m thinking as I hop off the mini fridge. He reaches out, yanking my arm and spinning me around.
“Fuck, I shouldn’t have told you that.” He stands, towering over me, still gripping my arm. “Look, Sid, you can’t go after him. Not yet. You’ll get your chance. But if something were to happen to you…Jeremiah would kill me. And you.”
I shrug my arm out of his grip. He lets go.
“Don’t tell Jeremiah we had this conversation.”
I smile at him, then leave, threading my way out of the kitchen without bothering to look for the tofu.
Chapter Twelve
Present
I don’t want to go to Raven Park. Jeremiah takes me there to torture me often enough, and I wonder if Lucifer has seen me. I wonder if he’s waiting for me there. The thought scares me more than it should.
But I need to do this, for me. To get his beautiful, midnight blue eyes out of my fucking head.
Leaving the hotel is relatively easy, with a few hassles. I plan to have Nicolas vouch for me, after I threaten to tell my brother about the ‘Yes/No’ game we played earlier that day, in which he’d told me all about Jeremiah’s feelings for Brooklin and all about Lucifer’s baby.
He hadn’t, of course, but it was true enough I could fuck him.
Still, he argues with me.
“Absolutely not, Sid,” he says from his black leather couch. I sit across from him perched on the edge of a chair. The TV is on, replaying a fight from the night before.
“You can’t stop me.”
Nicolas barks a laugh. “I can. And I will. Your brother would kill us both if I let you leave here.”
It isn’t that I can never leave. Just not at night. And definitely not to go looking for Lucifer, when Jeremiah has specifically told me the job is for Halloween.
Besides that, I don’t have a car. And my phone has a tracker. Jeremiah claims it’s to keep me safe from the Unsaints.
But I don’t plan to bring my phone. Or take a car. Raven Park isn’t that far. I can run there, and I know how to get to the southern border that edges the lake. That’s where the house is. I’ve seen it myself.
A small part of me wonders how close he knows he is to me. What he and the Unsaints would do to Jeremiah if they knew I was here. Maybe they do know. But I want to know why the fuck they’re looking for me. Lucifer had no problem letting me go that night.
“Look, Nicky,” I say, crossing
my ankles, my combat boots on the seat of his chair. “You either let me leave, keep your mouth shut about it, or I’ll tell my brother about our little game.”
Nicolas glares at me, tearing his eyes away from the fight. He closes his eyes, lets out an impatient sigh. “You’re testing me, kid. But here’s the thing.” His eyes spring open. “I don’t give a damn if you tell Jeremiah about the game. I’ll have much less hell to pay for that than if he finds out I let you walk out of here in the dead of night while he was away, without sending anyone with you.”
I grin, hopping down from the chair, standing right in front of Nicolas, blocking his view.
He narrows his eyes, waiting for my challenge.
“I’ll be back in two hours,” I say, crossing my arms. “And you might think Jeremiah won’t mind if I tell him about our game, and maybe he wouldn’t have. Maybe he wouldn’t have given a damn, you telling me about Brooklin.” I lift one shoulder in a lazy shrug. “Maybe he wouldn’t have gave a damn that you told me Lucifer doesn’t know I’m here.” Then I drop into a crouch, my hand on his knee. “But he will give a damn about the rest. About the fact that Lucifer is a father. That he’s with his baby’s mama. He’ll give a damn, because he’ll know, then, that it was you who pushed me out of this hotel to go looking for Lucifer. Because if you don’t let me leave, I’ll find a way out myself. We both know I will.” I squeeze his kneecap, my heart thudding while he watches me.
This might not work.
I will find another way out, if he says no. But having Nicolas get me out is easier. Much less work than trying to scale the roof and sneak down the long driveway, dodging my way past the armed guards.
But I will do it. I’ll take out the guards, too, if I have to.
But I’d rather not.
Two hours. That’s all I want. Enough time to jog to the park, scope out the house, and jog back. To see what I’m up against. To see where Lucifer and his gang went after he dumped me in the asylum last Halloween.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Nicolas seethes, scrubbing his hand over his face. That’s when I know I have him.
I smile, stand to my feet, and turn to go, shoving my hands in my hoodie pocket.
“Two hours, Sid. If you’re not back in two hours, all bets are off. I’ll lie to your brother if I have to, and when I find you, I’ll kill you myself.”
I glance over my shoulder. “Deal. Now zip me up.”
Climbing out of the trunk of Nicolas’s Mercedes and breathing in the still-warm fall air gives me a kick of adrenaline. I’m really doing it. I’d really bargained my way into two hours of free time, even if Nicolas had to stuff me in a body bag to do it. A body bag that he claimed was full of tools when we passed the guards at the door to the mansion. It’s no secret Nicolas has a hideaway in the city, and that he’s been working on renovating it himself. A place to get away when he has time off, which is almost never.
My brother knows where it is.
Which meant Nicolas had actually put tools in the body bag with me, and on the long, winding ride down the driveway, I’d been smacked in the ass with a hammer and some nails one too many times.
But still…I’m free now.
Nicolas doesn’t ask where I’m going. He doesn’t want to know. Because if Jeremiah comes after him for this, his ass will be on the line.
But even as he lets me walk away from the parking lot of a dead gas station, I think he knows. Especially as he calls out, “Two hours. Do you have the gun? The watch?”
I nod without looking back, making my way to the sidewalk that lines one of the quieter streets of Alexandria.
The gun is against my hip, concealed by my hoodie. The watch is on my wrist. I glance at it as I walk away.
