Kings of Anarchy

by Caroline Peckham

  "I've never run from anything in my damn life," I growled at her as I watched the rain trickle down over her cheeks and her grip in my hair tightened.

  "Liar."

  I narrowed my eyes, meaning to correct her, punish her, push her away, but the intensity of those blue eyes reflecting the storm up at me had me pausing and the truth spilling from my lips instead.

  "I've never felt anything like I do when I'm with you, Tatum Rivers," I breathed and I couldn't even be sure that she could hear me over the rain crashing down on the lake. "And I don't warn you not to push me because I'm angry at you for trying. I warn you because I'm afraid of what I could do to you if my control slips when we're together and I do something to you that I can't come back from. It's too easy for me to be cruel, it's too easy for me to hurt you."

  "I'm not afraid of you, Saint," she replied, the flare of passion in her eyes saying she actually meant that.

  "That's just because you don't think you have anything to lose anymore."

  "Or maybe I think I've got everything to gain."

  I stared at her for a long moment wearing Kyan's hoodie with the rain washing lines of mascara down her cheeks, her hair bedraggled by the storm and lipstick smeared from the kisses I shouldn't have stolen from her and I swear she'd never looked so beautiful to me. Her imperfections were her perfections, the fire in her soul which I had ached to douse was now the thing I admired most in her. And the wildness I'd wanted to tame more than anything I'd ever known was making me crave a taste of that freedom instead.

  My hands slid around her waist and I leaned closer to her so that the raindrops which ran around the back of my head fell down and splashed against her cheeks, her nose, her lips.

  "I can't try and pretend that I'm not the man I am, Tatum," I growled.

  "I never asked you to."

  I paused as I considered that, and I realised it was true. I'd assumed the desire she showed for me had come with the caveat that she expected me to change if we acted on it, but she'd never once said that.

  "It took a long time to turn me into this monster you know. And I don't think I'll ever stop being him now,” I told her.

  "Saint, I don't think you're-"

  "I'm sorry, Tatum. For all of it. And for none of it. Sometimes I can see what I am as clearly as I can now and I know that the things I do, the things I've done are unforgivable. But I also know that being that man is all I know how to be. And I'm not going to have some epiphany one day where I fall in love with a girl and realise the error of my ways and dance off into the sunset. My version of a happily ever after is never going to fall into a nice, neat little box that can be tied off with a pretty bow and have me making some girl's dreams all come true."

  "I never said I wanted a happily ever after or a Prince Charming," she replied with just as much conviction as me. "I said that I was yours. All four of you. I swore to be your Night Bound. What that means is up to all of us. And right now, I'm not hating it the way I once did."

  I released a long and steady breath, leaning forward until my forehead pressed to hers and inhaling heavily as I dug deep to regain some level of control over myself.

  I dropped my hands to Tatum's thighs and lifted her out of the freezing lake water until she wound her legs around my waist and tightened her grip on my neck to hold herself up.

  "Saint, I really don't think you should be lifting-"

  "Don't tell me what to do, siren, or I'll do a whole lot worse than spank you in the morning when I'm ready to face punishing you again."

  Tatum swallowed thickly, leaning back so that she could look at me as I carried her out of the lake in the rain and strode up the beach towards the others where they still waited. My ribs were doing a whole lot more than aching now, but I didn't care. I wasn't putting her down until we were back inside and out of this storm.

  "Are you good now?" Kyan asked me, eyeing me like I was a wild animal who had escaped from the zoo and gone on a rampage.

  "I'm good," I replied in a clipped tone, walking between the three of them and noting Monroe's glare coupled with the way he looked at me carrying Tatum in my arms.

  I was well accustomed to my own jealousy by now and if I wasn't mistaken then I was seeing more than a flicker of that same emotion in his eyes too. The question was, how far were his fantasies for our girl going? He’d obviously been concerned enough about her to come back here to check on her, and it didn’t take a fool to see the way he watched her all the time.

