by Amo Jones
My heart beats loudly in my chest. I find myself slowly stepping toward Tillie, and I’m not sure why. It’s not until I’m beside her that I realize how much foot space I’ve made. Her eyes come to mine, covered in wetness. She swipes a tear from her cheek. “Don’t worry. He’s just mad that I told you.”
“Told her what, Little Terror…” Brantley growls from behind me. I knew he was there. Not because he had his hand on me, or because I saw him move, but because any time Brantley is near me, I feel him. His shadow. The darkness that hovers around him is strong, and anytime it’s here, I feel it. My soul recognizes it.
Tillie runs her tongue over her bottom lip. “Ah, I may have told her, and Madison, that Saint was mine and Bishop’s sister…”
Silence.
If you wanted to hear a pin drop, you probably could. Wind whooshes through the trees that line the sides of the monstrous-sized school, but other than that, all there is, is silence.
“Fucking fuck!” Bishop yells, jogging up the steps to the door Nate disappeared through.
Eli chuckles, following behind Bishop before Hunter and Tillie follow behind them. Then it’s just Brantley and me. I haven’t turned to face him, mainly because I can still feel the anger boiling inside of me, threatening to spill over the edge.
“Saint…” he says, and I don’t know what that simple word does to me. I can’t explain it.
Turning slightly, I find him closer than I initially thought. He takes yet another step, and my hand comes to his chest. I trail my eyes up, past the veins that swell over the pale flesh of his neck, his jawline that has been carved with a scalpel sharp enough to cut through stone, swollen lips slightly pinched pink, and finally up past his sunken cheeks. Dark and stormy eyes peer back down at me, with lashes that fan out any time he blinks.
“Not now.” I go to slip past him to follow the rest inside, but fingers connect with mine and electricity sparks through my blood, rushing straight to my head.
He pulls me back roughly, and I find myself once again facing his chest, his shirt fisted in my hands.
He tenses his jaw a couple of times, because the muscles on either side swell. “Don’t fucking question the shit I do.”
“I didn’t say I did,” I whisper softly. I can’t take my eyes off his lips. They look so soft. Curved in all the right places, with a perfect Cupid bow in the middle.
“Do you trust me?” he asks, his mouth moving around the words perfectly. He has asked me this same question numerous times through our life, and every time I’ve said a simple yes. Because I did. I do. Maybe. I did. I trusted him. But now that I have this information, something he didn’t think to tell me, it has left a hazy residue over that simple sentence.
“Bran, yo!” Eli calls from the door. But we don’t disconnect. I don’t push away from his chest, or look away from his lips, and he doesn’t stop glaring down at me.
“Fuck off, Eli.” His fingers trail up the side of my neck and it’s the first time I’ve truly felt the power his touch contains. Skin on skin. Death caressing life. Heaven invaded by Hell. Cold. So cold. “Do you?” he asks, and my fingers inch up his shirt, to the vein that pulses beneath the skin on his neck. I brush my fingertip over it, closing my eyes as my heart sinks in my chest.
Fingers are around my chin, his nose touching the tip of mine. “Open. Your. Fucking. Eyes.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why?” he growls, his warm words falling on my lips. He’s close. So. Very. Close.
“Because I can’t lie to you.” Finally, I step away, holding my breath. Betrayal isn’t an emotion I can control, but I’m no liar either. The truth is, I don’t trust him the way I did. Maybe the lie is only small, I’m not sure yet. I haven’t had enough time to truly think on it, but betrayal is betrayal, and right now, it’s the only thing I feel.
He curses under his breath, and I know I’ve lost the side he bared to me seconds ago. The entire time I’ve known him, he’s only shown it to me three times. Three times. All of the other minutes and hours, he was cruel, but not in a way that made me feel abused.
He grabs my hand anyway and pulls me behind his hard body. “I don’t give a fuck if you don’t trust me, Dea. You’re doing as I say whether you fucking like it or not.”
