Page 22 of Cherished by the Sinners (Sinners Never Die #4)

Darlene

T he opening of a door woke Darlene.

She’d learned long ago not to reveal to whoever was in the room that she was awake by lifting her eyelids only the tiniest amount.

The room she was in was not hers. It was sparsely decorated, but it was all masculine. The person who moved almost silently across the room was tall and broad, and dressed in a high-end sweatsuit. His dark hair looked shiny. Wet.

Magnus was back.

He walked over to look down at her, but he didn’t do anything, just stood there for several seconds.

Then he sighed and retreated down the hall.

Magnus and Mason’s deep voices teased her ears.

She loved the sound of their voices. Dark rumbles that always did something strange to the pit of her belly. It made her hot for them.

Which was a bit confusing for her, because she associated sex with danger and pain. But she was also sure they would never hurt her. It left her uncertain.

She was, however, looking for some answers to some pointed questions. Hopefully, she’d still be alive at the end of the conversation.

She pushed herself up into a seated position, then got to her feet. She walked over to the room Magnus had disappeared into; the door stood wide open.

She knocked on the doorframe. When the two men turned to look at her, she said, “Hey.”

She looked over Magnus. Yup, his hair was wet. He’d had to have a blood-be-gone shower too.

The brothers looked at each other then back at her.

“Would you like to sleep some more?” Mason asked at the same time Magnus asked, “Would you like something to eat?”

The thought of food didn’t sit well with her stomach, so she said, “I would love a hot drink. Tea if you have it.”

“I’ll have a tray brought up,” Mason said, pulling out his cell phone.

“How are you feeling?” Magnus asked, gesturing at her to back out of the doorway.

“I’m... okay,” she said after a moment. “I have some questions, though.”

“Questions?” Magnus asked, herding her back to the couch with both hands, as if she were a baby goat.

“Yeah.” Mason was following them, so she continued. “I saw some pretty fucked up shit in that warehouse.”

Both men froze statue-still for nearly three seconds.

“You’re not... scared?” Mason asked in the smallest voice she’d ever heard him use.

“Of what? That nutso from England? No, he’s dead. He can’t hurt anyone anymore.” She paused to frown as she sat on the couch. “He is dead, right?”

“Completely,” Magnus promised. His wide eyes made him look completely freaked out.

“What did you see?” Mason asked. He slowly lowered himself onto the couch, his big body taking up the remaining room on the sofa.

She opened her mouth to answer, but Magnus standing by himself bugged her.

“Magnus,” she said, motioning him closer, but there was no more space on the couch. “Is there a chair or something you could bring over?”

He dropped himself onto the floor two feet in front of her.

She frowned. “What are you doing? You don’t have to sit on the floor.”

He crossed his legs and sat like someone sitting next to a campfire. “I’m good here,” he said.

There was an edge to his voice, a note of fear and worry that she didn’t like. What could he be afraid of?

“What did you see?” he asked.

She glanced at Mason. Did they really want to hear all this?

Mason nodded his head.

She blew out a breath. “Okay. So, Eli grabbed me from the hospital.” Damn. In all the stuff that followed, she’d forgotten about the chaos of the attack. “Did he hurt anyone?”

“Not that we’ve heard,” Magnus said.

Darlene nodded. “So, he wanted to know why I was so special... His uncle sniffed me and then just told Eli, ‘No.’ I didn’t know what he meant.” Mason and Magnus both stiffened.

Huh, so special meant something specific to them.

“I explained that I was once a prostitute, but that I’d been given a second chance to be a normal person with all the rights and freedoms I’d never gotten to have before. He seemed to think that was funny because his uncle was going to use me to punish you two.

“That made me mad. I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt me or you ever again and told him so.

Then I showed him my back and said that I’d already lived through hell, and that I would do anything to save you two from the kind of emotional pain his uncle inflicted.

Even...” her voice trailed off. Would they understand or would it make them even more upset?

“Even going so far as to kill myself right then and there.”

Both men made almost identical shocked noises.

Mason leaned forward to grab one arm, while his brother came up on his knees and grabbed her other arm.

“No,” they said in unison.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not suicidal, I just wanted him to understand how certain I felt about the whole punish your enemies situation.”

“He sat and thought about it for a while, staring at me like he’d never seen a human being before.

Then as we arrived at the warehouse, he told me I wasn’t what he was expecting, that he admired my strength of convictions, and he would try to help me as much as he could.

