Page 12 of These Monstrous Ties

“Fuck this.” I don’t know why I’m done now, but something doesn’t feel right. Something just feels...all wrong. I twist again in his arms and he lets me go. I toss my cup on the table. “I’m out.”

Ria’s words come back to me: merry-go-round covered in blood. Unsaints. Something else coming...

Yeah. No.

“It was nice meeting you, but I’ve got plans and apparently you do too.”

He says nothing, his blue eyes locked on mine. A muscle feathers in his skeleton jaw, but otherwise he doesn’t move.

And I kind of wish he would. A fucked-up part of my body wants him to stop me.

I turn around, hoping to feel his hands around my waist. Fingers around my wrist. Something.

Nothing.

So, I go, away from the crowd, into the darkness of the forest, looking for a secluded spot to finish what I came here for.

Chapter Five

Present

“If you fuckingtouch me again, I will kill you.”

It’s not quite an empty threat, but the way Kristof laughs from his bathroom, it might as well be.

He took me home after all, tied up in the back of the black SUV Jeremiah always takes me to view his kills in.

I’m tied to a chair wearing nothing but a white t-shirt that’s three sizes too big, and I’m under no one’s protection at the moment—my bastard brother had ordered all guards off of Kristof’s hall—but I’m far from fucking defenseless.

After Halloween night a year ago, I made sure I was never defenseless again. I flick the blade from the butterfly knife in my hands, one I’d managed to get to in the car and hide from Kristof because he’s dumber than a fucking rock.

Kristof keeps brushing his teeth, and keeping one eye on him, I begin to saw at the rope he’d cinched around my wrists.

This room is disgusting.

It is, like every room in the Rain house, far too big, with far too many amenities. My brother’shousewas formerly a hotel, and he’d bought the entire thing before it even began to run as one. He’d let the previous owners build it, market it, inlay the floors with gilded marble, the ceilings with mirrors flush above the bed, and the walls with flat screen TVs, and then he’d broke a deal with them.

By that I mean he threatened to kill them and gave them millions of dollars in exchange for their disappearance and silence. They’d left Alexandria, probably fled north to Virginia. If they were smart, they wouldn’t still be in North Carolina.

Jeremiah Rain is a thug of the richest kind. Leader and priest of Order of Rain. He’s cruel. Vile. Vicious. He’s pushed me to the edge this past year more times than I care to count. I just never thought he’d actually let me be used as a sex toy. But we’ve been separated far longer than we’ve been together.

He clearly hasn’t developed those brotherly feelings toward me that he should have.

I don’t think he’s ever developed feelings of any kind, for anyone.

Rumor has it his foster parents locked him in a cage after they adopted him from California, where we were born. Apparently, after he killed his siblings and his parents, he inherited their billions, then became an Unsaint, before he betrayed them. He’s never confirmed those rumors.

He’s never denied them either.

All I know now is that the Order of Rain deals in murder, drugs, and anything that will put more money into his hands. My own payment is sparse, considering I don’t do anything but what Jeremiah says. But I don’t lack for anything here.

Except right fucking now.

Right fucking now, I’m going to need someone to come clean up the mess I’m about to make of Kristof’s balls. I would never use this blade against my brother.

But I damn sure will against anyone else.

I keep my hands held behind my back, even as they’re free now. And I wait.