Page 53 of The Villain's Beast

I didn’t have enough energy to laugh, so I gave him a huff of breath that turned into a whine when Daren hauled me back up onto shaking legs.

“You’re everything that matters,” he whispered into my ear, stroking his hands down my arms to the tips of my fingers. “Let’s get cleaned up and make sure the house is still standing.”

Chapter 37

Bellamy

It was jealousy, I realized. Sitting on the edge of Daren’s bed—again in borrowed clothes—watching the way he and Luca moved around each other like they were in a shared orbit. I’d never met two people more destined to be together, more meant to be, than the two of them.

Sighing, I fidgeted with the cuff of Gideon’s hoodie, which I’d put back on after the shower, even though Daren and Luca had teased me about the necessity to leave it behind for Fletcher. The history between Fletcher Sinclair and Gideon North was simultaneously the best and worst kept secret between the two houses. There was no doubt the two men hated each other beyond reason, but the hate was too present and violent for it to be based solely on their names. It was a personal kind of investment, one I knew too well because it was how my father felt about the Sinclair family as a whole.

“Respectfully, Bellamy,” Daren said, leaning against the wall opposite the bed and folding his arms in front of his chest. “Why are you here?”

“Why am I…”

“How did you get chosen for this?” Luca clarified. He sat on the floor between the bed and the wall, but to the side. Ourbodies formed a triangle, easy for all of us to see the other two at all times, which felt important.

“My dad,” I explained, a story I didn’t know the whole of that would never make sense. “I was supposed to go to school in California. But that changed and now I’m here. My mom was…”

“Was what?” Daren pressed.

I remembered her tears, her anxiety the night they’d sat me down and told me about my pending enrollment at RHU, about my involvement with the Thorns. I wonder if either of them knew what it had meant at the time. If they knew I’d be a human offering, a sacrifice to seal generations of secrets between a handful of families who had more money than most countries. Maybe that was why my mom had been so distraught over the whole thing.

“Not happy about it,” I said. “She cried when I found out.”

Luca shot Daren a concerned look, eyes crinkled around the corners behind the crystal clear lenses of his glasses.

“Why?” I asked. “What was that look for?”

“I don’t know,” Luca said, features clear once again. “It’s just weird.”

“Why is it weird?”

“Because you’re nobody,” Daren said simply, mouth twisted. “That’s not?—”

“I know how you meant it,” I said simply.

“I don’t think I’ve ever even heard the name Marchant before you.” Luca stretched his legs out in front of him, flexing his toes toward the ceiling and stretching his arms back behind him.

“We aren’t anyone. I have five older brothers and at home I shared a room with two of them. We don’t have money; we don’t have anything.”

“Quite the offering,” Luca mused under his breath.

I wanted to be offended, but it was the truth. I’d learned little about the organization of the Thorns and the Roses in the lead-up to initiation night, but I knew they had money and power and everything they did was an exchange of those things. There was no reason for me to be part of it at all. No reason for my dad to be a part of it either.

“My dad told me to make Fletcher Sinclair an ally.”

“Fletcher has no allies. That’s why he’s”— Daren pointed to the upstairs—“up there and we’re down here.”

“Aren’t you an ally?”

“I’m a deputy,” he said. “Luca is a deputy. Right hand. Advisor. Whatever you want to call it, but ally? I think you have to trust an ally, don’t you?”

“Gideon doesn’t trust anyone,” Luca said.

I remembered Gideon coming back into the room at Rose Hall, remembered him crawling on top of me and rutting me into the bed like the beast he wanted everyone to believe him to be. I’d seen the cracks in his façade, though, just like I had when Fletcher had me by the throat in the woods. The two of them were so much the same, but blind to see how much stronger they could be together instead of apart.

“Who do you trust?” I asked Luca.