Hopefully long enough for you to find me. ”

“Perhaps we will let him live, after all,” Mason said. He released his hold on her arm but didn’t let her go. Instead he took her hand in his.

Magnus copied him, resulting in both men coming much closer to her than they’d been before.

“Okay,” she said, squeezing both their hands. “This next part is... scary.”

They squeezed her hands in return.

“We will never allow harm to come to you again,” Magnus said, his voice no longer edged with fear, but determination.

She smiled and tilted her head back and forth. “Not sure you can get rid of the scary shit in my head, but you’re welcome to try.”

They didn’t say anything, but both men began rubbing their thumbs in a stroking motion on the back of her hands.

Their touch did something to the heavy rope wrapped around her lungs, picking apart the knots and loosening it.

She cleared her throat. “Eli’s uncle was a weird kind of crazy.

He talked like he’d been Napoleon at one time, and was trying to make a comeback.

He didn’t sound entirely rational. He seemed to jump from one topic to another with nothing connecting them.

He raved about gaining power and bringing your family down.

He seemed to think the Brezniks killed a bunch of his family members, and that he would kill me slowly in front of you by. .. drinking my blood.”

“He grabbed me by the throat and sniffed my neck, but didn’t bite me. Instead he brought in another prostitute I knew and killed her in front of me.”

“How?” Magnus asked.

“By biting her with his sharpened canines and drinking her blood. I think he... ate some of her too. It was hard to tell; he was just laughing insanely while he did it.”

She ran out of air in her lungs and had to stop speaking to take in a breath. When had she gotten so out of breath?

Both men opened their mouths to speak, but she shook her head.

“Wait. Let me finish.” She swallowed. “He said, you were just like him—monsters who had to drink blood and eat people to survive. He said a normal person like me wasn’t worth anything to people like him.

” She looked between them. “I know you have those pointy teeth. Were you born with them?”

“No,” Mason said. “We filed them down when we were younger. It was something all of us did.”

“But why?”

Magnus swallowed hard. “To do what Sebastien did.” His face drained of all color, as if he were dying in front of her. “Tear out the throat and drink the blood of a person.”

“You do that? Drink blood?”

They both nodded.

Nausea rose, crawling up her throat. They were monsters too. They were monsters too . Her breathing ran away from her, making her stretch to breathe properly at all.

“Why?”

“First, you need to know that we would never hurt you. We will never allow anyone to hurt you,” Magnus said.

She tried to tug her hand out of his grasp, but he wouldn’t let her go.

“We could never hurt you,” Mason said. “We love you, Darlene.”

No, no, no. She didn’t want to hear that. What point was love if they were so different from her? If she was nothing more than a pet.

But they wouldn’t let her go. Were, in fact, refusing to let her go.

“H... how are you different? I need to understand.”

“We’re as human as you,” Magnus said. “We were born and lived exactly the same as everyone else.”

“Until we got sick. Almost everyone in our family got sick. The disease killed most of us, but not all. Anna, Bazyli, Yvgeny, Mason and I got better. A lot better. We got stronger. When we were injured, it healed in seconds. Our senses were heightened. And, though we didn’t know until some years passed, we didn’t get any older than the day we began recovering from the disease. ”

“How old are you?”

“Over eight hundred years,” Mason said.

“Wow.” She blinked a couple of times.

“There are some drawbacks,” Magnus said. “The changes to our immune systems affected us in some weird ways. We can’t take in nourishment like normal people. Drinking blood is the only way we’ve found that works. We can’t sleep either. We’ve learned to meditate, but it’s not as satisfying.”

“We can’t have children,” Mason said. “We no longer produce sperm.”

“We can still have sex,” Magnus rushed in to say.

He sounded so concerned that she understand that, that she snorted. Typical man. She giggled, and both men smiled at her.

“So, do you eat people?”

“No. We don’t. We drink blood, but we’re very careful about how we do it and who we drink from.”

“Oh.” She wasn’t quite sure how to ask this next question. “Why was Sebastien completely insane?”

“Imagine living beyond your normal lifespan,” Magnus said. “Imagine not aging, not sleeping, not changing while everyone around you aged and died.”

She tried to imagine it, but it was almost too strange. “So, I guess the question should be why aren’t you insane?”

“Anna thinks,” Mason said. “That it’s because we have people to care for, who care about us.”

She looked between them, hope a wild stallion galloping in her chest. “Like me?”