Page 51 of Crescendo (Beautiful Monsters #1)

“She’s pretty,” Darcy says, propping her hand beneath her chin. “She’s foreign, too. She wasn’t speakin’ English the whole time. Was it Spanish?”

I shrug without giving her an answer, but I can’t help the part of me that wonders just what the little bitch said.

She isn’t talking now. She’s staring straight up at the ceiling, her pupils pinpricks, her breathing heavy and slowed.

There’s sweat glistening over her forehead, and her lips are slightly parted. She looks dead.

I know that look. As Mack suspected, the little princess is liking the high.

Only God knows if Stacatto drugged her at all, but I doubt it.

She’s swept away on the burning wave of dope, locked inside her own private cocoon, safe from the pain.

For now. The first high is always the sweetest—the cruel benchmark addicts spend every high after that attempting to chase.

You can never reach that bar again. It’s why Mack chose his initial dose carefully, knowing just how much of the hook to bait.

He could have sold her out to ten men tonight and it wouldn’t have mattered. She’d still crave the next fix.

“I need to sleep.” I grit the words out while staring down at my hands, which are covered in Mack’s blood and my own. Adrenaline’s still flooding my system—I’m too fucking wired to sleep, but Darcy takes the hint.

“It was good to see you, Dante,” she says, rising to her feet.

Then she surprises me by stepping forward, placing her hand once again along my swelling cheek.

“I know I’m not... I know I’m not someone like Arno.

But I was your friend too. And Parish...

” She breaks off and stares at the floor, pulling her hand away.

A good man might let her wallow, but I can’t help but state the obvious. “If she was your friend, then why are you fucking the man who really killed her?”

Stacatto may have been the lethal bullet, but Mack’s the one who loaded that gun six years ago when he coaxed a seventeen-year-old Rish into getting high that very first time.

Darcy doesn’t appreciate the reminder. Her eyes flash, and I see the hint of the woman Mack has turned her into. She may shiver at the thought of the Kennel, but screwing the alpha means she can’t ignore what puts food on her table.

“Don’t attack me , Dante,” she says. “The last time I checked, I wasn’t sleeping with some guy named Vincent Stacatto.”

She leaves, her lips pursed, her eyes blazing, bitter and angry. But I don’t miss the way her hand flies out to gently brush my shoulder on her way past.

“Night.”

“Night,” I force myself to reply. Seconds later, I hear the door open and then quietly click shut, but the sound has the impact of a gunshot.

Exhaling, I take up the spot Darcy left, keeping my back turned to Stacatto’s woman.

Her breathing taints the air, a slow, raspy melody.

I shouldn’t give a damn about what thoughts might cross her mind in the morning when she comes down from the high.

I shouldn’t give a damn as to what might happen if she craves it again—and she will crave it again.

A life of cruelty leaves an almost irresistible itch for something to take the edge off the pain.

Cocking my head, I turn to look at her and snap my fingers once. It takes a second for her eyes to focus and crawl in the direction of my hand.

“Hey.” I snap again and reach for her when her eyes start to turn vacant.

She ignores me though, and no one’s home when I snatch her knife from my pocket and wipe that asshole Sammy’s blood off on my jeans.

Then I jab the edge of it into the flat of her palm, pressing deep enough to break the skin.

Blood wells up when I start to cut, sawing a single jagged line about an inch long in the center of her hand.

The pain barely wakes her up, but she’s back again, watching me with hollow eyes.

“It feels good now,” I tell her, knowing she can probably process only about half of the words I say. “But it won’t last. It never does.”

A low sound buzzes from her throat. Words?

A tattered laugh? I can’t tell. Whatever it is trails off when I stand and reach for the buckle of my jeans.

I tug them down while I circle the bed to stand directly beside her, my hips positioned above her head so that she can’t miss a single fucking detail.

I shed my boxers next, feeling what Mack must have felt when he stepped into the ring, prepared to face an old foe with newly learned tricks up his sleeve.

I wait until she focuses on me. My cock is already stiff when I reach for her hand and place it on my hip, positioning her fingers so that she can feel every jagged variation in the skin. Then I watch her, my eyes narrowed, and issue one single command.

Daniel a

“Count,” the devil tells me, pressing my fingertips into the ridge of scars that turn the top of his thigh into one of those “Touch and Feel” books they would give me in school to help me connect common sensations with the English words. Soft. Fur. Feathers.

Lucifer feels... raw . A million stories lurk within his skin.