“I won’t let you down,” I call out into the night.
Nicolas mumbles something under his breath, but I don’t catch it, and he doesn’t repeat it. I hear the door to the SUV thud closed, but he doesn’t start the car. He’s going to wait here, we’re going to dump the tools at his hideaway, and then we’re going back to the mansion together. Jeremiah doesn’t do a roll call every night, but sometimes he does. All the time, though, he lets Nicolas know where and when he’s going to be somewhere. And tonight, he’d told Nicolas he wouldn’t be back until dawn.
I wonder where he and Brooklin are staying, and why.
I know, though, that my brother likes to get away from the mansion sometimes. From the demands. Demands he’d created, demands he dove into like a fool with the jobs he did.
But none of that is my problem tonight.
Tonight, my problem is Lucifer and the Unsaints.
And I know, without him having told me, that Nicolas knows less about the Unsaints than I do. He might know that Jeremiah used to be one. He might know their parents are the Society of 6. But he doesn’t know how dangerous they are, or he would never have let me do this.
I’m fucking glad.
The roads to the forest are quiet. It’s Monday night, and even in a college town, people sleep. Not often, and not well, but they do. The flashing lights in the downtown core are far off in the distance. But twenty minutes after I left Nicolas, I walk through the intersection I’d first met Lucifer at.
I hold my breath as I cross the street, pull my hood over my head, like he’d had his when we first met. I don’t want to think about that night. About the death he’d stolen from me.
I want to think about what I’m going to take from him.
Because whether Jeremiah approves it or not, it’ll be more than his life.
The forest is pitch black, the only sound that of the dirt beneath my feet as I walk down the path in the darkness. It occurs to me too late that maybe I should have just taken Nicolas with me. Whether he wanted to know what I was doing or not is irrelevant; if I had asked him, I think he likely would have come.
But he’s long gone, the city at my back, the dark expanse of the woods before me. I wish there were more sounds, more bugs, more animals scurrying about the forest. It would feel more…natural. But there’s next to nothing.
Just my feet.
I take a dirt path that forks to the left, brush the hood back from my head and pull the gun out from against my hip. I can hear my heartbeat in my head, and I try to stop looking over my shoulder. If someone is watching me, they’ll know I’m nervous. It’s not a good thing to show nerves.
I steel my spine, put one foot in front of the other, and ignore the shapes my mind conjures around me; shadows becoming bears which become leering men. And when a bat flies overhead, the flap of its wings startling the shit out of me, it becomes Lucifer himself.
I huff out a laugh.
I have no reason to be scared. It’s not like Lucifer is going to kill me, even if he does see me in here. I don’t know what he wants me for, but it’s probably worse than death.
He’s an Unsaint after all.
I’ve survived worse than death.
But the rest of the Unsaints…they might actually kill me.
I like the cool feel of the gun in my hand, and I brush my thumb around the barrel, a zip of confidence lighting down my arm with the touch.
I’m safe.
I repeat that to myself like a mantra as I edge closer to the river.
The house down here is supposedly a family home, from way back in the day. But I’d never known anyone to live in it. This park is government property. I’m surprised they’d never torn the thing down.
And then, too soon, it looms in front of me.
Utter darkness, the river glimmering beyond it under the light of the stars. I look up at the second floor. There are curtains closed at every window, but even still, there isn’t a hint of light anywhere in that house. I can’t imagine the Unsaints staying here. They supposedly left town for a while after last Halloween, but they have more money than I’d ever see in my life. They can, and do, afford better lodgings than this.
Maybe Trey had been wrong. Maybe Jeremiah had fed him this information precisely because he knew
I’d try to ferret it out of Trey. Maybe no one lives here, and I’m playing into my brother’s trap, like I always do.
But maybe not.
I take a step closer, eyeing the wooden porch. There are dried leaves scattered around the screen door, but otherwise, it looks shockingly clean.
I think about turning around.
I think about jogging back down the path, jogging out of the park, finding Nicolas and speeding back to the mansion. I think this might have been one of my worst ideas ever. But before I can spin around, I hear something.
From behind me.
I aim the gun, arm extended, opposite hand on my elbow, and then I turn. But I don’t say a word. The dark forest stares back at me.
I try to swallow my fear. I have nothing to be afraid of. I have a gun and I know how to use it. And besides that, it was probably just an animal. Never mind that it sounded like a boot scraping against gravel.
Or maybe it’s Nicolas, trying to fuck with me.
I’m safe.
I say it again and again and again.
Safe.
And then a hand clamps over my mouth.
I know better than to pull the trigger, but I draw my arms in, try to elbow whoever is on my back. But their other arm pins mine to my sides, forcing the gun to point down, useless at the tips of my fingers.
I try to breathe. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. I try to calm my pulse, try to fucking think. But right now, I can’t think at all. My mind is blank, my fear nearly palpable.
Because this person’s hand over my mouth, I can smell it.
Cigarettes, but a particular kind. I don’t know the brand; I’ve never smoked. But this scent is burned into my memory like so many other things I want to forget.
“You’re scared of me, Lilith?”
Lucifer’s voice is as hoarse as I remember it, his words brushing against my ear. I try not to shiver in his arms. Try, and fail.
He breathes a laugh against the back of my neck, then rests his chin on my head. His grip hasn’t loosened, not even a little. I don’t want to give him the benefit of squirming, of trying to uselessly fight back. Because I might have been trained, but something about the way he’s holding me, about the way he’s making sure the gun is pointed down…I know he and the Unsaints have been trained, too.
