Page 52 of Crescendo (Beautiful Monsters #1)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Daniela

Morning descends with all the intensity of a freight train slamming into my chest at full speed. My lips part beneath a groan first, cracked and painfully dry. Next, my eyes blink themselves open to a stained, grimy ceiling illuminated by a swath of gray daylight.

My brain is mush, my skull composed of a million bricks that clatter together when I try to sit up.

I barely lift my head clear of whatever lies beneath it only for it to fall right back down.

It takes three attempts before I can roll over onto my hands and knees.

I’m shaking, forced to rock back and forth to stay upright.

The world is spinning when I finally manage to lift my head and focus on the shadowy figure watching me from across the room.

“Get up,” Lucifer commands. His tone is clipped with impatience.

How long has he been waiting? How long has he been wondering whether or not I’d survive my little brush with a powerful opiate?

His eyes reveal nothing as I scramble to remember how to control my limbs.

It hurts when the muscles in my legs contract in order for me to stand.

They shake too badly, and I flop back onto the mattress, clinging to handfuls of the comforter for balance.

Panting, I glance at him through the wild, tangled mess of my hair. “Help... Help me.” I hold my hand out, gauging his reaction to the request.

His eyes narrow, but before I can even guess whether or not he’ll move, he approaches me and snatches my wrist.

I cry out when he pulls me to my feet. The bastard isn’t gentle. I stagger forward and have to clutch at the wall for balance. Clinging to it, I tremble, every nerve loose and unstable.

“Look at me.” He’s at my shoulder and grabs for my chin himself when I don’t obey quickly enough.

The breath catches in my throat as he manipulates my body against the wall and presses me back while he steps in closer. His scent sneaks into my lungs: sweat and blood. He hasn’t washed yet. Bruises paint his jaw and discolor the center of his chest. Battle scars.

I can’t stop myself from reaching out to trace the mark just above his right pec.

He stiffens at the contact, but I doubt that it’s out of pain.

His grip over my chin tightens, craning my neck back so that my eyes return to his.

They peer deep down, searching me. At first, I think he’s checking to see if I’m fully free of the aftereffects of the drug.

Then he steps closer, pinning me against the wall with his bulk, and I realize his true intention.

Do I remember? If so, how much? How much of Lucifer’s dark, dirty secrets still taint my skin?

I school my expression into revealing nothing, and he grunts in frustration, his nails digging in. He won’t break me though. Vinny taught me well how to wear a mask—but, beneath it, I peer over what snippets I do recall. Just who hurt him as a child? His father?

The devil gives me no answers when he finally lets me go. It’s only as he jerks out of my reach that I realize my fingers never left his skin, stroking absent patterns against his bruised flesh. Letters. D A N N Y...

Lucifer knew my own dark secret. Now, I have one of his.

But there are no winners in his game. Just bitter round after bitter, brutal round. Which one of us will finally leave the cage as the victor? Will we ever leave at all?

Lucifer gives away nothing of his battle plan as he retreats down a narrow hall. He doesn’t command me to follow, but I do anyway, bracing one hand against the wall.

This apartment is even smaller than the last one. In just two steps Lucifer enters a tiny kitchen. There’s a bathroom to my left, and to creep inside it, I would simply have to shuffle two inches sideways.

“Here.” Lucifer snatches a plastic cup from a cupboard above a metal sink built into one of the countertops. He runs the faucet and fills it with water from the tap. “Drink,” he commands, slamming it down on the counter closest to me.

I reach for it only to flinch as pain sears through the center of my palm.

It’s a shock to find blood pooling there, seeping from a gash I don’t remember causing.

Then, like the scattered fragments of a nightmare, I remember—him.

My eyes seek him out, and I realize I left blood over his chest, the real reason he pulled away.

“You cut me.”

He doesn’t appear ashamed, but then I realize I’m not exactly angry.

I remember . The words he said drip through my ears in a distorted melody.

“It feels good now,”he told me while I was swept under the heroin.

“But it won’t last. It never does.”I wonder if he spoke from experience.

His face reveals nothing, and I don’t ask.

Instead, I lift the cup and drain it dry. My head is swimming when I set it back down and swipe at my mouth with the back of my uninjured hand .

