Page 44 of Broken Obsession

Eden may have thrown up again, but when he got ahold of himself and turned back, it was to find the same scene before him.

Ares delivered a blow to the exact same spot.

Zonnie screamed, a sound unlike anything Eden had ever heard before.

He tried to stay focused, to watch, just like he’d claimed to want, but it was too much.

Eden managed to stay on his feet, but he blacked out several times.

Each time he came back, it was to an even more gruesome scene than the last.

It was like waking in the pits of hell.

And discovering he was one of the demons who resided there.

Chapter 9:

Two hours was a pathetically short amount of time to keep someone alive. It wasn’t even close to Ares’ personal best, certainly not a detail he’d be sharing with Zar later—or ever. But after the first sixty minutes, Eden had started noticeably shaking. By the one hundred and twenty mark, he’d sat down on the ground and covered his ears, unable to bear another second.

So Ares had stopped. He’d called it for the sake of his Starling, even though the only reason he’d been torturing Zonnie had been because Eden had wanted him to. He would have been fine slitting the man’s throat in the beginning and being done with this whole mess.

And it was a mess.

Blood coated everything, seeping through his clothes, making the sweatshirt hang heavy on his body. His boots made a sticky sound and clung to the plastic as he moved, and there was hair stuck to his leather gloves.

Ares had kept things fairly simple, breaking all of the bones he could without having to worry about accidentally causing internal bleeding too soon. Then he’d swapped the bat for the knife and got to carving, creating the image of a bird across his flesh in red. The final blow had been delivered to hischest. A bullet to his heart, the same way Eden’s mom had gone out. Effective and arguably quick, but still painful.

Hopefully in his next life, Zonnie still felt it.

Sometimes that happened.

Sometimes the pain felt from one physical form lingered in the subconscious and could be felt in a new one.

The weapons clattered to the ground once he was done, and Ares turned to take Eden in. There was no immediate reaction despite the growing silence, as though the Starling was tuning it all out and incapable of noticing it was over.

He probably was.

Ares had experience with that sort of thing, too.

With a sigh, he stripped out of his clothing, dropping pieces over the oozing body. Once he was in nothing but his socks, he made his way over to Eden and scooped him up, carrying him out of the room and into another smaller one next door.

The older man gave no reaction, merely wrapped his arms around Ares’ neck and clung to him.

Leaving him to linger in his own reality for a moment longer, Ares set him down on a chair and then turned to where he’d left a fresh change of clothing earlier. His socks came off and he flung them back into the kill-room. It didn’t really matter; this whole place would be cleaned top to bottom anyway, but he still did it.

After cleaning himself up and changing, he turned his attention back to Eden, who’d yet to move a single muscle. Kneeling before him, he tipped his head forward until his face blocked out anything else Eden might have been looking at.

“Do you regret it?” he wondered aloud. This reaction wasn’t totally unheard of. Eden was clearly in freeze mode, but they’d need to get him out of it soon. Ares wasn’t comfortable putting it off much longer. It was too easy to get lost insideoneself. “He took a bullet to the chest. I could try bringing him back for you, if you want me to.”

That seemed to finally reach him, and Eden’s lips pursed. He blinked, focusing slowly until he was finally present again. “Wh—what did you just say? Can you repeat that?”

“It’s unlikely,” Ares told him. “But not impossible. If you want—”

“Iwanthim dead.”

He paused and gave those words a chance to settle between them. For Eden to really hear and process them. “Still?”

“Still.” Eden laughed, but it was manic. The sound of a broken person, unaware they’d been rendered to pieces. “What does this make me? What am I now?”