by Cole, Tillie
Diel’s eyes widened, and his hand immediately dropped from Noa’s neck. Noa was ready. As soon as her feet touched the ground, she scrambled to her unsteady feet and ran at the fire. Without even hesitating, she threw the collar, its key and the remote into the flames, as a deafening roar sailed from behind her. She turned, lip curling in rage at the massive red scar on Diel’s neck, angry skin that had been tormented by shocks of electricity for far too long.
Diel turned, eyes wide, and Noa breathed in deeply. She planted her feet into the stone, holding her ground, then watched as the monster and the man began their battle for the person they were always meant to be.
Chapter 12
It was a dam breaking, wild ocean waves thrashing under a tornado burgeoning in the jet-black sky above. Diel could feel the control snapping from him piece by piece. He could feel his blood boiling, pure molten magma scalding the thinning walls of his veins. His bones vibrated with newly injected energy, and his muscles expanded like a condor flexing its wide black wings as it caught the current of a gale-force wind.
And Diel had no control over any of it.
His heart beat too fast, his lungs contracting and expanding in an erratic rhythm as they tried to keep up with the speed. But it was futile. Without the collar he was a fucking newly dropped nuclear bomb—detonated, irreversible, his sadistic wants and needs unable to be tamed.
Diel’s skin grew so hot that sweat poured down his face and neck. He had never had the collar off his neck. Gabriel turned it down when he went on kills, but his older brother always stayed near, ready to increase the voltage when the monster got too strong, too fast, too dangerous, and needed to be reeled back in.
But Gabriel wasn’t here now.
Diel’s vision flickered as he stared at Noa standing stoically before the blazing fire like a fucking pink-haired demon. He looked past her and saw the collar slipping further into the mountain of ash in the hearth, the key already lost to the splintering wood. It was the only collar they had. And she had destroyed it. She had fucking destroyed Diel!
His breathing grew even faster, and he felt his monster charging at the cage he had forced it into. The minute Noa had taken the collar from his neck, his monster had roared in victory. It had already craved the woman; her long pink hair and leather-clad body were his greatest fantasy come to life. My reward, it chanted whenever she was near. My reward for all the years in Brethren hell.
Diel felt his hot body break out in shivers, as if the flu held him in its grip, like how he had felt after he had been branded by the Brethren’s hot irons, as Father Quinn watched his body fight the resulting infection with zero medication—delirious, yearning for reprieve.
Diel looked down at his hands, as if they should appear different. He had only a second to take a single breath before the monster melted into the black mist that made up its previous form and infected Diel, a plague-like virus racing through his cells and blood and bones, shredding his muscles as it fought for control.
“No,” Diel spat out, teeth gritted and jaw aching. He tried to push the monster back, but without the threat of the collar’s electric shock, it was as stubborn as the devil, a demon intent on complete possession, finally overriding the last bastions in Diel’s body that had resisted its pull for too long.
Even in the high intensity of that moment, Diel remembered his younger self, the confused boy who dreamed of the day that the chains were torn from his body and he got to embrace the monster. But now that fantasized moment was here, born in reality, a spike of true fear splintered through his skull. He never fucking felt fear. Nothing scared him after the hell he and his brothers had been put through.
But as the monster seeped too deep into his body to ever be removed, like a malignant tumor too advanced to conquer, Diel felt that spark of fear stab down his spine like the plunge of an archangel’s fiery sword.
Diel had spent a lifetime searching for an outlet from who he was. The monster had been his shield against the fucking war the Brethren had raged on his young, fragile body. But now he was in jeopardy of losing all that he was to the monster he had once viewed as his savior, he didn’t want Diel the man, himself, to die. He didn’t want to suffocate under the monster’s fists.
He wanted to fucking live.
He wanted to fucking fight.
Diel realized that his legs had buckled and he was on all fours on the floor. He was wrenched away from his inner thoughts to find himself staring at the folly’s ancient stone beneath his palms and knees. The monster felt like a ten-ton weight crushing down on his back, threatening to snap his spine. He gasped for breath, trying to stop it from taking control, when he heard, “Don’t resist it.”
