Page 5 of These Monstrous Ties
He feels weird under my fingers. Not quite cold. Not really warm, either. I stroke his cheek. Then I snatch my hand away and look up, meeting my brother’s gaze.
“Are you done?” I ask him.
He smiles. My stomach churns.
“Not even close,” he purrs.
I get to my feet. “Fuck you,” I say to him for the second time that night. “I’m done, Ja—Jeremiah.” Sometimes I forget he changed his fucking name. Changed his name and sold his soul, it feels like sometimes. “Done. Take me home.”
But I don’t move.
Jeremiah laces his fingers together in front of him, flicks his jade eyes from the body to me.
We’re blood. But in these moments, I feel like nothing to him.
“I need you to be strong, Sid.” His voice is low. “I need you to be brave. I need you to learn how to look out for your own goddamn self. But if you’re not strong, you won’t be able to do that, will you? Like you couldn’t last year?”
We’re not on a merry-go-round anymore, but I still want to puke when I think of that night. When he found me after fourteen years. At my lowest.
I feel that familiar anger growing in my skin. I’m always angry. But unlike the Hulk, it isn’t something I even want to control. And it isn’t a superpower. Not where my brother is concerned.
I stand to my feet. Beyond my brother, Kristof, meaty and bald, is smirking at me. Nicolas is frowning and he shakes his head. Another warning. I ignore him. I walk around the blood soaking in the carpet and stand toe-to-toe with Jeremiah.
“Let me go,” I say, my fingers flexing wide at my sides to keep them from curling into fists. I glance again at the muscle lining the room that my brother keeps with him at all times—even when he fucks Brooklin. But neither Kristof nor Nicolas reach for their weapons or take a step.
It makes me feel a little better. But it makes me angrier, too. My brother has never taken me seriously. Even less so since he found me in that underground asylum, bloodied and hungover, nearly naked the morning after Halloween a year ago. I had been alone. I wasn’t supposed to have been alone.
Before that night, I’d been free of him for over a decade. Now, he has me trapped again.
“I tried to let you go, Sid. We know how well that turned out.”
Kristof dares to laugh.
Jeremiah turns to him, his eyes narrowed. Kristof sobers up, wiping that smile off of his broad face.
Hell, if he keeps this shit up, the man on the floor won’t be the only one leaving this room in a body bag.
“Then give me a different job,” I snap, tearing my eyes from Kristof. My brother regards me like he regards everything else: Coldly. His head is cocked to the side, his obsidian watch gleaming beneath the sleeves of his grey shirt. “Let me do something besides viewing your leftovers.”
But it’s what he says next that’s the reminder. The reminder that I’m not an employee he’ll kill instead of fire. I’m not someone he will ever let go, in any way. No, I’m his. I belong to him, no matter how much I might hate it.
“My sister won’t be food for the wolves.” Meaning I can’t be an escort again. The only other job under the roof of the Order of Rain that I might be qualified for.
But not quite.
“Housekeeper? Chef? Fucking pool boy? Give me something else. I’m done with this shit, Jeremiah.”
“I’m going to let you reconsider what you’re asking me right now,” he purrs, looking down at his hands. He runs one through his hair. We’re inches apart, and I want to reach out and strangle him.
“I’m not going to reconsider. What am I doing here? Why…” I choke on the words. I look down at the bit of carpet between us that isn’t bloody. I swallow, the scent of blood hitting me like raw meat kept in an airtight container. “Why do you do this to me, Jamie?” My eyes meet his. I let the name he was born to hang between us. Maybe he’ll remember that he wasn’t always this nightmare. Whatever the Unsaints did to him, I think it might be worse than what they did to me.
No one breathes in the room. But it’s too late to take the words back now. The plea. Even as I regret it already, even as it feels as bitter as the blood in this room on my tongue.
Fuck him. Fuck the Order of Rain. Fuck. This. Shit.
“You want a different job?” He steps closer.
Involuntarily, I step back. Jeremiah isn’t just older than me. He’s taller than me. Richer than me. Stronger than me. Loved more than me. Or maybe it’s hated more than me...it’s hard to tell the difference between the two these days. He nods to one of the men.
