by KV Rose
I never knew it could feel this good.
My head is tipped up, hair down my back, and in this moment, with my eyes closed, him inside of me, his hand claiming my throat, I feel loved. And I know, even in the moment, it’s the most twisted sort of love. The kind my mom, if she gave a damn, if she had been someone else, someone that cared, it would be the kind of love she warned me against.
If my father was out there somewhere, he’d be disgusted.
But I don’t care.
It’s mine. And whether Maverick says it or not, whether he admits it, I know he feels something for me.
He groans against me. “Fuck, Ella, you’re so fucking tight.” He moves faster, and it feels so good, I don’t know why I was ever afraid of this. Of him.
His thumb pulls down my bottom lip and he twists my head so I’m looking at him. “You’re fucking mine,” he whispers. “Do you understand?”
I nod.
“Tell me.” His voice is more urgent as he thrusts into me, his breath catching in his throat for a moment. “Tell me no matter what happens, you’re mine, Ella.”
His rubs his thumb over my lip and I dart my tongue out and lick him.
“I’m yours,” I tell him against his finger. “I’ll always be yours.”
“Fuck, Ella.” He presses his forehead to the back of my neck, twisting my head back around. He pushes me down, so my chest is to the bed, my ass up in the air as he finishes, spilling into me, one hand gripping my ass.
He collapses on top of me, and I scoot my hips down flat to the bed.
“Fuck, you feel so good.”
His chest is sweaty, and it sticks to the shirt of his I’m still wearing. His arm is slung over me as he slides off of my back so I can breathe, slowly pulling out of me. He pulls me closer to him, one leg over my hips.
“I love you,” I whisper, my eyes closed, my body sated. My mind delirious.
He presses a kiss to my head and doesn’t move away for long moments. But he doesn’t say it back, and my chest tightens, something pricking behind my eyes.
I swallow it down, turn my head from him.
He squeezes me closer, and we stay like that for hours.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lucifer sits behind the wheel as we watch Cain saunter down to the drag strip, not bothering to bring his Camaro. He, like Luce, doesn’t believe in racing.
Bunch of fucks.
Atlas and Ezra are already there, sitting on the hoods of their respective rides.
The windows are down on the M5, both Luce and I smoking, just different drugs.
Lucifer tilts his head back, closes his eyes as he exhales through his nose, holding his cigarette out the window, his other hand rested on his thigh.
I pinch my joint between my thumb and index finger, throw it out the car and lean back, too, eyes closed.
Another Council, another hour of wasted time I can’t get back.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me. Shakespeare wrote that in “Richard II”, and goddamn do I feel it. Everything I do nowadays seems like a fucking waste of time, unless I’m with Ella.
I’m looking forward to Noctem, just so I can lose my mind. Snap.
“She’s gonna keep it,” Lucifer says in the quiet of the car, the only sound someone’s laughter from down at the strip.
I resist the urge to open my eyes. Something about my brother’s tone doesn’t really seem to mesh with what he’s saying. Or with what she’s told me.
“That’s great,” I mumble.
He laughs, but it’s humorless.
I sit in silence, waiting for him to unload. I haven’t talked to him about Ella. He knows I went upstairs with a girl that wasn’t her, so maybe he thinks I don’t give a fuck about her. And I tried not to.
I tried to let her go that night. Or maybe I just wanted to see how much it would hurt me to see her really hurt.
Maybe I’m just fucked in the head, but I know I won’t do that again. Seeing her sitting beside Mark at the bar was torture. Watching her touch Connor, too.
Thinking about what her mom’s ex-boyfriend did to her…no. That’s not happening again.
“She doesn’t want to,” Lucifer finally continues. He coughs, and it’s raspy, just like his voice. I keep my eyes closed. “But she’s going to.” He pauses, and I know what he’s going to say before he says it. “For me.”
I sigh, pressing further into the seat, my wounds healing but still painful. I haven’t needed to call Father Tomas back over. Haven’t needed to get lost in the pain again.
Ella is pain enough. And what comes next is going to be painful enough to last me a fucking lifetime.
“She’s going to resent you for that,” I tell Lucifer, my tone even. Brothers tell each other the truth, and since I can’t seem to do that about so many things, I’ve gotta at least try with this.
“She wants to meet Finn.” Another laugh, full of bite. “Get a feel for what it’s like to be around a kid.”
I know he’s ignoring my comment but there’s nothing to say about it.
“You’ll be a good dad,” I offer. I think that’s true. Probably overbearing and overprotective, but I know that as many screws as he may have loose—like we all do—he’ll be better than our fathers. He’ll do things differently. He’ll love with his whole heart, and he won’t force them to choose between love and duty. He won’t let them get girls entangled in a game that could cost them their lives. And if it is a girl, he’ll never push her away.
He’ll be good.
Better, at least, and that’s a start.
“I doubt it,” he says indifferently. “But she’ll make up for it. She’ll be perfect. She is perfect.”
You’re suffocating her. She misses Jeremiah. Let her talk to him. Let her go. Let her live. Let’s get out of this. Let’s run away from it.
Find her letters.
