Page 16 of These Monstrous Ties
Nicolas could be a guard, but he isn’t. Not exactly. He’s smarter than the others. Not as smart as Jeremiah, or else Jeremiah wouldn’t have let him work for him. But smart enough.
It was Nicolas who’d come to my room to tell me Kristof would live, and he’d keep his hands off of me from now on. He’d told me to keep my mouth shut in the kill rooms, as he calls them. To keep my damn head on my shoulders. To listen to my brother.
I told him to fuck off.
Jeremiah never took me to kill rooms more than once a month or so, after he tormented me at Raven Park. I was good for the rest of October. That doesn’t mean, of course, that nobody else won’t die at his command. It just means I won’t have to see the remains. He likes to give me a break. To keep me guessing.
To make me panic.
He’s a businessman of the worst kind, if you can even call him that. He operates outside of the law, dealing in things most people wouldn’t dare.
Tonight, he’d killed that man before he took me to Raven Park. Our usual sick routine. A reminder of what could happen to me again, if I wasn’t safe.
I have no idea why that man was his target tonight. No clue in what way he’d run afoul of my brother. Jeremiah didn’t offer that kind of information. He didn’t need to. We were sworn to him, to the Order, for the rest of our lives. If we wanted to quit, well, our lives would end rather quickly.
But no one seems foolish enough to come after Jeremiah Rain, to oppose him.
I wish someone would.
Specifically, I wishedhewould. Lucifer. The Unsaints. But he’d vanished that night, the first we met. The last, too. Vanished with the rest of them after Lover’s Death. He could be dead for all I know.
I remember the time before Jeremiah and the Unsaints, when I’d spent many blissful years unaware that Jeremiah Rain even existed so close to me. I’d seen the hotel, of course, but I never gave a damn that some billionaire bought it. I didn’t know about Lucifer either, or the Society of Six. About Lover’s Death. The Unsaints.
It’s not that my life had been easy before.
It hadn’t been.
It’d been hard.
But it had beenmine.
Mine to end, until Lucifer convinced me otherwise.
Until my brother came in and took it all away. The choice. The plan. My mind.
Chapter Seven
Halloween, One Year Ago
The voicesgrow distance and the chill this far from the fire wraps itself around me like a living thing. I put my hand on the grip of my gun on my thigh. Before, when I strapped this thing on hours ago—was it really only hours?—I’d felt certain. I’d known what came next. After a series of bumps and bruises and shots to the heart, this final thing was going to be it for me. My own choice, taking my life in my own hands.
Now, though...I’m not so sure. But I don’t want to fall back into that abyss of darkness I’d fell into too many times before. That darkness was suffocating. Maddening. I know I can’t survive that again.
But can I pull the trigger when the cold barrel of this gun is digging into the side of my head?
I don’t know.
The party in Raven Park grows distant and I realize with a start that the fucking merry-go-round is ahead of me. The park opens up into a small clearing, a circle filled in with wood chips for kids to play.
Only right now, it looks like kids should never come here. The merry-go-round isn’t moving, but shadows seem to lurk within the small poles spearing the animals: bears, ponies, something that looks like a wolf but with floppy ears. In the dark, it all looks a little grotesque.
I think I see something thick spilling from the white unicorn’s side, but I shake my head and it disappears.
Ria’s words are just freaking me out. I reach for the horns on my head absently, still walking toward the clearing, and then I freeze.
Someone is watching me.
Standing in the shadows, leaned casually against a lion, it’s the man from the party with the hood on. It’s still on, down low over his face, concealing his eyes, but I know he’s watching me. He’s been watching me since the party.