Those three words were like a rope being tied around his chest, pulling tight and guiding him through the quicksand to stand. Diel’s head lifted, his torso straightening some despite the slicing of claws along the flesh of his back. His eyes clashed with a familiar brown gaze.
Noa. Noa had done this. She had fucking done this! Diel’s head shook with rage, and he bellowed out the full force of that anger, his voice echoing around the room. Noa didn’t even flinch. She stood before him, decked in black leather and heavy black boots, her long pink hair a curtain around her curvaceous body. “You were never meant to be apart,” she said, not one bit bothered by the fury pulsing from Diel in her direction.
She did this. She fucking did this!
Diel heard a crack from the fire and saw the remnants of his collar tarnishing to black in the ever-climbing flames. Gritting his teeth so tightly he felt they would shatter, he fought back against the smothering weight of the monster on his back and shakily got to his feet. His torso unfolded as if it had been hunched over, lain dormant for a century and had forgotten how to offer any kind of muscular support to his body.
The minute he was standing, his monster attacked, thrashing and knocking Diel from side to side. His body was pushed left and right, his unsteady feet stumbling as Diel fought to keep balance. All the time he kept Noa in his sights. She remained unmoving. Just watching him with the dark stare that dared him to try and take her down.
“You!” he snarled, his voice broken and weakened as any energy he possessed drained out of him as if his skin were a sieve. “YOU!” Diel shouted and, despite his unsteady feet, he lunged at Noa. As he approached her, the monster hooked an arm around his neck, wrenching him back. Just as he was about to drop to his feet, Noa’s hand shot out and gripped his cheeks. The monster instantly calmed, groaning as the woman it wanted took him in her firm hold.
Diel’s lips curled back, but as he looked at Noa, he felt it. He felt the monster’s overwhelming attraction to her, its desire to fuck her, to have her clawing at his back and screaming their name. Diel’s throat tightened as he suddenly saw the fantasy the monster conjured in their brain like a movie reel. He felt Noa’s hair dusting across his chest. His dick twitched, and he fought to keep hold of the disgust he felt toward the idea of fucking her in any way. Of anyone ever touching him like that.
“He’s you,” Noa said, voice curt and words direct. Diel’s body stilled, like her voice was another leash he couldn’t escape from, the omnipotent voice of God that he couldn’t unhear. Her long fingers were tight on his cheek, her nails digging into his stubbled skin. She thrust him forward to keep his attention. “You are one and the fucking same. You don’t have a monster living within you. You never have. He is you and you are him.” She wrenched him closer, and a long groan slipped from his parted lips at her forceful action. His muscles heated, and he wasn’t sure from where it came—him or his monster.
Diel’s head rolled under Noa’s hold; he didn’t know if he was preening under her touch or trying to wrench himself away. Everything was a fucking thick fog. A great fog of black smoke that choked his lungs and eradicated anything from his sight but her. Noa with her pink-hued hair that shone like a fucking sun blazing in the middle of a nuclear winter.
She only kept hold of him tighter.
Lowering her head to his, nose to nose, she said, “He stepped forward when you were a child to shield you from all the pain.” She shook her head. “He isn’t a fucking demon. He’s you. He’s the warrior within you that, as a child, you didn’t even know you could be. He became the warrior you needed. He doesn’t deserve your punishment or censure.”
Diel’s heart smacked against his ribcage, almost like it was trying to escape too. But he knew it was just her words penetrating deep that was breaking him apart. Crushing any excuse he had ever given himself as to why the monster had appeared to him in Purgatory, how it had crawled from the darkness in the depths of night and protected him from the agony of the rack, the pain of the priests’ cleansing punishments and the evil members of the Brethren fucking him over and over like a dog.
