Page 13 of Crescendo (Beautiful Monsters #1)

With an unrestrained roar, Arno lunges, and I’m ready for him.

My fist tightens eagerly, and I let it fly into his stomach, driving every ounce of air from his lungs.

The blow lands harder than I meant it to.

Harsher. He wheezes and swipes at my head with an open palm.

It’s child’s play to duck it, and I land another blow on the center of his chest that sends him backward and sprawling against the counter.

“Stop!” Francisco steps in between us. His stance isn’t hostile to me as he places a restraining hand on Arno’s shoulder, but it’s almost too hard to silence the blood lust that rises up so fierce and so hard that I can feel it taking shape around me.

The buzzing begins at the back of my skull, swelling to a deafening hum that won’t be silenced until I beat Arno’s face into a pulp.

Until I smash his fucking face into the counter.

Until I feel his blood on my hands. They curl, hungry for that slick, intoxicating heat. And I want— need —to feed that itch.

“Dante.”

I shrug off the voice that battles with the steady pulse taking residence in my brain. It’s a chant, almost. Fight. Punch. Bleed. Kill.

“ Dante .” It’s Arno calling me this time. There’s blood on his chin, but I’m not sure how or why.

My knuckles ache. I only registered two punches, but the twinge in my shoulder warns me that it was several more.

“Dante,” Arno tries again. He spits out a mouthful of blood onto the floor, which is dark enough to obscure the violent coloring. “Parish...she’s... Fuck, Dante, she’s dead. Parish is dead.”

“What?” I shake my head, desperate to clear it. It’s too confusing to jump from violence to blood and then death.

“She’s dead,” Arno says almost as if to himself. His hand fumbles along the bar until he finds a discarded glass, and he downs whatever is inside it. “How the fuck am I supposed to tell our mother? Those bastards didn’t even...”

“Who?” My voice ripples over that familiar, low tone. Clarity returns in snatches, but my fingers aren’t shaking at least. “What happened to her? Mack?”

“No, not him. These other bastards—” Arno breaks off, and something cold fills his gaze. “I didn’t want to bother you with this. I know this isn’t your fight, but—”

“I’m in.”

Parish. Stupid fucking Parish. So busy trying to act older than she was, but still too fucking young to die.

If it’s Mack who got her, then some other drug dealer probably gutted her when she couldn’t pay—if she hadn’t put a needle in her arm first. It’s cruel, but not unexpected, though I don’t know why Arno seems so caught off guard.

He understood the fire his sister liked to play with.

Hell, some might even say that he was the one to inject it into her veins in the first place, considering the business he dealt with.

But no. Arno seems too raw. Too broken. Parish wasn’t killed at random.

“I’m in,” I repeat, giving the word a vicious edge. “Whatever you need.”

“Good.” He nods once. Then he turns and heads for the back of the bar, jerking his head for Francisco and me to follow. “I’ll need someone to help me clean up the mess.”

Arno heads to the basement of Mulligans.

There’s a door off the rear entryway near the fire exit.

One of his men is standing guard. There’s a Glock in one of his pockets and a knife tucked in the other.

He doesn’t attempt to disguise the telltale bulges of either weapon, and his gaze is icy.

Parish may have been a nuisance, but loyalty to Arno makes her death everyone’s burden to bear.

“It came a few hours ago,” Arno’s saying as he leads the way down a wooden set of stairs.

“Fuck. S-she...” He shakes his head, squaring his shoulders as if preparing to barrel through the closed door awaiting us at the base of the steps.

Instead, he knocks on it once with the broadside of his fist, and the door is opened almost immediately from the inside.

“She’s here,” a man says as Arno moves past him, ushering Francisco and me into a large, open area where more men are lurking in the corners like guard dogs.

The only light comes from rows of fluorescent lights attached to the ceiling.

The walls are gray, nothing more than painted cement.

The floors appear to be poured concrete.

There’s none of the comfort or care that decorates the upper interior of Mulligans.

The barroom is for show. This place is for business.

“Well, where the fuck is she?” Arno demands. He cranes his neck and makes a show of glancing around the room on a scavenger hunt for a woman hidden among the slew of men.

