Page 28

“It seems I underestimated your skills, devil boy,” I purr, keeping my eyes closed and my face toward the sun.

“I can say the same thing, Angel. Nice knot work.”

His footsteps get louder, and the anticipation of him being close tingles beneath my skin.

“I was a Girl Guide, you know,” I say with a smirk. “I’m assuming you didn’t learn your escape artist skills in the Scouts?”

“It will probably come as no surprise to you, Angel, that I’m not really a fan of group activities.”

“Shocking,” I mutter, finally lowering my chin and cracking my eyes open.

My breath catches when I find him standing at my feet, amazingly still shirtless, and staring down at me as if I’m about ten seconds from being devoured. Or killed. And quite honestly, as he stands there with the sun shining around him, looking like the devil himself, I don’t really care which route he chooses.

“Whenever we used to go and stay at our grandparents’, my father’s parents, our grandfather would set us challenges,” he explains. “I’m sure most kids would get some kind of hide and seek to enjoy. But not the Deimos twins.”

I gasp loudly when his hands wrap around my ankles, parting my legs so he can press his knees between them.

“He used to have this shed in the garden. Well, he called it his shed. Alex and I named it his torture chamber.”

I’m so lost in his eyes, in the pain oozing from him as he tells me this story, that I flinch violently when his hands skim up my calves.

His eyes widen in horror, and he rips his touch from mine.

“No,” I cry, sitting forward and wrapping my fingers around his upper arms, dragging his hands back. “Keep going,” I urge.

He nods, shifting forward as his eyes search mine, desperately trying to find something that will tell him I don’t want this.

“I want everything,” I whisper.

“I learned nearly almost everything I know in that shed,” he continues, making my heart pick up speed.

I might not know the details, but I’ve heard enough to know that Daemon’s skills lie in torture.

My stomach turns over at the thought of what his grandfather could have done to those two little boys in that shed.

“He’d tie us up and leave us in there to escape,” he says before my imagination can run too wild. “And the whole time, he’d have videos playing of all the things he could have been doing to us while we were stuck there.”

“Jesus.”

“Alex hated it.”

“He doesn’t like blood,” I whisper.

“He’d refuse to watch. Instead, he’d lose himself inside his head. Singing whatever song he could come up with to drown out the cries of the men on the screen.”

He crawls closer, spreading my legs wider, but his eyes never leave mine.

“I, however, watched every second of those videos. I studied the reactions of the victims. I learned what made them talk and what didn’t. And all the while, I figured out how to get us both out.

“While you were all practising for maths and spelling tests, I was learning how to escape, and coming up with even more terrifying ways to make grown men cry, because I promised myself that one day… one day, I was going to tie him to that chair and make him suffer in all the ways he’d force us to endure.”

My breathing is beyond erratic when he’s finally right in front of me, his hands resting on either side of my hips and his nose barely a breath from mine.

“H-he had a heart attack, didn’t he?”

His eyes darken for a beat.

“Yeah. Motherfucker died before I got the chance to show him just how beautifully he’d trained me.”