by Liz Meldon
Killer
The Hunt, #4
Liz Meldon
Copyright 2018 Liz Meldon
Published by Liz Meldon. All rights reserved.
License Notes
Thank you for purchasing this book. It remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons or situations is unintentional and coincidental. References to or mention of trademarks are not intended to infringe on trademark status. Any trademarks referenced or used is done so with full acknowledgement of trademarked status and their respective owners. The use of any mentioned trademarks is not sponsored or authorized by the trademark owner.
If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to purchase their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Reader Warning
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Bonus Content
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Thanks for reading!
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my fantastic beta reader Amanda for all your love and support. You were the first eyes on Moira and Severus’s story, and your enthusiasm pushed me onward. Much love to my phenomenal proofreader Phoenix, for catching my errors with poise and tact. As always, much love to my author besties group, my sun and stars, and my parents for being incredibly supportive of this journey. A huge shout-out to the amazing #bookstagram community for all your love and support! Last, and certainly not least, a great many thanks to my readers. Without you, there’s nothing but me and my imagination.
Cover Art: Daqri @ Covers by Combs
Reader Warning
Please note that as with all the books in THE HUNT, this book has a rating of EXPLICIT. KILLER contains scenes of graphic violence, sexual content, and coarse language. It may not be suitable for all readers.
Chapter One
“Severus, Severus, Severus… You’ve been a bad little beastie, haven’t you?”
Slowly, with great difficulty, Severus lifted his gaze to the creature standing on the other side of the wooden post he’d been hanging from for—well, fuck knows how long, honestly. While unable to feel his hands, most of his arms, Severus could most certainly feel the deep, desperate ache in his shoulders. It was relentless, the pain. Unending. Vicious. He shifted about, the inner demon snarling at the sight of Aeneas in the flesh.
He wasn’t surprised that the warrior angel had collected him. It had been Moira’s great fear during their last conversation—their last argument, he reminded himself, in which he’d acted like a scorned child mid-tantrum. She had feared this very scenario, so much so that she had been willing to walk away just to keep him safe. He hadn’t been able to see it at the time. All Severus had seen was the rejection, the fuck off in her eyes—which, when he thought back on it, and he had had plenty of time to think thus far, hadn’t really been there. But fuck off was what he had seen, experienced, endured from every other significant connection in his life, save Cordelia and Alaric. Instinct had forced him to run, to protect himself before the woman he loved could gut him and play with his ruined innards.
But what had running got him?
Captured.
Captured, fading in and out of consciousness for an eternity, with the knowledge and guilt that he had reacted too severely before. He should have just talked to her. He should have forced her to explain it, in agonizing detail, just to be sure of her intentions—even if it could have broken him.
Because—Moira wasn’t his parents.
She had never blindly hated him for being an incubus.
He should have realized…
“Wake up, dog.”
He grunted when the angel’s foot collided with his side, the steel-toed boot threatening to crack a rib.
“I am awake,” he rasped, his forehead resting against the prickly wood, knees bent. He could stand, relieve the pressure, but he was too weak. He had been weak when he’d returned from Hell—but he was far worse now, his strength draining, in need of a human’s touch.
The post stretched some twenty, maybe thirty feet in the air—ready to accommodate all sizes of demonkind. Cuffs snapped tightly around Severus’s wrists, offering little to no wiggle room, and chains strung him up. Below him, sand. It filled his circular cell, which had showered him in ceaseless fluorescent light since he’d arrived. While nothing like the bright burn of the angels’ light, it had been no more comfortable.
At least it hadn’t scorched his skin. The first time he had awoken, shirtless and alone, Severus had found his face, arms, hands scalded and blistered. The pain had been excruciating, so much so that even his inner demon cowered. Since then, his body had healed—barely.
Out of the corner of his eye, he spied Aeneas crouching by his side, head cocked, as though examining an unfamiliar creature at the zoo. Severus should have relished the sight of the angel; he had his daughter’s eyes, her pale pink lips, her severe angles.
Only Aeneas was nothing like Moira. He lacked all her warmth, her good-natured smile. He paled in comparison.
Moira was a vision.
Aeneas was a nightmare.
Severus swallowed hard, his throat lined with sandpaper—but he knew better than to ask for water. He knew better than to hope for any comforts in this prison, which, if he had to hazard a guess, he suspected was in the basement of Seraphim Securities.
That was the rumor, anyway, amongst the local demon community.
Still, for all he knew, they could be far from Farrow’s Hollow—far from the protection of Alaric and his father, and, worse, far from Moira.
Alone again, Severus.
He gritted his teeth when Aeneas dug a hand into his hair and wrenched his head back. Staring into the face of the enemy, Severus had expected to find it impassive. In his experience of sketching them for two weeks straight, angels seldom wore their emotions on their sleeves. Most of the time they appeared neutral, excluding the odd little smile here and there. Yet Aeneas radiated smugness. He oozed pride, cruelty. The latter shouldn’t have surprised Severus, but he couldn’t help it: angels were supposed to be do-gooders. Protectors. Watchers.