I follow behind him anyway. Even if he didn’t have my wrist in his grasp, I still would. Just before he’s about to push the main doors open, he turns to face me, and if I was anyone else, the glare he’s inflicting on me would make me squirm. But I don’t. Brantley may be the Devil incarnate, but he protects those he chooses to with the same fierceness it takes to rule over Hell.
“And if you don’t like it?” The corner of his mouth curves as he tugs on my hand and his mouth moves to my ear. I hold my breath, ignoring the way fire erupts inside of me. “Make sure you scream fucking murder. I prefer it that way.” He turns and pushes open the doors so hard they slam against the walls inside, causing me to jump. “Inside. Now.”
I follow behind, grabbing the handle and closing it gently. An office is directly at the front, with twin stairs behind that lead off to three separate wings. Behind the office is a large foyer, opening out to the back of the building. To the right is a long hallway, and to the left, the same. On the wall leading behind the front desk are years upon years of trophies, credentials, winnings.
I continue to follow Brantley down to the back of the office area, the smell pungent. Dusty old books that haven’t been flipped through in years, burned wood, and musty corners fill my nostrils.
Once we reach the back, Brantley takes a turn to the left and leads us through two wooden doors, where a conference room is. Maybe it was the staff room? Looks more like a conference room. Everyone is seated around the table with Nate at the head this time, not Bishop. His hands are buried in his hair, his hoodie over his face.
Tillie is rolling her eyes, tears long since dried, and Bishop looks over my body quickly, before going to Brantley. “Everything good?”
Brantley pulls out a chair, takes a seat in it, and kicks his leg out wide. I grip the edge of the one beside his, but his hand comes to my arm, stopping me. I catch his eyes just in time for him to grab me around my hips and pull me down onto his lap.
Everyone is silent. Another silent break. Why is everyone always quiet whenever Brantley does something?
I turn in his grip, but his fingers don’t loosen enough for me to do it comfortably. Finally, I’m turned enough to catch his gaze. “I can sit in the seat beside yours.”
He doesn’t pay me any attention, momentarily disregarding my comment. “Prefer you where you are.”
I turn back around to face everyone else, shrugging. I wait for him to move his fingers, but he doesn’t. If anything, they tense.
Bishop is still glaring at Brantley. “Are you done? Because we’ve got shit to discuss, and since she now knows about the biggest family affair in history, can we continue?”
Brantley kicks out his other leg, and because of my small frame and his massive one, I can balance on one of his thighs.
Brantley squeezes my hip bone. “Just getting started.” And for some reason, the words ring through my brain long after he says them.
Bishop chuckles, shaking his head almost in disbelief. “Well, shit.” He looks to Nate, but Nate’s focus is on Brantley and me.
I watch as a smirk creeps onto the corner of Nate’s lips, hidden behind his hoodie. “Saint, I believe we’re the only ones who aren’t related…”
The sound of a gun cocking penetrates the air, and suddenly a shiny silver barrel is beneath Nate’s chin, pressed roughly into his skin. His smirk doesn’t change, if anything it becomes wider.
Tillie stares at him. “Say it again. You know, because I don’t think I heard you correctly…”
Brantley is laughing beside me, so hard he has to hook his arm around my belly to pull me closer, farther up his lap. “Little Terror, behave. He couldn’t even if he tried.”
“Is that a challenge?” Nate flashes his pearly whit
e teeth. “Because I’m game.”
“No fucking games!” Bishop snaps, and everyone looks to him.
“Well, that’s a fucking first,” Tillie mutters.
Bishop flips her off. “Pretty sure we can at least agree on this, Tills.”
“Actually, yes.”
“Great, wanna put the gun away then, baby, hmmm?” Nate says lazily. Eli erupts into fits of laughter and Hunter is shaking his head as if this is a common occurrence.
Tillie slowly removes the gun from Nate’s chin. “Sorry. It’s the pregnancy hormones.”
“Yeah, because that’s it…” Brantley chuckles. She brings out a side of Brantley I haven’t seen. The energy between them is strange. Seeing Brantley with anyone else is weird, though.
