Page 75 of Crescendo (Beautiful Monsters #1)

“I never hated him,” he tells me, his voice so gruff that I could have imagined it—but even my dark fantasies were never so twisted.

“I never hated...him. You can’t hate an animal.

You pity it. You fear it. You want to put a bullet in its brain to end its fucking misery, but hate?

No...” He backs away, shaking his head, and my shoulder burns with the loss of his touch.

“You don’t waste an emotion like hate on a creature that can’t even feel.

” He flexes his fingers, and I think I understand what he means.

A man who makes his living off violence can’t afford to be reckless with the tools of his trade: hate, pain, rage. They fuel him, making it easier for him to envision himself as merely another worthless animal fighting its way out of a cage.

“Espi hates me because...no matter what I fucking did, I could never protect him. It was never enough.” His voice carries a wave of pain even someone like me—scarred and abused and tormented—can only dream of.

It’s the ache I feel whenever I think of Christoph, only magnified by every year and every day he had to build the shadow of an illusion around the only person he seems to love.

What was it like for him? Having to enter that house every day to shield Espi from the monstrous “animal” lurking in the basement? What was it like, waiting to kill his own father the moment he heard footsteps on the stairs at night?

There’s nothing I can say. I can only sit and watch as the devil retreats and storms into the bedroom, slamming the door shut behind him.

I can only breathe and reach down to finger the length of the cello. I can only pray that, if I play long enough or hard enough, I can escape this hold he has over me.

I won’t let the devil destroy the one thing Vinny never could.

I play for hours. My fingers ache. My arms are on fire. My mind is still here . I’m still painfully aware when the door to the apartment opens and a new presence slinks his way inside. He watches me with a scowl, his green eyes blazing. Apparently, he isn’t a fan of Bach’s cello suites.

“Can someone shut her the fuck up?” Arno takes a step toward me only to freeze in his tracks. A quick glance over my shoulder reveals why.

Lucifer’s guarding the doorway to the bedroom, his arms crossed like a true beast from Hades.

I don’t know how long he’s been standing there, but with one look, he pins Arno in place.

With one look, he steals away every semblance of peace I have ever found while playing.

In defeat, my bow-wielding hand falls, and the song dies on a harsh, broken note.

“Mack’s waiting for you,” Arno says. “Wanted to come get you himself, but I ‘volunteered.’” He’s implying something. Something that makes Lucifer perk up from the top of his head down to the tip of his toes until he prickles with energy, electric .

“He can fucking wait.” His tone leaves no room for challenge.

Chuckling to himself, Arno doesn’t even try.

There’s a hint of admiration in his gaze.

Despite the anger that sometimes burns hot between them, I sense that—though I don’t think by blood—these two really do harbor the bonds of brotherhood between them.

There’s respect in the way Lucifer lets him off with only a visual warning when Arno takes another step toward me.

But there’s a challenge between them too. A dare. Maybe even a game. I’m the ball, but Lucifer won’t give me up so easily.

“Anything else?” he wonders, his tone steady and cold—but I don’t miss the way he shifts, bringing his bulk just a fraction of an inch closer.

“Nothing,” Arno concedes, taking a step back. “Just that Mack seems to want to do this shit tonight. Be ready.”

“Am I ever not?”

Arno doesn’t reply when he turns and leaves, closing the door behind him. The tension doesn’t leave Lucifer’s muscles until the door on the lower level slams shut as well, the sound faint through the walls. Even after that, he merely shrugs.

“Get up.”

I obey, setting my bow aside and propping my cello against the couch.

The devil approaches me with slow, measured strides. My breath hitches and something inside my chest tightens when he enters the shadow of my personal space and reaches out to trap my chin against his palm. With one scorching look, he stares at me, into me, through me.

“About what you said... Do you hate him now?”

“Yes.” I don’t even have to think. The rage will always be there, festering in the pit of my soul. I hate Vincent Stacatto with every fiber of my being. Maybe that makes me weaker than him, the devil able to reserve his hatred for only those creatures he deems worthy of it.

Lucifer frowns and his fingers tighten. I feel the ridge of every one pressing into my jaw, tilting it so that I’m forced up on tiptoe, and his face is closer.

“Do you hate me?”

I flinch away from his touch, but he doesn’t let go.