The smile Aeneas wore now was better suited to a demon—a prince of Hell, even, the kind they wore before they slit your throat. Severus swallowed hard, his neck straining under the angel’s grasp; was Aeneas about to slit his throat?
No. He glared up at the creature—this so-called protector of humanity, dressed in a tailored suit, a gold ring on the pinky of his free hand. Aeneas would draw this out, make it hurt. Severus was doomed to suffer under the angel’s hands—of that much he was certain.
“Thou art a sinner, Severus Saevitia,” Aeneas murmured. “We have been watching your filthy little operation for years, waiting for you to slip up. And now you’ve done it… Six clients dead in a mere twenty-four hours. Fresh from a hell-gate to a bloodbath. We cannot stand for this.”
Severus’s eyes widened as the angel tsked down at him, admonishing him as one might a child. Sluggishly, he digested the news, his head snapping back up the moment Aeneas released it. Six clients—dead?
Rage roiled within him. White-hot, piping fury that had him yanking at his restraints with all his might. The chains rattled but gave no sign of budging. The metal would have been forged in Heaven—what hope had he, in his weakened
state, of breaking it?
The realization did nothing to soothe his temper. Even his inner demon responded, roaring within, and his eyes snapped to black as he glowered up at Aeneas.
“There’s no point in denying it,” Aeneas mused, nonplussed by the display, by Severus’s aggression. In fact, it only seemed to amuse him further. “We found their mutilated bodies, Severus. All of them. Whatever did sweet Pamela Prescott do to you?”
He shook now, his body trembling violently as his supposed charges washed over him. Pamela Prescott—the widow in her early fifties who saw him twice a month. He had scheduled her more frequently in the weeks that he hunted Diriel, before he and Moira had gone to Hell. She’d brought him a sample of the first vegetables from her garden. Little things—tiny tomatoes, baby carrots, the daintiest of zucchinis. Moira had thought the gesture sweet; she’d even used the produce in their supper one night.
Pamela Prescott adored him, and Severus had grown quite fond of her. She was prim and quiet, a little shy—a woman who wanted to talk more than fuck.
Her face flashed before his eyes, and Severus yanked at his chains again, shooting up and pressing a foot against the wooden pole, trying desperately to push off, to get some additional leverage.
“I never touched those women,” he snarled, practically foaming at the mouth as he lunged for Aeneas—lunged, and yet stayed right where he was, too, the chains offering no give. The angel merely arched a white eyebrow, then snorted.
“Technically, you did. You touched all of them. Intimately. Repeatedly. Sinners, the lot of you.”
“You had no right to hurt them—”
“Me?” Aeneas pressed a hand to his chest, his expression shifting to mock hurt. “I never hurt them, beast. I never so much as rustled one hair on their little heads. You, on the other hand—”
“It isn’t a crime to seek companionship,” Severus growled. “To seek comfort and pleasure.”
“Ah, but did they know you sought something too?” Aeneas clasped his hands behind his back. He wore a small, patronizing smile now, but his eyes glittered with malice—with victory. “You stole from them, incubus. You used them for years, then butchered them for your own twisted delights.”
“Lies,” he hissed. “All of it… You slaughtered innocents to put me away. You. Not me.”
“None of your whores were innocent—”
“Something tells me you don’t quite understand how escorting works,” Severus said without thinking. “I’m the whore, not them.”
He tensed as a flicker of rage flashed across the angel’s face, vivid and raw, before finally letting out a soft breath when Aeneas smiled again.
“Semantics. I’ve done nothing but my duty, entrusted to me by Him to—”
“Probably not to fuck his children, right?” Severus lifted his eyebrows, knowing and not caring that he was pushing his luck. “I’ve heard that’s frowned upon by the heavenly father—”
Getting punched in the face by an angel was nothing like getting sucker punched by a demon. Severus went down hard, the chains biting into his skin as they propped him up. An angel’s fist—it was a sledgehammer. Ten sledgehammers. A hundred. As he hung there, mouth open, blood dribbling onto the sand below, he considered it a fucking miracle he hadn’t lost all his teeth too. Spots danced before his eyes, and he tried blinking them away, his shoulders screaming in agony once more, his full weight resting upon them.
The demon within snarled, a vicious, brutal sort of sound that rattled between his ears. No acid reflux this time. Severus knew his truest self wanted him to fight back.
And just how am I supposed to do that? Snark him to death?
He glanced around his prison cell, searching for mounted cameras within the sprawling space. Above, the roof domed, designed as one giant, unrelenting white light. Over his shoulder, he spied iron bars across an arched doorway, and darkness on the other side. No cameras. Nothing modern as far as the eye could see. Severus gulped. The punishment waiting for him—there was probably nothing modern about that, either.
