Page 118 of The Cruelest Chaos

“How do you feel? About your dad’s death?” I ask Lucifer, keeping my tone even.

He smiles at me, hands resting on his thighs. “Aside from hearing Sid tell me she loves me? Nothing has ever felt better than driving that knife into his fucking brain.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The ground iscold beneath me. The footfalls of the 6 leaving echoing around me makes me think we’re in a cave of some sort. A tunnel. But I don’t know. I can’t see. There’s a blindfold over my eyes, and my hands are bound by rope behind my back.

Noctem is here.

When the steps of our fathers dissipate, Ezra is the first to speak. “Who has the knife?”

Someone always gets a knife. They might blindfold us, bind us, and drop us off in the middle of nowhere, but we have to get free somehow because otherwise we’d just be sitting around here shooting the shit. The knife is also a weapon, in case we can’t hack it for three days with no food and lots of drugs.

In case we decide to turn our backs on Mos Maiorum, the unwritten code that says we put our brothers before ourselves.

Neither of us have been doing a hell of a lot of that lately. Maybe that knife will do more than saw through rope this time.

I don’t have the knife.

Ezra, apparently, doesn’t have the knife.

“I do.”

I roll my eyes behind the blindfold. Of course fucking Lucifer would get the knife.

“You mind hurrying the hell up?” Atlas asks. He doesn’t like the dark, and I hear the tension in his words.

I love the dark; after being locked in a closet for hours at a time at the hands of my nanny, I grew used to it. What I don’t like is thinking of Ella with Sid in Lucifer’s house. I told her about Noctem. Told her I would be back as soon as I could.

I think some part of her still doesn’t get what this is.

I kind of hope Sid can sort that out for her. I feel a little guilty, giving Sid that burden. But she would explain it best. She almost died at the 6’s hands, after all.

Maybe when I get back, Ella will have changed her mind. She hasn’t been bound to me, and no one really knows what I’ve told her. I could deny everything; tell them she knows nothing. She was a toy. A distraction.

If she wants to run from me, I’ll let her.

I think.

“Done,” Lucifer mutters and I hear something shift in the darkness and then cold steel against the back of my wrist.

He slides the blade over the rope and quickly frees my hands.

“Thanks,” I mutter as I shake out my wrists, letting the rope fall free. Then my hands go to the blindfold and I yank it off, scrubbing a hand through my hair as I blink in the darkness.

There’s not much to see.

I can’t even make out my brothers in here, but I hear Atlas murmuring his own thanks. Cain is the only one of us who hasn’t spoken, which isn’t surprising.

“Where do you think we are?” Atlas asks, that tension still present in his voice. He wants some light.

Don’t we all.

I sigh. “We were in the back of the van for half an hour. Not far. Probably still in Alexandria.”

I hear the blade clatter to the floor and Lucifer says, “All done.”

“Hey, pick that back up!” Atlas shouts, panic in his words.