Page 117 of The Cruelest Chaos

But I know better. I know they’re things over our heads, things we couldn’t begin to understand. To participate in. This is a cult like any other—charismatic, all-powerful leaders and brainwashed members—but it’s different in other ways. Richer. Stronger. More influential. The 6 decide elections. Sway organizations like the CDC and FDA. They know senators and presidents and prime ministers. Billionaires and innovators and even the quiet, wealthy hideaways that don’t want their faces in the paper or the tabloids but that pull the strings on puppets from behind the scenes.

I don’t want to deal with that. I don’t want to be involved any more than I already am. Maybe one day I’ll be ready, or maybe I’ll die before I have to play my role.

“What’re you going to do with the girl?” Lucifer asks me again.

He didn’t forget after all.

I look up to find him staring at me, and I think about how close we were when I took Ella to his house. Saw him snorting lines at eight in the fucking morning.

This is our life.

“I don’t know.” I decide to try being honest with him for once.

“Do you like her?”

“Yes.”

“You love her?”

“I’ve known her five weeks.”

“I fell in love with Sid in two minutes.”

I laugh, running my hand over my head. “Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, bro.” I roll my eyes, turning my head to gaze out the windshield. “It’s called lust.”

“I married her, didn’t I? Over a year after I first met her.”

“You two spent a lot of time apart. It was like falling in lust all over again.”

“I love her more than I’ve ever loved anything in my fucking life, and if that doesn’t count for shit, well, it’s the best I can do.”

I know he loves her now. But two minutes? Nah.

“But you didn’t answer the question,” he continues in a lower voice. “What’re you going to do with her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well think about it now. Do you love her enough to hide her? Do you love her enough to bury her? Let them do it?” He blows out a breath. “You love her enough to let Ria die in her place?”

I sit up straighter, the sudden movement making both my back and my side throb, but I ignore it as I shift in my seat to face him, my eyes narrowed on his. “I don’t know if I love her. I don’t know if I’ll let her fucking die. This might be news to you, but I haven’t exactly treated her like a goddamn delicate flower and I’m not so sure I’m not just using her to get some of this bullshit we deal without—”

“Some girls like that shit,” Lucifer interrupts me coolly with a frown, his head still leaned against his seat as he watches me. “Sid does. Shit, I like treating her like shit, too.” He taps the side of his head. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly good, psychological reason for why her and I are so terribly unstable, but I don’t care what the reason is. She likes it. I like it. Save your flower bullshit. The girl probably doesn’t want it, and I know you damn sure don’t.”

No. I don’t. I don’t know what vanilla sex is to save my fucking life, but I know I never learned. I wasn’t raised that way. Before I started calling myselfMayhem,I might’ve had a chance. But after that…

Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done.

I try not to think about Ella’s request. Try not to think about the way I’d wanted to give in, to tell her the whole story. To give her some of my truths. Spill all my secrets. But then I’d expect her to take them to the grave, and that’s a heavy burden for anyone, especially a nineteen-year-old girl.

I’ve already told her too much as it is. She doesn’t need to pity me, too.

One of her own secrets echoes in my head.

Shane.

I don’t know who Shane is, what he looks like, where he is, but I do know he’s going to fucking die. Maybe right alongside her mother. Maybe my father, too. Maybe all of them.

Is that love? Wanting to kill someone that hurt her? That would hurt her? I don’t know.