Page 48 of Sweet Violence
"Now tell me about my next mission. Did you say there was a training hall? As in, full of fighters? Probably massive, scary demons?"
Dev chuckled and released me, walking casually to the pile of bodies and swiping a clawed finger through the viscous pool of blood. I gave him a sceptical look when he came back to me.
"You'll handle it beautifully," he assured me. "There's no match for you in this empire except me and your circle."
As if to echo it, he reached for my arm and drew a heart on my pale skin with blood.
Crazy bastard.
I couldn't help thinking his obsession with me was tinting his view of my abilities a smidge. But I was curious about the next batch of Dev's enemies—and Taj's enemies. And if they turned out to be working with my asshole father, I could weaken him and stop whatever new bullshit plan he concocted to take over Hell and kill the devil.
Because I was getting a little too comfortable here in Hell, and a little too at ease around the devil, too. If Eidolon did anything to threaten that … well, I didn't knowwhatI'd do. I was still off-balance and fucked in the head from everything that happened in London, that damn massacre—it wouldn't take more than a little nudge to push me off the deep end.
And something told me there wouldn't be any coming back from it.
15
"You're going soft," I muttered at myself as I strapped my last knife over my newly cleaned leathers, and zipped up my boots.1
I left my backpack downstairs near the door to my suite—I needed to come back to meet Dev before I left anyway—and huffed at myself the whole way across the fortress to the wing where the circle lived. Or as the devil had taken to calling them,mycircle. I liked it much more than I wanted to. My possessive heart beat harder at that little word—my. Mine.
I poked my head into the kitchen, half expecting Joseph to be cooking up a banquet. The man always seemed to be making food when I saw him, but the homely, wooden kitchen was empty. This suite was about as different from the palace they lived in on Earth as you could get.Thatwas a huge glass and chrome monstrosity filled with light and cold; this was warm and lived-in and kinda messy. I smirked as I kicked a pair of discarded shoes out of my way and strolled into the hallway beyond the kitchen, pausing at the sound of soft piano music.
Huh. Was one of my—the, I meantthe—circle a musician?
I didn't know as much about them as I would have liked, and that thought alone was worrying. I shouldn't have wanted to know anything, but at this point I should probably make peace with my fascination. Even if I wasstrictlyignoring any feelings—the existence of which was up for fierce debate.
Still, I couldn't deny I was curious about them. I wanted to know why Arkan ditched his post the night Koa got killed. I wanted to know why Taj spent so much time with his dogs when he should have been out taking full advantage of his princely status. I wanted to know how X perfected his completely insane murder technique. I wanted to know where Joseph learned to cook the best pancakes in existence.2
I was in deep, deep shit with this circle.
The soft green carpet of the hallway muffled my footsteps as I approached the music's source. The whole suite had an emerald, silver, and black vibe. Very Slytherin Chic, only without the damp smells of the dungeons. I approved.
I peered through the crack in the door, widening it just slightly so it didn't creak, and only locked down my sound of surprise with years of training to be sneaky. It wasn't someone playing a piano, but the most graceful, beautiful dancer I'd ever seen.
Holyshit. That's my mate?
I'd seen X do a lot of graceful shit, and he always moved with a certain amount of lethal beauty; his lithe, ink-covered body cut through the air more precisely than the rest of us moved. But this…?
I didn't know enough about dance to describe what he was doing, but I had a vague idea it was contemporary dance. Watching his sweat-slicked body fly across the room, it was more like art than dance. My heart began to thump my ribs as I watched him pirouette before falling to the floor, his spine bowed, head dipped.
He looked like he was about to cry, and my chest crushed up like a crumpled piece of paper before he surged to his feet and twisted, rising onto his tiptoes and extending his arm, tattooed fingers reaching for something I couldn't see.
The music carried him into a spin and I blinked when he did the fancy ballet thing of standing on pointe, his lilac hair damp and straight, flying around his face. He brought his hands into his chest as he twirled, like his heart was breaking. Honestly, I thought mine was just watching him. Why were my eyes stinging? Why were my arms covered in goosebumps?
I could hardly breathe as the music rose, a breathless crescendo that had X blurring around the room, sweat soaking into his pale grey shirt as he leapt and arched and dipped, emotion in every gesture and shape he curved his body into.
I knew he was beautiful and sensual, but this? I swallowed against a lump in my throat, watching him collapse to the polished floor with the last rush of music, slamming his fist once with the final note.
Holy fuck. He was … he was…
Actually, I didn't know what he was. I hadn't been exposed to a lot of beauty in my life. I'd been too busy training to go to galleries, too busy hunting victims with Dad to visit museums or watch a play at the theatre. I was pretty sure Christian Lachesi had never been to the opera or a dance performance in his life. And neither had I until now.
It was raw in a way I never expected, and made me raw just watching it. I should have been a bystander, but the emotions in X's dance tore up those same emotions in me. And fuck, right now I just wanted to escape the same darkness he'd been running from in the routine, wanted the love he'd been reaching for.
I closed the door behind myself with a soft snick, drawing X's head up. I didn't speak as I approached him, my heart carved open, bleeding every vulnerability for him to see. Fuck, it hurt. I wanted it to stop hurting.
"Av?" he asked, pushing to his feet and reaching for my face with the same care and desperation he'd reached out during his dance. A quiet song began to play, setting heartfelt background music to my heartache. "You're crying.Who hurt you?"