I follow his gaze. He has about ten bodies here—for show, I suspect. Whoever this guest of honor is, Arno wants to make quite the impression.

The only furniture is a metal folding chair placed in the center of the room, beside a matching table and a laptop. It’s flipped open, the screen displaying a blank blue desktop.

“They’re on their way in,” one of the men says, and Arno begins to pace, raking his fingers through his mane of hair.

Maybe five minutes pass before the door leading to the stairway finally opens.

“Did anyone see you?” Arno demands of the figure at the door before they can even enter the room. “Were you followed?”

His voice prickles with suspicion. He’s on edge. His hair gleams like a flame, and the man himself seems just as untamable, liable to set everything he touches on fire.

“No one saw,” another man replies, his voice gruff. “I got her. The driver’s been paid off. It went as planned.”

I’m expecting a man to appear from the shadows of the doorway.

Not a woman. She’s small, slender, and dressed as if for a party.

Her black hair is piled on top of her head, displaying a slim throat.

Her dress is short, paired with a cleavage-baring neckline, but if Arno has decided to mourn his sister by ordering a high-class call girl, she doesn’t seem to be the type.

She looks too young, for one. Her lips are painted red, but they do little to combat the smattering of freckles across her nose or the innocence that wafts from her skin like perfume.

I’d peg her at twenty, tops. The color of snow, her skin gleams beneath the fluorescent lighting, though I figure the paleness of it has something to do with the gun being pressed against the back of her head.

“Arno...what the fuck is this?”

He doesn’t bother to answer me. Instead, he grins as the woman is marched across the room by the gun-wielder, who I recognize as one of his men. Dall. “Sit her down,” Arno commands, jerking his chin at the table.

The woman is shoved down onto the metal seat, though she does her best to regain her composure.

Her legs cross politely at the ankles, her hands settling primly on her lap.

She could be at a fucking tea party if it weren’t for her expression.

Fixated on the laptop screen, her eyes are dead, staring far away at something that isn’t there.

“Arno...” I don’t know whether to intervene or merely watch.

There’s something hypnotic about the entire scene.

Something intoxicating. And I fucking hate having to admit it to myself.

The urgency calls to the beast inside me, who stirs hungrily, sniffing at the air.

The threat of violence is as irresistible as it is disgusting. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Language, Dante,” Arno playfully scolds. “We have a guest.” His eyes continue to smolder. He’s amped up on something more potent than alcohol—it’s rage.

Like venom, it taints his every word, and I stare down at the seated woman on whom he seems to project most of his wrath. She doesn’t seem capable of murder, but I know without even having to ask that whatever is going on has everything to do with Parish.

“Play the fucking tape,” Arno snarls, but his voice slips an unsteady octave. His bottom jaw trembles and he clenches both tightly in an attempt to hide it. “Now, damn it!”

The man with the gun keeps it trained on the woman with one hand while he leans over her and fiddles with the keys on the laptop with the other.

The screen turns black, and then the still image of a woman appears.

Over her face hovers a white, sideways triangle enclosed in a circle: the universal symbol for play.

The moment the video begins, I know why Arno’s so unsteady.

Why his men are sporting the looks of wolves eager to hunt.

The video’s star stares dead into the camera.

Her hair hangs dank and limp down her shoulders, and her green eyes are vacant but steady.

She’s high, but not to the point where she can’t feel any fear.

“Arno...” She inhales, her voice trembling.

Someone behind the camera must have been holding up something for her to read, because she squints. “Th-this is what happens...”

“Keep going,” someone grunts, their face unseen.

Parish flinches. Her tongue shoots out to wet her lips before she tries again. “Arno, this is what happens when you— oh, God .”

A hand seizes her hair, yanking her head back, and the camera pans out to reveal the figure standing behind her.

He’s tall. Parish, hunched over on her knees, barely comes up to his waist. Dressed in a black, tailored suit, he doesn’t seem like the sort to solicit the favors of a coke whore.

He’s young, maybe thirty, but there’s an agelessness in his dark eyes.

Brown, slicked-back hair frames a broad forehead anchored by a square jaw.

His nose is crooked—like it’s been broken one too many times.

Behind him is a nondescript backdrop of white walls and tiled flooring.

I scope out every detail, but it’s no use. They could have been anywhere.