Page 79 of Goldsin

Lucian sent me here to teach him a lesson: Don’t steal from the rich. But in truth? I’m only doing this for Marison.

Like they say, greed gets you killed.

“Let’s see if that small head of yours understood ...” I inch closer to his face from behind his chair. With my hand resting heavily on his shoulder, I wait expectantly for him to repeat the words I instructed him to say earlier.

“I-I’m a—I didn’t do it!” He cuts himself off, voice booming through the empty place.

Grunting, I straighten up, my jaw clenching while my lips twitch with excitement at what awaits him. “Very well,” I drawl before throwing a punch to the side of his temple. The crack of bone vibrates down my spine, awakening something inside of me. “How about now? Are you over your bullshit yet?”

Blood splatters out, raining down on the floor, and I feel like a painter creating his next masterpiece.

The idiot’s head snaps back, eyes rolling upward in pain as I stare down at him.

He worked as an intern in the North America sales division. I know the pay wasn’t the highest, but it sure was more than he would have gotten working anywhere else. Someone must have put him up to this. There’s no way a guy like him would have come up with the plan alone. Then again, he did rape Marison.

He isn’t as innocent as he makes himself out to be.

I’m staring at him, head inclined to the side, when the earpiece I’m wearing crackles to life.

Her voice appears next.

“Lost for words? Let me help you with that,” I hear her say. My dick stirs, jaw clenching with all the venom she spits at Marcus.

Fuck.

And when I hear the unmistakable sound of gunfire I grunt with pain. A different kind of pain from the one Marcus is undoubtedly experiencing right now.

I planted a bug in the dress I gifted Aurelia tonight. Not because I don’t trust her, but because I couldn’t deal with the thought of missing out on witnessing this kind of rage coming from her. There is nothing hotter than a woman who doesn’t mind getting dirty to achieve what she wants.

There is nothing sexier than feminine rage.

When she told me about her mother I felt a weight fall on me. It was all too familiar. The treatment she went through is nothing uncommon in the Inferno Consortium—something even my own mother can’t run away from.

But Aurelia’s mom wasn’t treated like a human being for even a moment. It was only in those last seconds ofher life that she was finally a person. That she finally lived to die.

“Are the things you did to my mom flashing back to you, huh?” Aurelia shouts.

Blood rushes through my body, and I see black.

My hands ball into fists, and I hear the sickening crunch echoing around me as I rain punch after punch down on his face. My rhythm is in sync with her anger—with her hard breathing as she relives what her mother must have felt. Everything, until Aurelia becomes her, letting all her injustice out through the wounds she inflicts on the guilty.

“Julian, please have mercy!” he whimpers through each punch.

But I only hear her instead. “All those disgusting, degrading things you made her do—did to her!”

An image of my mother flashes behind my eyes, her bruised body and defeated soul as she came to my room to read me bedtime stories even after what Lucian did to her. Even while she bled she put on a smile for my eyes only.

Her soft voice as she read each happily ever after. How her eyes shone even behind the makeup concealing the truth.

I hear Aurelia seething at Marcus, and I know she’s close to killing him. “Keep going, golden one,” I say under my breath even if she can’t hear me.

My fist connects with his face. Over and over again.

“No-no. Please ... I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he softly pleads, so faint I hardly hear it. Panic rushes over his features.

Then a gunshot rings out, and I grin like a madman as I hold the gun to his forehead, my shot matching the one coming from the earpiece.

Like two halves of one soul, both of us are silent as our panting encircles us, each with a dead body in front of us.

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