Noa’s hand moved into his hair and pulled harshly. “His blood is your blood. His breath is your breath. His thoughts are yours. His needs, his lack of fear, his incredible strength, his fucking roars, they are all you.” Noa yanked at the strands even harder. “Embrace him, Diel. Fucking embrace him. Feel his darkness seep into your bones and make them stronger. Feel him invade your muscles and see them grow. Let his thoughts splice with your thoughts. Let his fucking half-soul merge with yours. Light and dark, both you and him. Embrace him. Protect him. Fucking love him!”
Diel shook so hard at the crescendo in Noa’s voice that he screamed. He thundered out a bellow so fucking loud he thought it would shake the world down to the final circle of hell. But as he released years and years of pent-up frustration of fighting the monster in his heart, and with Noa holding on to his hair, he rid himself of the chains that held him and his monster back from one another, two fighters circling the same ring, forced to tear the other apart, only to find out they’d been allies all along. He fucking ripped down the walls that kept them separated, and they crumbled to rubble at their feet. And with every brick and every piece of cement that fell away to gray dust between them, he felt the consolidation of his two individual parts. He felt the unification, the amalgamation of fear and strength, of evil and good, of light and dark—monster and man. One fucking formidable beast that enemies should fear and loved ones should hold close.
Diel’s vision grew dark as he collapsed to the ground, depleted. Noa’s hand slipped from his hair, and he felt her take several steps back as his body splayed out on the cold hard ground. Recovering. He heard Noa’s rapid breathing even from across the room, like it was a living part of him too. Like she was another beat to his heart, a secondary throb to his pulse.
He lay motionless on the frigid stone, legs tucked into his stomach. His limbs throbbed and his head swirled with dizziness. But second by calm second, that dizziness ebbed and the throbbing in his limbs became a numb kind of slow burn.
Diel blinked. The room filled with the low light from the wall lamps, and its features became clearer the more he blinked—clearer than he had ever seen anything look before. He breathed, and his lungs filled with rejuvenating air, the expanding flesh crying out in sweet relief. As he exhaled, the muscles in his body that always ached and burned, twitched and jumped, filled with soothing life.
No pain. No aches. No more feeling like they existed in skin that wasn’t entirely theirs.
His torso wasn’t clenched. The monster no longer paced in its cage, causing Diel to be tense at all times, guarding against any attempted breech. He looked down at his hands. His fingers were relaxed, no longer curled into fists, and he could see every mark on them. He could see the texture on his broken nails, where before it had been like looking at life through a dirtied, blurred lens—all grayscale, no color. Everything was a riot of color now. He lifted his hand into the air. He could feel the mixture of warm and cold air kissing his damp skin, swirling in the atmosphere around him.
He … felt.
Diel had never felt much before. There’d been a tourniquet wrapped around his senses, depriving him of their full effects. He hadn’t known he’d been so numb to life, to emotions and senses and everyday fucking mundanity, until that very moment.
The ground was hard and rough beneath his body, but he relished the feel against his skin. He carefully moved his legs away from his torso. They stretched, and he moaned at the ache—as if he hadn’t stretched in years, as if he’d been stuffed into a box, chained shut, with no one returning to free him.
He paused. He searched for the monster’s presence inside him, the ghost that was an eternal shadow behind him, a constant dark whisperer in his ears. But there was nothing.
No, that wasn’t true. He felt its presence, its soul existing, surviving, at peace. But it was no longer separate to his.
It was him.
Diel’s chest suddenly felt light, without the constant burden of being split into two severed parts.
It had always been him. Them. Both. Conjoined twin souls occupying one body. Brothers in arms at the beginning, enemies for a time … now one complete force of nature.
Diel sat up, breathless with excitement, feeling as though he’d just been reconditioned as a man, upgraded, repaired … finally found after years lost in an abyss. Like an automatic download from the ether, memories from both monster and man filled his head. But they were no longer separate memories, of two distinct personalities swapping back and forth like the constant flicking of a switch. He realized that the memories and experiences had been made and lived by them both. And the memories rained down on him like blanket bombs. He felt rage and fury and disgust and pain as he recalled being under the Brethren’s control as a child. He felt happiness and freedom from the nights the collar was turned off and he made the kills.
