by Esme Devlin
“What can I get for you, princess? Tell you what, I’ll let you have two since you’re legal now.”
She giggles and beckons me over with a painted fingernail. “I’m not drinking tonight.”
I cock an eyebrow at her. “It’s your eighteenth. Have a drink if you want one, I’m not here to judge.”
But she just shakes her head, slow as fuck, a smile playing on her lips and her eyes dancing. “No.”
I’m about to tell her not to say that fucking word to me, because she’ll not see twenty minutes of her own birthday party.
But then the penny drops.
Fuck — not a penny.
The boulder drops.
“You serious?”
She starts nodding slowly and I think something cracks inside me. It’s like at the end of the grinch when the cunt grows a whole new fucking heart. Bad example, but you get the idea.
I’m delighted.
And that’s a very rare emotion for me to have right there.
I look around the room, not sure who to tell first. But she grabs a hold of my hand and pulls me back in close to her. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your emotions in check. It’s still early days. Very early days.”
I get her point, but how do I keep that to myself? And how fucking long are we talking here?
But we’ll discuss that later. This is her night. Everything needs to be perfect. And everything will be perfect. Else blood will spill.
So I calm myself down and bury my emotions again, just like she asked me to. She gets a glass of tap water thrown her way and starts laughing while I come around the bar.
“Will you dance with me?”
My hand goes to my neck and I give her a look that says I don’t know how to dance. And I could go my whole life quite happily without ever trying to.
She doesn’t pet her lip, though, and I’ve always admired that about her.
She just grabs my hand and drags me up to the space beside the pool table anyway.
I don’t even know what the song is. Grace seems to know, considering she’s lip singing it at me. Might as well be Latin for all I know.
But I take her in my arms anyway, resting a hand at the small of her back and I do the whole routine as good as what she’s ever going to get.
She’s looking up into my eyes and I think that’s when it hits me. I’m happy. Actually, properly, happy. And that’s something I never thought I’d ever say or think.
But I don’t know if I should say that to her, so instead I tell her other shit that sounds more like me.
“I’m obsessed with you,” I tell her.
Her eyes flick all around my face and she misses a good few beats before she opens her mouth. “I’m obsessed with you, too.”
“Fuck have you done to me?”
She laughs at that one. “That was all you. Since day one, it’s always been you.”
“Remember when I told you I could have loved you?”
She smiles at me. “I’ll go the rest of my life without forgetting that day.”
“Good, because I meant it. I’m going to love you. Every day until my last one.”
I bend down and give her kiss and she pulls me even closer. “I’m going to love you too,” she says.
I pull back and then I don’t even know what the fuck comes over me. I didn’t plan this. I mean I always planned this, just not like this, but this seems right.
I drop to my knees and the room stops chatting almost immediately. “Will you marry me, Grace McCormack?”
She smiles, giggles, puts her free hand to her mouth and tries to hide her expression. Then finally, she nods. “You’re crazy, but yes.”
I get up, nodding back at her. “Go and sit yourself down with Kate, I’ll not be a minute.”
Then I duck out of the room and go up the stairs to my bedroom. I don’t think Grace has ever seen any of this shit. She doesn’t pry, just like my mum. She doesn’t sneak around looking for answers where there are none, she just asks me straight to my face — and I admire her for that.
I pull open one of the drawers in the old writing desk and take my mum’s ring out, taking a second to admire it before I slip it into my pocket. The pile of books catches my eye as I’m closing the drawer. My old notebooks. The ones where I used to scratch all my feelings into paper and laugh at how much the world would judge me for them if they ever caught wind of it.
I’m not hiding these from Grace. They’re sitting right here, and she could read them if she wanted to, but I doubt she would.
So I pick them up, and one by one I throw them down into the fire. I don’t think I’ll ever let go of the hate or the anger poured onto those pages. To be honest, I don’t think I need to. I’ve found a way to have all that inside me but have someone else there too.
Someone who is going to bring someone else in there with us.
I hope it’s a girl.
Plenty of time to have an army of boys. I want a girl I can shower in attention and cuddle when the nightmares get too bad for her.
I think about that while I watch the books shift in the fire as the flames lick higher above the edges.
Grace said I was poetic. I think maybe all insane people are. Just like this fire, we burn each other, again and again because we can’t fucking help it. She burned me every day with her tongue, her bite, her fight. I burned her too, her mind, her body, her past, her future. Burned it all and threw it into the flames just like these notebooks. But that’s what souls who live in the shadows do. We burn each other, over and over again just so we can feel a little bit of light on our skin.
And I’ll burn with Grace until the day I die.
THE END
Please note this story continues in Book 2 of Twisted Games and follows a different couple who have been briefly introduced in this book.
THE TRUTH GAME
Grace has a monster.
I have a secret.
What one would be worse —
A secret, or a monster?
The monster could hurt you, but the secret promised to strangle you in your sleep.
I have a secret, and I’ll take it to the grave with me.
I’ll take it to the same grave the secret started. I’ll take the secret from your throat and make you wish I was only a monster. You think you have a secret? You’re about to find out how wrong one little girl can be.
Also by Esme Devlin
Twisted Games Series
The Truth Game
The Lies Game
Tormented Series
Tormented Part 1
Tormented Part 2
About the Author
Hello and as always, thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. For this one I just wrote the book I wanted to write. Was he a good guy? Probably not. Did I love him anyway? Hell yes. Does that mean I have issues? Hahaha WHO KNOWS?!
A huge thank you to my amazing Beta reader Lizzie who stayed up many a late night with me while I was writing this. (Malachy is hers!! Haha.) Also my amazing friend and author Nicole Cypher who is always there to give me support and much needed validation. And to my love for life Logan Fox who has helped me more than I can say here :-)
If you’d like to follow me on social media I would love to have you! I am busy working on The Truth Game. Have you worked out who it’s about? Come tell me!