  The three of them formed a ring around me as I strode back to The Temple with Tatum in my arms, but just as I reached the building, I fell still.

  The heavy wooden door swung inwards slowly and large, muddy boot prints had been tracked across the flagstones inside.

  I stepped over the threshold with Tatum in my arms and slowly lowered her to the ground as the whole fucking world came crashing down on my head.

  On all four walls of the central part of the church which made up the living room, some piece of shit had graffitied three giants cocks and the words The Justice Ninja will take payment in your blood in red spray paint.

  "No," I snarled, like refusing to believe that any of this was happening would just make it go away.

  "I'm going to enjoy killing this motherfucker when we catch him," Kyan said in a low and dark voice which was a promise of its own.

  The only small mercy was that they’d used spray paint instead of human shit this time and I thanked all that was holy for that. I probably would have had to burn this place if they’d wiped their shit all over my walls.

  Monroe frowned down at the floor, pointing out the muddy footprints and the way they seemed to have just circled the room to the spots where they’d plastered the graffiti before leaving again.

  I wanted to demand to know which one of them had left the fucking Temple last so that I could lay blame at someone's feet for not locking the door, but I knew it was pointless. I was the reason that we'd all been out in that storm. It was on me.

  My jaw was grinding and there was a vein throbbing at my temple as I fought against the desire to do more damage to the place than I had in my rampage earlier. What was the fucking point in preserving it now anyway?

  "Saint?" Blake demanded, stepping in front of me and filling the space before me so that my view of the destruction was cut off. "We'll sort this out. You need to go and calm the fuck down before you end up on a killing spree tonight. Go play some piano or some shit, okay?"

  I wanted to fight him on it, but I knew in my heart that I was barely holding on to my sanity as it was tonight so I just gave him a firm nod and turned away from the damage, catching Tatum's hand as I went and tugging her down the hall towards Kyan's room.

  I drew her through to the bathroom and set the water running in the shower while she watched me with eyes that seemed to see too much.

  "You need to warm up," I muttered, getting a pair of towels ready for her and then heading back through to Kyan's room to take one of his shirts for her to wear when she was done. It set off a tick in my jaw to think of her wearing it, but I needed as many reasons as I could come up with to stay away from her tonight or I knew I was going to cave into the temptation of her flesh.

  It wasn't even like it had been earlier when lust and desire and anger had collided into something hot and carnal and desperate between us. No, right now I felt like the cracks in me were showing and for some reason I got the impression that if I just allowed myself to get lost in her, it would be that much easier to hold them all together.

  But I couldn't do that. Even without the rules to bind me, I knew that if I gave into the desire I felt for her body while I was achy and broken and feral like this that it would be all too easy to let her become the reason I got myself together again. And I had never in my life relied on someone that heavily before. I absolutely wouldn't be doing it with a girl who had every reason to hate me.

  It didn't matter if I longed to do it or not. That was just the weakness in me talking. The same weakness my
father had worked tirelessly to remove from me. And I refused to ever admit that so much as a speck of it remained despite his best efforts.

  I waited in Kyan's room, dripping on his carpet as my sodden sweatpants made me shiver. But I wasn't allowed to enter the bathroom while she was naked, that was one of her rules.

  "Saint?" Tatum's voice called to me and I tried not to let the sound of my name on her lips do anything to thaw the cold that had set into my bones, but it warmed them a little all the same.

  "I'm here," I said in flat tone, retreating so far into myself that I had no room at all left for rage or hate or any petty, human emotions that might cloud my judgement.

  "I'm not naked. You can come back in."

  I released a slow breath and moved back into the bathroom, finding her standing beneath the flow of hot water in the black underwear I was pawing at not so long ago when I almost lost control with her.

  "Get in," she encouraged. "You must be frozen."