A million new words and sensations to learn.

I drag my thumb along his thigh, straining to see the irregular, silvery edges of the cuts.

It’s too dark, however. Touch is the only sensation I can employ to study him, and I’m greedy to learn.

“Count,” he told me. His scars, I assume. But I already have, though the number is somewhere...deep...down...away. I have to start over.

My head swims around the room while I crawl to the edge of the bed and use him like an anchor to hold myself upright.

Naughty, naughty Daniela. I pretend that I don’t notice his cock as I cling to him.

My head comes too close, the tip of him grazing my hair.

Lucifer growls, but like a good teacher, he won’t let himself forget the task at hand.

His grip is a vise clamped down over my throbbing fingers as he steers them to the top of his row of scars.

Count. I do, carefully stringing the numbers together like popcorn on the Christmas garlands my mother and I used to make.

Um, dois, três, quarto. I take my time, learning him with every degree of dedication it took to learn English.

Dante is a tougher, more archaic code to crack.

I’m on the fourteenth dash when he finally decides to speak.

“I made the first one the night I swore...that I wouldn’t let it happen again. He wouldn’t come into my room again. I’d stop him.”

A darkness taints his words. I can see it dripping out of his beautiful mouth and speckling the air like spray paint. I keep counting, however, using my grip on his leg to keep myself tethered. Fifteen. Sixteen .

“The fucker liked to wait until he thought I was asleep,” he says, his gaze on the far wall, his jaw clenched.

“Sometimes he knew that I’d raid his liquor cabinet and drink whatever I could find just to make it easier to pass out.

..” He breaks off, inhaling and exhaling hate like a dragon.

His body ripples with emotions that spill into my waiting hands. More hate. Hate. Hate. Fear. Regret...

“I cut myself that night,” he tells me, brushing his hands alongside mine to prod the remnants of that very first shallow wound.

“As a reminder. This was the last time... There was a knife under my bed. I was ready for the fucker. Then he came in and I just...lay there while he fucked me like an animal.” His voice breaks, but I have never heard such a dangerous sound pass the devil’s lips.

He’s a creature formed entirely of rage.

My fingers tremble against his white-hot skin, and I’ve lost count. I start over, but this time, I let my hands fall and bring my face in close, brushing my lips against his uneven flesh. His story is too complex to be felt. It needs to be inhaled. Swallowed. Consumed. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen.

“I did the same thing the next night,” he continues by the time I finally reach the twenty-eighth mark. “And the next. And the next—” He inhales sharply when my tongue grazes his skin.

My lips go dry at his taste. Sweat and musk, way more potent than whatever’s in my veins. He travels deep down inside me to where no one else has ever been. A place that Vinny doesn’t even know exists. It swells with the presence of him, and I’m infested with the devil himself.

“Thirty-four days,” he says, his voice catching over the words.

It’s more than a number. It’s the price of his soul.

Thirty-four days before he finally managed to fight his way out of hell.

“I didn’t use the knife, either. I hit him.

..with my fists. I kicked him. I couldn’t stop.

The bastard wasn’t even hurt. He didn’t try to stop me when I ran out of the house, half fucking naked, screaming that I’d tell the police.

Maybe he wanted me to...” He laughs; it’s a twisted hollow sound that drips down over his chest like falling blood. “I was twelve.”

My head throbs beneath the weight of his confession. It wants to sink back down into the warmth...the nothingness. My brain doesn’t want to feel, for once. It wants to sleep. The drug makes it so very easy to sleep.

But the devil’s taste is on my tongue. I wince as I sink forward and fall to my knees.

My mouth is on him, still pressed against the shrine of his body, and I breathe in each word of his morbid sermon.

I memorize every cut, and he lets me clumsily attempt to trace every one.

His bitter truth is enough to counter the opposing rush of the heroin.

But it’s a bittersweet cure—he’s ruined one high and given me another. The substance he wields takes me impossibly higher than anything else, but he’s stingy. He won’t ever give me another taste, and my teeth sink into his flesh in punishment, though my jaw feels too heavy to truly bite down.

He flinches back with a hiss, raking his fingers through my hair to latch onto the back of my skull. He forces me to look up, holding my gaze. Then he hauls me upright and shoves me back onto the bed, leaving me there while he stands against the wall.

He watches as my tongue shoots out and seeks all traces of his taste from my lips. He watches me swallow every last bit. He watches...and he knows exactly which budding addiction will win out when I finally come down from the high.