“She is,” I agree. I can almost feel his eyes shooting daggers into the side of my head but I don’t care. Sid is perfect. Perfectly fucked up, just like the rest of us.
“You ready for Noctem?” he asks with an edge, ready to change the subject.
“Yes.”
“What do you think it’ll be this year?”
I shrug. Usually, it’s psychedelics, lots of pot, a cave or a castle or an abandoned building with no civilization for miles. The 6 drop us off for three nights, pick us up as the sun rises on the fourth day. We’re supposed to have bonded. Faced down some of our demons. Not killed each other.
We’ll see if that last one holds true this year.
“You giving up the girl before or after?” Lucifer presses when I don’t bother trying to answer his previous question with words.
Maybe he does know a few things about me after all.
“You letting Sid stay home? You trust her?” I counter.
He’s quiet a minute, an engine revving at the strip. From the sounds of it, I think it’s Ezra’s. Hope he doesn’t crash into the trees beyond the runway.
“I trust her,” Luce finally answers. “I just don’t trust anyone else with her.”
Classic answer of the abuser, but I can’t really talk, so I keep my mouth shut and hate both of us for it.
“So what’re you going to do with her?” I turn my head, still leaned against his leather seat, to face him. He barely lets her leave the house. He still hasn’t got her a car. I don’t believe for a second he’ll feel okay leaving her for three days, not with the shit Jeremiah pulled at the bar. Things have gotten worse since then. They’ve fought more. Thrown things.
I know all of this, and he has no idea.
He’s looking at me, smoke coming out of his mouth. He tosses his cigarette without taking his eyes off of me. “Extra guards. And maybe if you wanna play nice, you could have Ria come chill with her.”
There’s a challenge in his words, and I deserve it. I’m lying to him about so many things, and I don’t feel great about it. He doesn’t know I had Ria. Doesn’t know I lost her.
&nb
sp; Only Ella knows that.
Only Ella knows every fucked up part of me.
I don’t answer him.
“You know they’re going to be looking for her as soon as it’s over.” Lucifer cracks his knuckles. “Maybe even while we’re there.” His tone is ominous, and I know he’s not trying to force my hand, but he’s right. They probably will look for her. They might have already found her. And I’m too much of a selfish prick to do anything about it.
My stomach churns, thinking about what the 6 might do while we’re away; to Sid, to Ella, and to Ria if they haven’t found her already. I keep reminding myself Elijah is better than Lazar, but every Council meeting shows me they’re all the same.
And my father, now that Lazar is out of the way, is the most toxic of all of them. Maybe we should just kill them all and get this shit over with.
The words are on the tip of my tongue: Run away with me. Let it go.
But I know better. I know they’re things over our heads, things we couldn’t begin to understand. To participate in. This is a cult like any other—charismatic, all-powerful leaders and brainwashed members—but it’s different in other ways. Richer. Stronger. More influential. The 6 decide elections. Sway organizations like the CDC and FDA. They know senators and presidents and prime ministers. Billionaires and innovators and even the quiet, wealthy hideaways that don’t want their faces in the paper or the tabloids but that pull the strings on puppets from behind the scenes.
I don’t want to deal with that. I don’t want to be involved any more than I already am. Maybe one day I’ll be ready, or maybe I’ll die before I have to play my role.
“What’re you going to do with the girl?” Lucifer asks me again.
He didn’t forget after all.
I look up to find him staring at me, and I think about how close we were when I took Ella to his house. Saw him snorting lines at eight in the fucking morning.
This is our life.
“I don’t know.” I decide to try being honest with him for once.
“Do you like her?”
“Yes.”
“You love her?”
“I’ve known her five weeks.”
“I fell in love with Sid in two minutes.”
I laugh, running my hand over my head. “Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, bro.” I roll my eyes, turning my head to gaze out the windshield. “It’s called lust.”
“I married her, didn’t I? Over a year after I first met her.”
“You two spent a lot of time apart. It was like falling in lust all over again.”
“I love her more than I’ve ever loved anything in my fucking life, and if that doesn’t count for shit, well, it’s the best I can do.”
I know he loves her now. But two minutes? Nah.
“But you didn’t answer the question,” he continues in a lower voice. “What’re you going to do with her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well think about it now. Do you love her enough to hide her? Do you love her enough to bury her? Let them do it?” He blows out a breath. “You love her enough to let Ria die in her place?”
I sit up straighter, the sudden movement making both my back and my side throb, but I ignore it as I shift in my seat to face him, my eyes narrowed on his. “I don’t know if I love her. I don’t know if I’ll let her fucking die. This might be news to you, but I haven’t exactly treated her like a goddamn delicate flower and I’m not so sure I’m not just using her to get some of this bullshit we deal with out—”
“Some girls like that shit,” Lucifer interrupts me coolly with a frown, his head still leaned against his seat as he watches me. “Sid does. Shit, I like treating her like shit, too.” He taps the side of his head. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly good, psychological reason for why her and I are so terribly unstable, but I don’t care what the reason is. She likes it. I like it. Save your flower bullshit. The girl probably doesn’t want it, and I know you damn sure don’t.”