  I wanted to tell her that I didn't follow anyone's commands and that she needed to watch her tongue unless she was looking to get punished, but instead I just pushed my soaking sweatpants off of my hips and let them fall to the tiles with a splat. I kept my boxers on, though it wasn’t like the tight material left much to the imagination.

  I moved beneath the hot water, keeping my eyes off of her so that I wouldn't be tempted again as I turned to face the white tiles on the wall.

  I flinched minutely as the soft touch of a sponge brushed against my spine but made no other reaction as Tatum slowly rubbed circles over my skin with it, cleaning my body and taking some of the weight off of my soul at the same time.

  We said nothing but once she finished washing me, she dropped the sponge and her hands slid up my spine instead.

  I opened my mouth to protest, but before any words made it past my lips, her fingers curled around my shoulders and she began to gently massage the tension from my muscles.

  A low, deep groan rolled from the back of my throat as she slowly worked her way lower, finding kinks and knots along my spine and easing them with a firm and purposeful touch which had the knots in my soul unfurling just a little too.

  When she made it to the base of my spine and her fingers were skimming the waistband of my boxers, I turned to look at her and she pulled her hands back.

  I took her jaw in my grip and turned her face up to mine as I shut off the water.

  "Do as I say tonight, okay?" I asked and she nodded silently, her eyes filled with questions I had no intention of answering. Certainly not today.

  I made a sound of appreciation and released her, stepping out of the shower and pushing my wet boxers off as I went. My cock sprung free, hard and proud and fucking hopeful as ever even though I absolutely wouldn't be giving in to its demands. But at this point it seemed ridiculous to try and hide it from her. I wasn't a slave to my body any more than I was a slave to anything else though, so if she thought my desire for her was some kind of victory over me then she was sorely mistaken. It only made me more dangerous to her.

  I dried myself off and then wrapped a towel around my waist, keeping my back to Tatum as she stripped out of her wet underwear and dried off too.

  "Get dressed in that," I commanded, pointing at Kyan's shirt without even bothering to hide my distasteful sneer.

  "But this is Ky-"

  "I thought you were going to do as I say?" I asked in a hard tone.

  Tatum bit her lip and pulled the baggy band tee over her head and I nodded once in approval.

  "Follow me," I commanded and I led her back out through Kyan's room to the main part of The Temple where the other Night Keepers were well underway scrubbing the walls. The graffiti was thankfully coming off fairly easily and they’d flipped the dining table upright again too. One of them had even managed to fix the chair I’d broken and I spied a drill and some screws sitting on the kitchen counter, fighting off the desire to shudder at the thought of manual labour.

  "I gave the whole place a sweep to make sure there's no chance that anyone was still in here. The door down to the gym and the crypt were locked anyway and the rest of the building is clear," Kyan said as we passed through and I nodded my approval.

  I didn't miss Tatum's sharp inhale which said she hadn't considered that, but I ignored it as I led her up to my room.

  "Get into bed," I commanded, refusing to look towards my bathroom which I knew was still in a state of disrepair since I'd lost the plot earlier. There were still tiny splinters of glass from the mirror lodged in my knuckles but I didn’t have the patience to sit with the tweezers and extract them at the moment.

  Tatum slipped away from me and moved beneath the covers, eyeing me in a way that said she expected me to punish her and wasn't totally against the idea. But I wouldn't be doing any such thing tonight. I couldn't. I was on the ledge and about to free fall off of it. I was only so calm because my emotions had burned out. But I was going to need to expel the turmoil inside me before I would really be able to function with true control again.

  I moved to the closet and changed into a pair of clean sweatpants and a t-shirt before pulling on a waterproof coat and flicking the hood up over my head.

  I switched the lights off in my room as I stepped back out and Tatum gasped from the bed like she didn't know what to expect.

  "Stay here all night," I commanded her. "You can only leave the bed if you need to use the bathroom and then you must return to it the moment you are done. Don't call me. Don't message me. Don't come looking for me. I'll be back in time for my workout in the morning."

