Page 132 of Like Grim Death: Part One

I think of being left alone. Never looked at when they were disgusted with themselves.

The way I always took every drink they offered me if I was in that kind of home. Every bottle of vodka, no matter how sick I would feel later. It was a way to pass the time. To make it all go…numb.

I stand, my head spinning. “Stop.” I turn my back to her. “Please, stop.”

I feel the bed dip and assume she’s shifting down her dress. I grab the back of my neck, stepping closer to the floor-to-ceiling window. I press my temple to the cool glass, gulping down air. Trying to forget. Trying to breathe as the storm claws on, outside.

“It’s okay. You can tell me.” She’s closer. Too close. “I think, maybe, we’re in this together.” She is right behind me. I have a vicious urge to lash out at her. To press against her bruises and make her cry. To make her feel what I’m feeling.What I felt.I stay still. Limp. I had to do that, sometimes. It is what they wanted from me. Obedience. I was a toy. I had to bemotionless, to stay their doll. “But if we follow all the rules, we survive, don’t we?” Too close. She’s too close to me. “I’ve started seeing things though, and I don’t know if…” She pauses, like she has said too much.

She is. She has.Get away, get away, get away.

“I don’t know what’s real anymore.”

She saw me, didn’t she?She saw me.

Get. The fuck. Away.

“But I’ve been taking these pills to…” She catches herself again. She’s going to spill all her secrets like the blood I want to take from her.Get away from me.

But she’s lost too, is she not? She knows I came into her room, doesn’t she?She’s just lost too.

She steps closer.

I stiffen, not daring to breathe.

Her hand comes to my shoulder, so soft, so light. Like an angel on one side of me. Miraculously, I relax a little at her touch, but my body is still coiled with tension. “We’re going to belong, aren’t we?”

I don’t know what she means. I want to tell her about my bandages. I want to show her what they did to me, as an offering, a reciprocal. I swallow thickly, then my fingers come to the buttons of my shirt. I hear her intake of breath, and I move quickly, wondering if she is as sick of naked bodies as I am. I keep going, forcing myself, because she won’t hurt me.She won’t hurt me, and if she does, I will fucking kill her.

Then I turn, shrugging out of my shirt, just letting it slip down to my elbows, and I know she sees the wounds because her eyes widen and the hand she had on my shoulder comes to her mouth, her fingers on her lips.

“He did that to you?” She looks up at me, then back down. “When? He…” She shakes her head, taking a step closer. She reaches one hand to touch me, gently, not on my wounds, but along my chest, where my tattoos are. Angels and demons and roses and more thorns. “Oh my God.” It sounds choked. Her touch is featherlight, and I do not despise it, because it isn’t sexual. Because it is soft. “I thought mine was the worst and I thought—”

A loudpopcracks through her words, cutting her off. She gasps, but I duck, grabbing her wrist and yanking her down with me to the floor. I amveryfamiliar with the sound of gunshots. Beneath me, she’s silent, the ringing probably monstrous in her ears like it is in mine. My chest is to her back, my palms on either side of her shoulders. Her head is to the floor, and my brow is pressed to the top of her spine. I feel something very cold and for a second, I think I’ve been shot and didn’t realize it.

It happened the first time.

Stab wounds you do not grow numb from. Gunshots can take a second to kick in. The first pain is brutal. The second, silent until it comes creeping into your awareness.

But I realize, as thunder cracks outside and I can hear it far clearer than I did before, the bullet splintered the window. Lifting my head, I see the smallest chink in it, the ammo lodged inside. Any normal window would have shattered. At the very least, there would be a spiderweb etched around it.

Bulletproof windows.Of course they have bulletproof windows, just like they do at my temporary home, in another state I have forgotten the name of.

The girl beneath me—Ella—makes a small whimper as she slowly starts to pick her head up. I press down against the back of her skull, her hair thick beneath my palm. Just as I push her face to the hardwoods to protect her from any future gunfire, a voice breaks the silence.

“Do not fucking touch her.”

I vaguely recognize the voice. But Lucifer Malikov’s has a distinct rasp. This one sounds just as angry, but more clear. There were a few men around the BMW Lucifer drove me home in. I was introduced, but sometimes meetings blur inside my head, I’ve had so many of them in my life.

I don’t move my hand from Ella’s head. But she’s the one who speaks next.

“Mavy.”

Mavy?

No, Mayhem. It must be. Lucifer said that name. The one with so many tattoos, I saw him this morning too. He was behind the dark haired girl with eyes like mine. What did Medici say abouthim?

“The Astor bastardwillkill you if you get on his bad side. He has a temper.”