Page 66 of These Monstrous Ties
“Aren’t you going to kill me anyway?” I ask.
He abruptly stops walking at the edge of the clearing. There’s a white Range Rover, and a black car. A blacked-out BMW M5, I see from the back of it. The vehicles are parked at angles, the rear-ends toward one another.
The Unsaints circle around me, their skeleton masks pulled down, and I see their guns are away. Probably in the back of their pants. I know Atlas, backwards hat on, directly across from me. I know Ezra, too, because he’s the shorter of them, which isn’t saying much. They’re all like giants. I recognize Mayhem, too, from his white tank and black pants, tattoos covering every inch of his arms. One on his face.
Cain is wearing a dress shirt, his head shaved on both sides, longer on top.
They’re expressions are unreadable, since I can’t see most of their damn faces.
Lucifer has been in my nightmares. Both awake and asleep. But I don’t know him. I don’t know these men, either.
I thought, that Halloween night, that maybe I’d fallen in love with him. I thought miracles happened. I’d started to think, before I drifted off into blackness, that he had been some sort of dark angel, a trueunsaint, sent to me in the night to keep me here.
But then I’d woken up naked and alone, save for the tormenter that is my brother.
Lucifer hadn’t been an angel. Not even a fallen one. He’d really, truly been the devil.
I look down at the forest floor. I can’t think while I look at them, while I feel Lucifer’s warm body behind me, clutching me to him.
“I’m going to kill them,” he answers me. “Everyone in the Order of fucking Rain. But probably not for the reasons you think.”
Fear steals through me. Not for myself. For Nicolas. Even, although I’m loathe to admit it, for my brother. I would normally never be scared for my brother. Never think anyone could get to him. But Lucifer has me, and while Jeremiah might not love me in the conventional sense, he’d never allow anyone else to have me. Especially not after what Lucifer did to me. Not after how Jeremiah found me.
My eyes drift to Lucifer’s forearm across my waist, the cut muscle, his long, pale fingers digging into my sides.
“Explain,” I whisper. I try not to feel his body flush against mine. Try not to smell him.
I don’t want to think about how he had met me at that intersection, slipped his hand into mine.
“You don’t want to know the truth.” He shifts against me, and I realize he had pulled a cigarette from his back pocket as his hand comes up from my waist and he lights it. He takes a drag, exhales the smoke over my shoulder.
I smell that familiar scent of whatever brand of cigarettes he smokes. I like it, although I’ll never admit that out loud to anyone.
I close my eyes. I don’t want to see the Unsaints’ focus on me. They’re so quiet, it’s freaking me out. And Lucifer seems in no hurry to get into one of those cars.
“Who hurt you?” he asks me quietly.
My eyes snap open. I almost laugh out loud.You,I want to scream at him.You fucking hurt me. You ruined my already fucked-up life. You left me at the hands of a monster.
I bite back those words. I don’t want him to know how much he’d fucked me over. I don’t answer him. He doesn’t deserve an answer. He doesn’t deserve anything.
“I can make her talk,” Ezra says, his deep voice rumbling through the forest.
“Chill out, Ez,” Atlas says, rolling his dark eyes. “She’s gonna have to talk, one way or another.”
Lucifer shoves me to the ground. I catch myself on my palms, the forest floor damp. I scramble around, sitting upright, but there’s no where I can scuttle to. They surround me. And from the ground, they look so fucking big. They could tear me apart.
But it’s Lucifer I look to.
And I don’t know why, but I do. I meet his brilliant blue eyes. He’s wearing a black, fitted t-shirt and ripped black jeans.
He sighs, exhaling smoke. “I don’t want to ask you again,Sid,” he sneers, as if my name is a curse. “Who hurt you?”
I laugh. It’s bitter and broken, but it’s a laugh. “Would you have cared if you had two kids?” I ask him, banking on the fact that Julie’s is the only other he has. Hell, he could’ve fathered a child in all fifty states. Fuck do I know.
I don’t know what I expect him to do. And it isn’t true. I took Plan B, brought in by Jeremiah. But I want to fuck with him a little, like he’s fucking with me.
“The fuck is she talking about?” Ezra growls. I don’t look at him, at my back.