“Do you?” he asks, but his voice holds a dark confidence as if he already knows my answer. Yes. “I hurt you.” His thumb drifts up to graze my ruined ear, and I can’t silence a whine. “I don’t give a shit about you. I would have let Arno and his men rape you on camera. I’m going to kill you...”

Yes, yes, yes, a part of me murmurs, seconding all of those things. I should hate him. I need to. God, I even want to. Hatred is one of my safe, familiar emotions. Hell, these days, it’s one of the few things that drives me through each waking moment, apart from fear.

It would be so damn easy to hate Lucifer, my devil in the flesh.

Fuck him for taking that choice from me.

“You can’t...” I clear my throat, and when I meet his gaze again, something sparks in the air, dangerous and hot.

I see deep into those cold, lifeless eyes—and he lets me in.

He lets me boldly prod and pick over the remains of humanity so that I can see for myself.

He is truly evil. There is no warmth in him.

No compassion. No soul. “You can’t...you can’t hate an animal . ”

I don’t know what makes me touch him, bringing a hint of life to those blue eyes as my fingers trail the front of his chest. Anger?

Rage? His own twisted bit of hatred for me?

He lets me drag my touch all the way down to the hem of his shirt.

He lets me slide the tips of my fingers underneath. He lets me feel his hard, warm skin.

My devil has a pulse. He can bleed. He can feel—he likes to feel my fingers along his waistband especially. He liked fucking me. He liked to taste me. My devil didn’t really want to own me...but I suppose that is the twisted irony of hell. Every soul gets shackled to something .

“You can’t hate an animal,” I croak, my voice breaking as that realization sinks in with the same brutality with which my nails dig into the flesh of his stomach.

Lucifer growls, invading my tiny section of carpet and forcing me back against the couch.

I retreat until my backside hits the top of it rather than sink onto the cushions at his mercy.

He’s ready for me anyway, forcing himself between my legs and bringing his mouth in close.

I hear his teeth click together, hungry for flesh with every bit of the instinct of a wolf.

Rather than bite, his tongue swipes my ruined ear, raising a wave of pain amid a shockingly wet heat.

“Animal,” he grumbles, tasting the word. “And you...you’re just a little bitch.” His hands brace against the wall on either side of me, trapping me between both surfaces. “I could fuck you,” he tells me in a guttural rasp. “I could make your cunt bleed. You still wouldn’t mean shit to me.”

I nod along with every dark promise as the space between my legs throbs—hell, maybe I even want him to follow through on it.

“You can’t hate an animal,” I repeat, gasping the words out.

It’s a curse—some horrible truth that tethers me to this monster I can’t even bring myself to hate.

At least Vinny taught me well enough how to see someone else as an animal.

“Animals are meant to be owned,” I tell Lucifer, but my fingers have a will of their own, and they start to hike his shirt up, revealing the chiseled planes of his chest and a dusky covering of fine, black hair. “Animals...animals are branded.”

He grunts, rolling his hips against my thigh.

He’s hard; I know that fact without even having to look or feel.

His lust taints the air, unashamed—he’s merely a beast surrendering to a natural impulse, and for some sick reason, it only grows when I reach into the pocket of my sweatpants and withdraw my knife.

The devil laughs, the sound ripped from a corded neck. He watches me drag my thumb along the dull edge. He waits until I raise it against his skin. He waits until I dig the tip of the knife into him, but not hard enough to draw blood.

Suddenly, the room dissipates. We’re both on fire, drowning in hell. I should throw my knife away. Beg for mercy. Plead. The violence promised in the devil’s blue gaze will swallow me whole.

And it’s about damn time.

I flick my wrist, digging my knife in even deeper, and he grits out a sound between a curse and a groan. His hand finds my wrist, gripping it tightly enough to hurt. Break. Then he applies more pressure, forcing the blade in...

The world shifts. Lucifer is lying on the couch while I straddle him.

My free hand paws at his shirt, but he’s the one who tears it off in the end, baring his chest to me, and I can’t help an appreciative groan.

Hell didn’t spit out too many monsters like him these days.

All chiseled, hard anger and rage melded against a human form.

Fixated, I drag my thumb along his abdomen, enthralled by the vibrant trail of blood that bleeds from a wound no longer than my fingernail.

Animals are meant to be branded. I’m possessed by insanity when I dig my knife in again, lengthening the cut into a longer, straighter line.