Lucifer’s searing eyes miss nothing. “If you haven’t thought of a plan for taking down Stacatto,” he starts, “now is the time.”

“P-plan?” Still dizzy, I shift so that my back is resting against the wall, and I brace my good hand against it.

“To take him down,” Lucifer clarifies, his voice hard and unnerving.

I’m going to “take down” Vincent Stacatto. When it’s said out loud—by such a serious man—I can’t help but laugh just once. Lynn might have been able to entertain the notion in her head, but putting it into practice?

I shake my head. “I...I can’t—”

“You don’t have a fucking choice.” Lucifer steps out from around the counter, and within seconds, he closes in on me. “Think.”

I jump when one of his hands finds the center of my chest, the thick fingers pointing toward my throat.

He makes a show of pinning me flat against the wall and leaning in, his breath hot on my skin. “What are his weaknesses? His businesses? Who are his allies?”

I’m still shaking my head. “He didn’t tell me—”

“Bullshit.” His fingers flex hard enough to send tiny jolts of pain exploding throughout my rib cage. “You’ve dreamt about it. Don’t tell me that you haven’t spent every waking moment fantasizing as to how to bring the bastard down...” His voice rumbles through my ears and resonates down my spine.

I shiver, and my tongue shoots out to wet my lips, tasting blood.

“He...he deals drugs—heroin and cocaine,” I say, racking my brain for the snippets of conversations I wasn’t meant to hear, the words I used to drown out whenever he’d force me to play during a torture session, the little bits and pieces of information I gleaned on my own.

“He owns a taxi company—Sunshine—and uses the drivers to distribute the supply throughout the city.”

Lucifer nods, accepting the information without comment. The pattern of his breathing changes, striking the side of my neck at a slower pace, but he still isn’t satisfied, and a silent command is conveyed when his hand presses a little harder against my chest. Go on.

“He...he deals in women.” I cringe, picturing the girls he gave to me as “gifts.” Anger mingles with the heat of Lucifer on my skin.

I shrivel and burn beneath both, and it’s easier to get the words out.

“They have accents. He must get them from overseas. I don’t know where he keeps them.

” Apart from my maids, I only knew of the women from the scattered conversations his men would have in the suite when they thought I wasn’t listening.

Do good tonight and we might stop by and see the new girls.

Sate your cock for once. “And as for allies...” My recent thoughts hold nothing.

I have to dig deeper, into an older store of memories that make me almost grateful for Lucifer’s brutal strength to hold me up. “I just know one. A detective.”

Lucifer perks up. I don’t know if it’s because of the hatred in my voice or the mere irony that a crime lord cavorts with an officer of the law.

“His name?”

“Detective Andrew Sosa.”

“Sosa.” He frowns. Apparently, the name doesn’t ring a bell. Regardless, he’s satisfied by the information, and he steps back, pulling his hand away, my chest expanding greedily. “I’ll look into it.”

“It would have to be quick,” I say, “whatever we do. Vinny will—”

“Vinny.” Lucifer scoffs and then releases a full chuckle that drips out through his teeth. “No matter what. You still call him that.”

“W-what?” I’m thrown off by his line of attack.

“Vinny,” the devil snarls. “You have yet to call the fucker by his full name.”

His full name . Vincent. It strikes me that the devil thinks I am weak for still calling my tormentor by a nickname. I see it in the way he shakes his head and laughs, his eyes narrowed over my body like the barrel of a gun, but I don’t shy away.

If only the bastard knew.

I’m the one to enter his personal space this time. Just a single step that takes me no farther from the wall than where I can still cling to it. Lucifer stiffens regardless, his mouth caught mid-chuckle.

“His...his name...” I have to lick my lips to find enough traction to speak.

I’m too tired to rein my accent in, and it takes over, mangling each word.

Lynn’s crisp voice is dead. For the first time in fifteen years, Daniela fully rears her head.

“His name is the only bit of power I’ve ever held over him,” I admit.

“I call him Vinny, and I never forget everything else. Ever.”

Lucifer holds my gaze for so long that I lose track.

The disgust lurking over the irises gives way to something else, though I’m not sure I can name it.

Describing him requires an arsenal of words I have yet to master.

Guilt? Respect? Acknowledgement? I can’t decide which is which before he finally nods once in a grim apology.