No. I don’t. I don’t know what vanilla sex is to save my fucking life, but I know I never learned. I wasn’t raised that way. Before I started calling myself Mayhem, I might’ve had a chance. But after that…
Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done.
I try not to think about Ella’s request. Try not to think about the way I’d wanted to give in, to tell her the whole story. To give her some of my truths. Spill all my secrets. But then I’d expect her to take them to the grave, and that’s a heavy burden for anyone, especially a nineteen-year-old girl.
I’ve already told her too much as it is. She doesn’t need to pity me, too.
One of her own secrets echoes in my head.
Shane.
I don’t know who Shane is, what he looks like, where he is, but I do know he’s going to fucking die. Maybe right alongside her mother. Maybe my father, too. Maybe all of them.
Is that love? Wanting to kill someone that hurt her? That would hurt her? I don’t know.
“How do you feel? About your dad’s death?” I ask Lucifer, keeping my tone even.
He smiles at me, hands resting on his thighs. “Aside from hearing Sid tell me she loves me? Nothing has ever felt better than driving that knife into his fucking brain.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The ground is cold beneath me. The footfalls of the 6 leaving echoing around me makes me think we’re in a cave of some sort. A tunnel. But I don’t know. I can’t see. There’s a blindfold over my eyes, and my hands are bound by rope behind my back.
Noctem is here.
When the steps of our fathers dissipate, Ezra is the first to speak. “Who has the knife?”
Someone always gets a knife. They might blindfold us, bind us, and drop us off in the middle of nowhere, but we have to get free somehow because otherwise we’d just be sitting around here shooting the shit. The knife is also a weapon, in case we can’t hack it for three days with no food and lots of drugs.
In case we decide to turn our backs on Mos Maiorum, the unwritten code that says we put our brothers before ourselves.
Neither of us have been doing a hell of a lot of that lately. Maybe that knife will do more than saw through rope this time.
I don’t have the knife.
Ezra, apparently, doesn’t have the knife.
“I do.”
I roll my eyes behind the blindfold. Of course fucking Lucifer would get the knife.
“You mind hurrying the hell up?” Atlas asks. He doesn’t like the dark, and I hear the tension in his words.
I love the dark; after being locked in a closet for hours at a time at the hands of my nanny, I grew used to it. What I don’t like is thinking of Ella with Sid in Lucifer’s house. I told her about Noctem. Told her I would be back as soon as I could.
I think some part of her still doesn’t get what this is.
I kind of hope Sid can sort that out for her. I feel a little guilty, giving Sid that burden. But she would explain it best. She almost died at the 6’s hands, after all.
Maybe when I get back, Ella will have changed her mind. She hasn’t been bound to me, and no one really knows what I’ve told her. I could deny everything; tell them she knows nothing. She was a toy. A distraction.
If she wants to run from me, I’ll let her.
I think.
“Done,” Lucifer mutters and I hear something shift in the darkness and then cold steel against the back of my wrist.
He slides the blade over the rope and quickly frees my hands.
“Thanks,” I mutter as I shake out my wrists, letting the rope fall free. Then my hands go to the blindfold and I yank it off, scrubbing a hand through my hair as I blink in the darkness.
There’s not much to see.
I can’t even make out my brothers in here, but I hear Atlas murmuring his own thanks. Cain is the only one of us who hasn’t spoken, which isn’t surprising.
“Where do you think we are?” Atlas asks, that tension still present in his voice. He wants some light.
<
br /> Don’t we all.
I sigh. “We were in the back of the van for half an hour. Not far. Probably still in Alexandria.”
I hear the blade clatter to the floor and Lucifer says, “All done.”
“Hey, pick that back up!” Atlas shouts, panic in his words.
Lucifer laughs somewhere to my right as I push to my feet, stretching out my legs. “You get it,” he tells Atlas. “If you can find the damn thing.”
“I’m scoping this place out,” Cain says quietly. And then I hear his footsteps as he walks away from us, into, presumably, more darkness.
Someone grabs my wrist and I flinch. “What the fuck?” I hiss, but Lucifer laughs and I smell the cigarettes he smoked before we got picked up at his house as he pushes something into my hand.
“What’s this?” Although I’m pretty damn sure I already know. I pinch the thin rectangle between my fingers.
“Funny, man,” is all he says, and then he starts handing out the folded index cards to everyone, save for Cain, who is gone.
Atlas sighs. “Why do they always give the acid to you?” He sounds a little put out.
Lucifer laughs. “Because they know I’m the only one that respects psychedelics.”
I roll my eyes, unseen in the dark. Whatever. “I’m going to find some light in this place.” I take a few steps in the dark, one hand held out to keep me from running into something. Or someone.
“Good luck with that,” Ezra mutters. “Atlas, where the fuck are you?”
Atlas sounds relieved someone agreed to hold his damn hand when he says, “Over here,” and the two of them move toward one another in the dark.
“Luce?” I call as my hand hits something solid, rough, and misshapen. This is definitely a cave, then.
“Yeah?” Lucifer sounds far away.
“You coming or you staying?”
He’s quiet a minute, and I wonder how often he’s thought about Sid since we left her. I wonder how she’s doing. How Ella’s doing.
Where Ria is.
“Staying.”