“We’re here because the school is reopening in one week for the remainder of the year and indefinitely. That means that everyone from the school in the Hamptons will be coming back here. To old soil.” Bishop pauses. No more jokes. “The Hamptons site will be handed back to Hector and the older Kings. The students and staff are aware and are prepared for the shift. The ones who aren’t, are us.” Bishop runs his finger over the top of his lip. His eyes connect to Tillie. “You wanna show Saint around so we can talk?”
Tillie stands, strolling toward me while flipping her long pink hair over her shoulder. “Come on. Maybe one of the old fucks who used to teach here has an alcohol stash. God knows they would have needed it…”
I go to push off Brantley and his fingers slowly—so, so slowly—disconnect from around my hips. I turn to face him while I’m standing, his hand covering the bottom half of his face, his eyes on mine.
“What?” he asks, but doesn’t skip a beat when his eyes trail up and down my body. He pauses on my legs, comes back up and stalls on my chest, before finally meeting my eyes again.
“Nothing…” I murmur, grabbing Tillie’s hand and sidestepping out of his outstretched legs. The shift between us is roguish, but it has my palms sweating and my heart rate speeding up anytime he’s near. Deep in the back of my mind, I know he has been more obvious with his wants lately. The eye contact, the touches, the fallen words that stain my mind longer than it took for him to say them. Instead of this all being scary, I find it provocative and tempting. I want to push him, but what a stupid thing that would be for me to do. Flirting with Brantley would be like performing a séance. You don’t know what you’re going to conjure, but you’re screwed once you unleash it.
Once we’re far enough away from the boys that they can’t hear, and almost back at the front office, Tillie laughs. “Has it always been like that between you two? Because I’m telling you right now, that is not something we have ever seen from Brantley.”
“You mean the hands-on?” I ask, my interest in her question genuine.
She grasps the rail of the stairs, her dark red nails almost matching the cherry gloss antique wood. “I mean he doesn’t—isn’t like that.”
I shrug my shoulders and follow her up the stairs. “He’s always just been Brantley with me, so I don’t know any better, but no. He hasn’t always been so—touchy.”
Tillie snorts, rubbing her belly. “Trust me. It’s much better the way he is with you.”
I already know Brantley holds dark secrets. Some I know, most I don’t. I thought over time, he would eventually share them with me, but here’s the thing with Brantley. He will never share the details of his hell, not because he doesn’t want to relive it, because he’s more than capable of doing so, but because he simply doesn’t want to invite anyone in…
Past
There were footsteps down the hall. The light was out in my bedroom, but there was enough of it from the hallway that slid beneath the crack of my door. Back and forth the footsteps passed. Over and over again.
I was sixteen now. Brantley never showed up at home anymore since Lucan died, and on that note, he never explained why he died or how. Or why when they put his body in the Vitiosis tomb, Brantley didn’t have a funeral for him. An anything for him. The tension between the two men had always existed like ardent flames, but that, to me, was still weird.
When the footsteps stopped, I assumed he was back in his bedroom, so I threw the covers off myself as my feet hit the plush carpet. I had on warm fuzzy sleepwear, a pink cashmere crop hoodie and undersized shorts. Slipping my feet into my slippers, I made my way to my bedroom door, squeezing the handle and cranking it open.
I paused when I saw Brantley sitting directly opposite my room with his knees drawn up to his chest and one arm slinking on it. I should’ve shut the door as soon as I saw him. He was okay. Alive. That’s all I really needed to know.
But then I started to notice things. Like how he was wearing no shirt and his jeans were unbuttoned. How his belt was unfastened, and his boots barely tied to his feet. That wasn’t the obvious thing I noticed, though. It was the smeared blood all over his body. A body that he worked on seven days a week. Where his six-pack abs dipped, curved, and popped, there were droplets of blood and dark stains, all the way up to his neck. My eyes collided with his, and before I could stop myself, I was on my knees in front of him, my hand on his cheek where blood streaked down to his collarbone.
“What happened?” I asked, yanking his head left and right and pulling him into me so I could inspect him for injuries. “Are you hurt?”
He didn’t answer.
