Page 20 of The Cruelest Chaos

We’re just going to drive away? Doesn’t he want to know if there’s actually a fire? Is he going to take me home?

Do I want to go home anymore?

He pulls something out of his shorts. A key fob. He presses a button, and I see lights flashing, and a grey car that probably costs more money than my mother has ever made in her life starts...opening.

The doors open upward, like wings tilted up. A bird diving down.

My mouth drops open. He turns toward me as we keep walking toward the sleek car. In the bleating of the alarm, the sound of cars peeling out of here, people still shouting even though there’s no obvious signs of a fire, he smirks at me and everything else...disappears.

“You ever ridden in a McLaren before?”

I’m vaguely aware it’s a sports car. I don’t answer him, but I’m sure he sees the answer in the way I’m staring at the ridiculous car.

He grins at me. It’s boyish, giving his angled face a less sinister look.

He steers me around to the passenger side by my shoulders, then pushes me toward the orange trimmed leather seats.

He seems to have forgotten all about my nails down his back.

I think about not getting into the car. Yeah, we fucked but I don’t know him. He doesn’t know me. Despite his devilish appearance, he lives a strange life surrounded by shiny, pretty things...and I’m not one of those things. I just wanted an escape for the night. It’s not the first time I went to a party looking for one of those.

And I cannot get attached. Not again.

But he shoves me, hard, and I fall back into the seat. He reaches around me, does up my seatbelt. With a devious grin, he shuts the bird-like doors and comes around to his side.

When we’re in the car, he turns to glance at me. “I’m gonna pay you back for that, Ella.”

I hope you do.

Chapter Five

I payher back for it, and then some. She took three shots when she got inside my house. If that’s what it was going to take for her to fuck me again, I didn’t care. I saw the mark on her face, the one I didn’t make, and I thought about asking her about it. I wondered if that’s what she wanted to forget.

I didn’t ask.

I have a feeling whenever she wakes up, she’s gonna be covered in more bruises. I think I should feel bad about that, but she begged for it.Not that I needed to be begged.

We didn’t talk much, and when it was all over, despite her feeble protest that she should leave, she fell asleep. I wonder if it hadn’t been close to five in the morning, still dark outside, if this would’ve happened so easily. If she would’ve let me carry her upstairs, dive my head between her legs, and then fuck her so hard she actually cried.

Monsters always get away with more in the dark.

Like whoever pulled that fucking fire alarm.

I got a report from the guards that there was not, in fact, a fire, which is another reason I don’t fucking like people. And tonight, I’ve got to deal with more of them. At Council.

But for now, Ella is asleep in my bed, and while I’m sexually satisfied, I’m not everreallysatisfied.

Which is a good thing I got a text from an unsaved number in my phone just as I finished choking Ella, coming inside of heragain, because I’m an idiot and believed her when she said she was on birth control.

It’s the same number that had taunted me about Poe’sThe Premature Burial:“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

But this time, all the message said was,Ready for confession?

I lock a sleeping Ella in my room (this house is full of dark surprises).

I let Father Tomas into the garage, the sun not even out yet.

I purposefully parked the McLaren and pulled the Audi outside on the driveway for this reason.