And he felt the fatefulness of both the Fallen’s kinship and brotherhood and meeting the Coven and—
Noa.
He stilled, heat swelling his muscles, and he slowly rolled his neck. No collar. No motherfucking collar to inhibit his movements. Because of her. Because of—
Noa.
He recalled long pink hair and a palm touching his cheek, warmth shining in brown eyes. He felt her soft-skinned throat under his hand as he lifted her against the wall. And he felt the heavy attraction to her that blazed inside of him. He remembered seeing the sinful side of her too. The darkness that swirled in her pupils, like a mating call to the wicked that lived in him. His pulse raced faster and faster, a song building to a dramatic, drum-crashing climax.
Hello, pretty monster …
That voice. That fucking sweet, addictive voice calling to him, accepting all parts of him. He could smell her as if she were right before him. Lavender and sweet musk. Skin as soft as silk, hair a soft pink veil.
She had freed man and monster from their mutual prisons. She had reunited them, made him see that that they were never different entities. Instead, they had been one soul cleaved apart by the fucked-up men in red dog collars.
Because of her, they were finally whole.
Turning where he sat, Diel spotted Noa still standing near the fire. Energy surged through his body. He jumped to his feet and swung to face her. Sweat dripped from his body, droplets trickling down his taut chest, over the Brethren brand that connected them both. His breathing was quick, and his cock jerked in his jeans at just the sight of her standing before him like an offering.
She was fucking beautiful.
Diel’s feet were anchored to the ground. Noa watched him closely, then after raking her eyes up and down his body, she met his gaze once again. A smile formed on her full red lips. “Welcome back, pretty monster.” Her smile grew wider.
Her pretty monster. He was her fucking pretty monster.
That was all it took for Diel to charge. He rushed across the room, the new weightless feeling inside him making it akin to flying. In seconds he had Noa in his arms and pressed, once again, against the folly’s jagged wall. But this time it wasn’t to kill her or wrap his hand around her throat. There was no murderous intent within him anymore, at least not toward her.
Noa’s warmth breath fanned across his face.
He closed his eyes and breathed in her intoxicating scent. As he opened them, it was like seeing her face for the first time. And it was as stunning as a church’s stained-glass window. Every part of her was complex and enslaving.
Noa’s eyes weren’t simply brown. They were ochre, the color of a fall leaf on a low-hanging branch, clutching on to its final days of life. Her skin was milky white, as if she’d been carved from marble. A batch of freckles were scattered across her nose like spilled cinnamon on a baker’s countertop. And her hair … Diel moved his head closer and pressed the soft strands against his cheek. Vibrant. She looked celestial, like she was not of this world.
To him, she was as powerful as a motherfucking deity.
Diel’s breathing was ragged, but he didn’t give a fuck about lost breath. Noa was pressed against him, and he felt every exaggerated curve of her body. Noa lifted her hand and moved back a strand of black hair that had fallen over his left eye.
He tensed with need as Noa smiled and whispered, “There he is.” Her hushed comment made his heart swell so big he thought it might rip out of his chest. Then her hand traveled down his face, leaving a river of heat in its wake. Diel bit his lip at her touch, his monster’s memories showing him just how much they’d craved it. How the man had had nothing to fear from her. She was like them. God had made her just like them. At that thought, Diel rolled his hips forward, but he froze when her fingertips drifted to the scar around his neck.
Diel held his breath, closing his eyes. He became completely still, a veritable statue, as Noa ran the top of her nail over his mangled and mutilated skin. Diel exhaled in stuttered bursts from his nose as her finger traveled to the nape of his neck, then back to where his collar had sat against his Adam’s apple. He opened his eyes, chest aching. Noa was breathing heavily too, her pupils blown. Her back arched off the wall, and she pressed her leather-covered breasts against Diel’s slick, naked chest.