“No,” he said with a heavy sigh, feeling the weight of Aeneas’s stare on his back. “No, you didn’t hurt anyone, I’m sure. You’re too careful for that, aren’t you? Just doing your duty… You probably had your lackey Diriel do it, didn’t you? Not sure how. He’s only just been released from Hell, and he’s marked, too, for his crimes. But I’m sure you managed.”
Aeneas hummed in agreement, and suddenly Severus felt him crouching at his right side again, the angel’s presence vibrating so soundly that it made him nauseous.
“Yes, that mark has made things difficult,” he breathed, the words burning across Severus’s skin. “I’d no idea the Corrupted Ones were doling out the same punishments down in the pit that we’re taught in Heaven, but I’m not surprised. They always were followers.”
“And you angels are, what, freethinkers?” Severus tried to make himself snort, but the sound choked him, getting stuck and gargled in his throat. Blood spurted over his lips instead, and he spat a mouthful toward Aeneas. It missed, painting the sand. With great difficulty, once more he raised his stare to Aeneas, narrowing it as he asked, “Did you pay Diriel too? Just as you paid Moira’s mother, Lara, to keep your secret? He’s a Lutum. He’s nothing, yet these days his network rivals some of the more established mob families. Did you buy his services? Is that why he wears all those fucking crosses? A s-subtle nod to his real master?”
“Such theatrical lies, beast,” Aeneas said, chuckling as he stood. “Though I am hardly surprised you have such a wild imagination. Your kind spouts lies just as naturally as they breathe. Great, grandiose lies in order to damn as many humans as you can. Pathetic, really.”
“Go fuck yourself—”
“Charming, as always.” Aeneas wrinkled his nose down at him for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Severus Saevitia, incubus, for the sin of murder, you are hereby sentenced to a century of imprisonment and punishment for every human life taken. By my count, that condemns you to six centuries with us. Welcome to Seraphim Securities. I am fairly certain you will not enjoy your stay.”
“You think I care about what happens to me?” Severus snarled, peering over his shoulder after Aeneas disappeared from his side, footsteps squishing across the sand. “I care about her. How could you do this to Moira? She’s your child—”
A hand slammed onto the back of his neck, shoving him down, stretching his shoulders to their limits.
“Moira Aurelia is an abomination,” Aeneas hissed, all that refinement, that air of arrogance, gone, and in its place a brute malevolence that Severus could feel in his marrow. “When the courts of Heaven decree it, and I receive permission from Michael at long last, I will slit her throat and bleed her dry, do you hear me? Perhaps I will do it here.” The malevolence eased, as if his spirits lifted at the thought. “Severus, you can watch her die.”
“She’s been searching for a father her whole life,” he bit back, “but you’re the one who missed out. She’s incredible. She’s smart and kind and beautiful—what you angels are supposed to be, and she’s only a hybrid. She will put you to shame, vermin. Just you wait and see.”
“Ah, yes, feel me quake in mine boots,” Aeneas spat, taking a step back. He then flicked something into the incubus’s line of sight: the tail end of a flogger, the tassels made of leather, their ends tipped with metal spikes. Severus’s breath hitched. That thing—it would peel the flesh from his back. Aeneas had mentioned a punishment alongside imprisonment. How often would he be flogged? Daily—for six long centuries?
Severus blinked hard, fighting back the sudden onslaught of emotion. His fear had finally gotten the better of him—fear that Moira would be long dead by the time he got out of here, whatever was left of him.
The spike-tipped straps disappeared from his side, only to rain down upon his back seconds later with all the force of a thundering train. He inhaled sharply as the spikes ripped across his back, breaking skin. Pain blurred his vision, and he cle
nched his eyes shut, choking out a groan.
“Now, I’ll knock ten strokes off today’s session if you tell me how to get into that little enchanted house of yours,” Aeneas told him, his voice calm again, his anger subdued. Severus heard the rustle of the tassels, the jingle of the spikes knocking together as the angel reeled his weapon back. “Severus? Think now. Twenty strokes will become ten. Tell me about the illusion. Give me the name of the witch who cast it. We know the building exists along this plane—we merely need a nod in the right direction so that we may access it. None of my men have been able to crack it, and they’ve been trying for years.”
Blood pooled in the small of his back. He could feel it, dripping languidly from his wounds, from the dozens of serrated slices across his flesh.
So, they hadn’t broken Cordelia’s spells, eh?
The thought had Severus smiling. His resolve stiffened—it had never faltered in the first place, but now a deep-seated satisfaction pumped through him. For all the fear the demon community had of these creatures, Cordelia had outwitted them, outmaneuvered them. His cousin, a fucking prodigy of a witch, had kept Moira, Alaric, hell, even Ella and Malachi, out of Aeneas’s grasp.
“You’ll never break it,” he sneered. “Never.”
Another crack of the flogger across his back silenced his chuckles, the laughter morphing into a low growl of pain.
“Fine. I prefer it this way, dog. You’ll break. They all do in time, and I have an eternity to wait you out.”
