Page 11 of Like Grim Death: Part One
“Find someone else. He’s not staying with me.” Then I turn my back to him, step carefully over the person lying motionless on the ground, and head toward the stairwell. Cain and Atlas make up the bodies I need to get through to leave, and they both step aside, Cain knocking his shoulder casually but with cold violence against someone I don’t know standing on his other side, a 6 robe covering his features.
I give my brothers a head nod, then shoot my eyes to the stairwell. I’m fucking done here.
I hear movement behind me and sense shadows following.
I can’t bite back my smile at who I know is Cain, Ezra, Atlas, and Maverick, taking up guard and following me out of here.
Yet as I reach for the curved silver banister of the stairs, clenching my fingers around it, one foot on the bottom step, I hear the man speak down below.
I stop, listening.
“You will find the most monstrous of yourfamiliahave vast amounts of patience, Lucifer Malikov. Your father defied tradition by marrying a woman not meant for him.”
I clench my jaw, thinking of my mother’s car crash. Of all the times I wondered if my father had killed her himself, to marry the woman who would become my nightmare.
“We waited until he hadyou.”
My trigger finger twitches on the gun, still held by my side. I close my fingers tighter around the banister, refusing to look back. My father was a monster, but is this man saying in this one thing, he wasn’t to blame?
I don’t think I believe it. But then the man speaks again, trying to cast out any doubt in my reeling thoughts. “Then we murdered her, to make it hurt…just a little more.”
I feel something at my back. A hand pressed flat to my spine. One of my brothers.
I don’t react to the words, or the touch, even as I feel sick, my stomach burning.
“Your son is very cute, Lucifer.”
I want to fucking puke.How the fuck would he know?The only photo I sent of my son was to someone I hate more than anyone else in this world, and I know he wouldn’t pass it along, if only to protect my wife.
The 6 have seen Rain—something which made Sid very uneasy when they stepped into our home—but even they weren’t allowed to take photos.
I’m holding air tightly in my lungs, and it burns at the back of my throat, but I know this fucker isn’t finished.
“Your wife isstunning.”He pronounces the word with care, his accent curving around it like he no doubt wants to curve aroundher.
My heart hammers rapidly inside of my chest for the first time all night.
“Obedience.”My nostrils flare as he keeps talking.“Discipline.You remember your virtues, do you not?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer, likely knowing I won’t. “In case you have forgotten the most important among the 6, hug your beautiful little family tightly tonight as you reflect on it.”
I stay completely still.
“Self. Sacrifice.”
“Who the fuck was that?”It’s Ezra who asks the question first, leaning against his dark gray Audi—which he hasn’t wrecked in a while—hands in the pockets of his ripped, black pants which are tucked into slate-colored military boots.
The first night of October is unseasonably cold, my shoulder is aching, and I’ve stripped off my gloves and tossed them into the trunk of my blue M5. All I want is to go the fuck home to Lilith and Rain, but I run this shit, so I have to deal with the aftermath of what just fucking happened.
I’ve got a cigarette pinched between my thumb and forefinger, and I bring it to my lips, inhaling and watching the cherry grow bright in the night.
I glance at Sanctum, a quarter of a mile away down the dirt road we drove out on to put some distance between ourselves and the 6. Sprawling gray stone, a cross atop the steeple, stained-glass windows, and a paved parking lot. Our new headquarters, it looks so similar to the old one, Jeremiah fucking Rain shouldn’t have wasted his time burning it down. I clench my front teeth around the cigarette, thinking of him and wondering where the fuck he is.
Unlike my half-brother,we’restill here, the evil carried with us. The only difference, I guess, is the gated cemetery around back of the church isn’t full of our dead relatives.
Yet.
“And where’s Atlas?” Mav’s words. I look at him, his McLaren’s rear close to the grill of my BMW. We’re parked in a twisted circle made up of mine, Mav’s and Ezra’s vehicles, plus Cain’s blacked-out Camaro. Cain is leaning against his car, fucking around on his phone, probably playing a game or something because we don’t have any service out here. An intentional thing.
I exhale smoke through my nose, holding Mav’s baby blue gaze, which seems to glow in the dark. Bass beats from Ezra’s Audi filter through the quiet of the still night, a dense forest at our back, fields surrounding the new Sanctum. A desolate road, the 6 snapped up all the land alongside it.
