Page 2 of Feral Monsters
Ike
He was so… quiet. Honestly, in the time we’d been watching him—or stalking him, as our youngest brother, Sabbath, liked to call it—he hadn’t ever said much. But I’d thought he might be a little more vocal once we rescued him.
Instead, he was just sitting on our couch, his hands folded primly on his lap. His back was ramrod straight, shoulders rigid and set back, chin tilted down, his gaze focused on the floor. In fact, now that I thought about it, the entire time he’d been in our house, he hadn’t met either of our gazes.
I cocked my head to the side, studying him more intently. Wraith, who’d been busy in the kitchen of our little apartment we kept in town when we needed a break from our family, appeared holding a sandwich and a bottle of water.
“Merit,” he called.
“Yes, sir?” our boy murmured, voice all demure and shy. And I fucking hated it. Because he wasn’t either of those things. Sure he knew how to fake it, but I’d been watching him long enough to know the fire that burned in his soul. To see the anger burning in his eyes when he thought no one was looking. Our boy wasn’t weak, and even if he did take anything his owner doled out to him, there was a hatred inside him that burned bright and strong.
I wanted to stoke that fire. To watch it blaze. And then, I wanted to set him loose on every mother fucker who’d touched him in his life, starting with his most recent “owner”. Then, we’d work our way down the list Wraith and I had put together, and we’d finally end with his parents, who put him in this predicament in the first place. Or maybe we’d start there. Who the fuck knew. So long as everyone who ever wronged him died slowly and painfully, I didn’t care what order it happened in.
I didn’t give a fuck if Pops agreed with my plan or not. I didn’t care that I was supposed to run every single kill by him before I ever made a move. None of us—not me and not a single one of my four brothers—did anything without Pops knowing about it first.
But this? I wasn’t letting Pops potentially take this from me. From Wraith.
From Merit.
Our boy deserved to have revenge. He needed to make everyone pay that’d ever hurt him, tortured him, touched him without his permission.
“Don’t call me sir,” Wraith grunted, his lips screwed in distaste before he smothered it. “Relax. I’m not your new owner. Neither is Ike. Just sit back please. You need to eat, and I’d like to check your wounds.”
I blinked at my brother. Was that why Merit had been so stiff and unmoving? Why he wouldn’t look at me despite me staring at him nonstop since we’d sat down in the living room? Did he really think we were his new owners? That we’d helped him out of those woods and I’d broken Pops’s rules several times when I dropped body after body of the men who’d been prepared to shoot him with those mother fucking rubber bullets?
“Oh,” I finally muttered out loud.
Merit, who’d just sat back on the couch, raised his pretty grayish-green eyes to meet mine. Fuck, he was so pretty. His dark hair was pin straight but still a mess on his head from running through the woods. And though he was shirtless and barefoot, his feet all cut up and his body covered in bruises, he was still so damn good looking. And fuck, I wanted to lick all those muscles. Sink my teeth into his body to mark him as mine. He was strong. Every time he moved, his muscles rolled beneath his skin.
“Why am I here?” he finally grumbled, taking the sandwich Wraith held out to him, then the bottle of water.
“We’ve been watching you,” I stated bluntly. “For weeks now, actually. We were supposed to go to my father to rescue you, but I grew impatient.”
“Your father?” Merit questioned before he bit into the sandwich, seemingly unbothered by the info dump. Wraith took a seat on the floor and dragged the first aid kit he’d set on the coffee table when we’d gotten home onto the floor with him. Wordlessly, he set to work on Merit’s torn, bleeding feet.
“Yes, our father,” I said, only slightly annoyed. I hated repeating myself, but I’d do it for his sake. I wasn’t sure there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for him, honestly, even if I didn’t particularly like it. “He runs things. Tells me and my brothers what we can and cannot do, mostly in relation to killing people.”
Merit didn’t even seem phased by what I’d said, and that had pride swelling in my chest. He was strong, just as I knew he would be. He was going to be absolutely perfect for me and Wraith.
“What Ike is trying to say,” Wraith said, ever the more human of the two of us, “is that you crossed onto our parents’ property a few months ago during one of the… games you played with your owner. Our dad was concerned and asked Ike and I to look into you. We couldn’t find you or anything about you, which forced us to let it go. But then, Ike finally found you again. You were bloody and clearly in need of help, but before he could intercept, someone dragged you back to your owner’s house.”
“I tried escaping,” Merit said quietly. Murderous rage bled through me on his behalf, but I managed to lock it down. Doing so was like second nature. Pops had made sure of it. “The window to my room had been left open to let fresh air in, and my owner forgot. My ankle was broken though, so it didn’t work. He beat me pretty badly. I quickly learned not to try escaping again.”
“He won’t touch you again,” I swore, my voice a mere growl.
Merit looked at me then and cocked his head to the side the slightest bit, like he was trying to figure me out. “What’s it to you?” he demanded.
Wraith answered before I could. “You are ours, Merit. You’ve been ours since the moment Ike saw you bleeding and in need of our help. But we are not your owners. We want you to have free will and be your own person. Make your own decisions. But that does not change that we have to have you.”
“We’re psychopaths,” I said, dropping the bomb like it was nothing. Figured he should probably know ahead of time, even if we had no plans of letting him go. “I’m more of a textbook psychopath than Wraith here. He’s more… human than I am. But I say that to say we cannot love.”
“We obsess,” Wraith informed him, picking up where I left off. It was second nature for us to finish each other’s sentences. Wraith could read me like a book. “And sometimes, those obsessions never go away.”
Merit scoffed and reached for his bottle of water. “I don’t see how this is any different, then. Clearly, you don’t plan to let me go.”
I smirked and licked my tongue over my front teeth. “You’ll see very soon, little killer.”
His brows furrowed. “Little killer?” He looked at Wraith for an answer, but Wraith was too focused on wrapping his foot in a bandage to meet his eyes. “You called me little killer earlier, too.”