  Her lips parted and I could just make out the movement in the dark, but she managed to hold back on the questions.

  "Okay," she agreed in a soft voice that had me relaxing minutely. At least I would know where she was while I was gone, and I could picture her here waiting for me easily enough.

  I nodded once and then turned away from her, heading down the stairs and glancing at the other Night Keepers as they continued to scrub the walls.

  Blake caught my eye and gave me half a smile, knowing exactly where I was going and silently promising to have this place fixed by the time I returned.

  I knew full well I would need to go over all of their cleaning myself to get it up to my standard, but I appreciated the fact that they would give it a good start even if I wouldn't ever admit it.

  I headed back out into the storm, making sure to lock the door behind me this time and made my way up the hill in the dark, heading for Ash Chambers.

  The rain crashed through the canopy of the trees as I stalked through the forest path and my skin prickled as I felt eyes on me.

  I kept walking, that sense of being watched growing more and more certain as I climbed the path and moved further and further away from the safety of The Temple.

  When I reached the top of the hill, I turned back suddenly and for a moment I was sure I saw movements in the shadows, but it was so dark that I couldn't be certain.

  "Come on then!" I bellowed, cupping my hands around my mouth. "If it's justice you're after then come and take it!"

  Silence followed my demand and I sneered as the coward remained hidden in the trees, but I felt certain they were out there somewhere, watching me, waiting. A hunter always knew when another predator drew close. But I was the king of beasts and I refused to be frightened by some skulking vulture.

  "Then perhaps the next time you strike, you should try and hit me harder?" I suggested. "Because as of right now, the only thing I see when you leave us your little messages and carry out your cowardly plans, is a dead man walking. And you'd better believe I know how to dispose of your corpse once I’m done cutting you apart."

  The trees remained silent and the storm howled with more force, so I turned and headed on to Ash Chambers.

  I used my key to let myself in as I reached the old building and lock the door behind me again once I was inside, not bothering with the lights as I navigated the familiar hallways in the dark and heading straight for th
e room set up with my grand piano.

  I shed my jacket as I lowered myself onto the bench before the keys and released a slow breath.

  When I started playing, Études, Op. 25 by Chopin I threw myself straight into the aggressive, complicated notes. It was a dark and angry piece which spoke to the monster in me all too clearly and helped me vent some of my rage. I intended to stay here all night and play until my fingers were cramping and my bad arm was screaming at me from pushing the muscles too hard.

  I wouldn't return to The Temple until the sun had risen and six am had returned. And then I'd start tomorrow with my guard up again and my walls reconstructed with my control over all things thoroughly intact. And I'd be damn certain not to let Tatum Rivers crack it ever again.

  But so help me, I was beginning to think her doing so was inevitable. So maybe I was just delaying my fate.

  "O nly if you wear the tutu and stick a corkscrew up your ass while you do a pirouette for me," I muttered, my brain half functioning as a strange noise drove into my skull.

  The repetitive scrubbing sound was underlaid with the dulcet tones of some of Saint's music and I groaned as I rubbed at my eyes, rolling upright as I fought to try and wake up. Why was it so fucking difficult to do? My brain was halfway there, but it felt like a battle within myself to even get my eyes to actually open.

  "Isn't it funny how you sleep like a baby when people say killers are supposed to be haunted by the memories of the people they've killed and not be able to sleep at all?" Saint's voice came from somewhere close by. His tone was conversational, but the fact that he was talking to me at all right now proved that he was actually still pretty on edge.

  I groaned as I swiped a palm down my face and tried to force my eyes open, realising I’d crashed on the couch again last night. "I think it’s supposed to be the guilt that keeps people awake," I muttered. "And I've never been one for feeling much of that. Besides, most of the assholes I've killed deserved it and the others...well, they couldn't be avoided. I might not like what I was forced to do to gain my place at Royaume D'élite but I'm not going to feel guilty about surviving."