Page 77 of Call It What You Want
He jolts when the blade bites into his skin, a wet sound following as I drag it across his chest. Not deep enough to kill. Just deep enough to hurt. To motivate.
“Please—” His voice cracks.
“Tell me…”
“I can’t?—”
“You can, and you will. Or I won’t have any more use for you,” I say. “And do you know what I do with things I have no use for?”
The knife twists in his hand again. His scream rips through the air, raw and animalistic. “Okay!” he pants. “Okay. I don’t know who hired me, exactly. But I know the order came from the inside, someone calledArbrum Notis.”
Everything stops. He fumbled the name, but I know it. A ghost from three years ago. “Aurum Noctis?”
The username from the Senator’s computer.
“Yeah, that’s it,” he says.
I stare down at him, my breathing labored. “You’ve talked to him?”
He shakes his head weakly, eyes rolling back. He’s losing consciousness. “Only through text…” He struggles to breathe, head lolling to the side. “You think you know who your enemies are. But not all of them are outside the walls…”
I sink the knife into his chest, right into his heart, watching with satisfaction as he twitches once, then twice. There wasno point in asking him more questions. Whatever he said next would’ve been a last, desperate lie.
Sin whistles long and slow. “Well, well, well.Now,that’sinteresting.”
I pull the knife free, blood dripping from the blade. The man slumps in the chair. The sight of him beaten and bloody should feel like victory. It doesn’t. It only feeds the thing inside me that never gets full. That part that wakes up hungry no matter what I do.
“It’s someone close, then,” Sin muses. “Someone who knows how to get to you...”
I drag a hand down my face, leaving a streak of wet blood in its wake. My pulse is still hammering, and I can’t tell if it’s adrenaline or my hunger for more violence.
“Careful,” Sin says. “You keep losing control like that, and there won’t be much left for your girl to save.”
I let out a dark laugh. “She’s the one who needs saving.”
For once, Sin doesn’t look amused. “Yeah, I’m not so sure about that…”
With a grunt, I drop the knife onto the tray, and it falls with a loud metallicclang.The guy in the chair is still breathing, but barely. I’d be surprised if he made it past the hour.
I wipe the blood off my knuckles and head for the door, needing space before I do something I can’t take back.
Sin’s laugh follows me. “You’re slipping, McKnight. All this over a girl?”
I don’t answer him, but the words crawl under my skin anyway.
Because he’s right.
This isn’t about control or vengeance or the damn Burning Crown anymore.
It’s about Ava.
I never stopped loving her.
Not when she left, not when I told myself she was safer without me, not when I tried to fuck the feeling out of my system. It’s been there the whole damn time, festering under my ribs, waiting for the moment she’d walk back into my life and remind me what it felt like to bleed.
And now that she’s here, I don’t know how to stop. I don’t think I ever did.
I shut the vault door, locking Sin in with the mess. As I head up the basement stairs, I tell myself I’m calm. But I’m not. The need for violence still pulses in my veins, and I hate how good it feels.