A defined smell of woody spice and strong-bodied liquid hit me just as I found his eyes on mine. I leaned in to sniff him. “What’s that smell?”
He laughed so hard his head tilted back and his fangs were flashing. Serious fangs. Brantley has teeth that would appease any dentist, but his canines are naturally pointed. Not a bad thing. Just adds to his eccentrically handsome face.
“Why are you laughing? Brantley, you have blood all over you, you’re shirtless, you smell weird, and now you‘re laughing.”
His lips twitched, but he kept his head tilted up to the ceiling. “I don’t know.” When the words left his mouth, I watched as his head came back to eye level with me, all smiles gone.
He brought his finger up to my face and I froze. “Don’t speak.”
I didn’t. I barely breathed.
“You read. Ever read Hunter S. Thompson?” he asked, and the question was simple, yet I still struggled to construct the right words to answer.
“I’m familiar with his work, yes,” I whispered softly, though I was barely breathing because the tip of his finger was tracing the outline of my lip. Why was he touching me the way he was?
“Have you come across his saying ‘Too weird to live. Too rare to die’?”
I swallowed, sucking in a gulp of air while I was at it, and nodded.
His tongue flicked out over his bottom lip, his eyes passive on mine. “Well, I’ve got a new one for you. Hmmm, wanna hear it?”
“You’re drunk,” I said, grabbing at his arm, but it was useless. I’d break my fingers even attempting to pull him to his feet.
“Nah uh.” He tugged away from me, smirking. “Wanna hear it?”
I didn’t answer. One, because whatever he did tonight was bad. There was a lot of blood on him that whosever it was wouldn’t have survived, and two, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it. Hunter S. Thompson was a brilliant writer, but he was controversial. He wrote on the other side of literature. The side with no rules. Of course Brantley would be familiar with his work.
“I’m telling you anyway.” He lay down on the floor, his eyes drifting closed as his arm shaded his eyes. All I could see was his mouth, which curved in a half-smile. “Too rare for earth, too doomed for Heaven.”
“Is that you?” I asked, entranced in the moment and not caring that I shouldn’t show interest.
He burst out laughing. “Fuck no. You won’t ever find the word heaven anywhere near my name.” He turned his head now, lifting his arm just enough for me to see. “It’s you. But you’re fucked now anyway.”
“Why?” I said, and again, I didn’t know why I kept enga
ging with him.
He smirked. “Simple, really. Because you’re owned by me.”
Present
I still don’t know what it was that he did that night, and when Tillie and I reach the top of the stairwell, I find myself turning to face her. “Do they do bad things?”
Tillie pauses. There are another two staircases that go up. I crank my head up and see that they go on for at least another four levels. “What do you mean, bad?”
I fidget with the button on my jeans. “I mean, do you think—I don’t know. I don’t know anything about them or this circle.”
“Yeah, well, you’re about to find out a lot.” We don’t take the next level. Instead, Tillie leads us down the long hallway, passing the lockers and doors that probably lead into classrooms, until we’re outside a room at the end of the hallway.
“Wonder what’s in here,” she murmurs. “Though honestly, a fucking werewolf could jump out at me by this point and I‘d totally believe it. Spoiler alert, he would also be a King.”
I can’t stop the giggle that leaves my mouth as she twists the handle and pushes it open. The room is dark, so I search for a switch on the wall and flick it on once I feel the nub. Lights flicker on after a few seconds. Chairs lead up to the back wall in a tilted fashion, with a large whiteboard at the front.
Tillie moves into the room. “You’ve never been to school or anything, right?”
I shake my head. “No. I had three tutors who would have a rotating roster every day of the week. On the third day, I would have all three of them and on the fourth, I’d—” I pause.
“You’d what?” Tillie asks, but I’m too focused on the guitar that’s sitting in the corner of the room, completely untouched. She follows my line of sight as I move toward it.
“Well, I’d do music. Piano, mainly, but also guitar. Their keys are similar, only a different instrument.” I can’t take my eyes off it. I don’t know why.
Tillie steps closer and wraps her fingers around the neck, handing it to me. “Play something!”
