Page 70 of Wicked Salvation

It crackles like a fresh bag of crisps.

Then I do the other—and that’s when he screams. In between his groans and shrieks I assume he’s swearing at me. But I can’t make anything out. I kneel beside him.

“You knew what your friend was up to, what he did to her andcontinuesto do to her. You knew about the rituals that would bind her to him, and you participated.”

His lip quivers. “I told him the last one was crazy,” he stutters. “None of us wanted to kill that girl but Silas insisted he had to, to make Eden his.”

New information.

It hardly changes the fact that he’s complicit, but it will change how I deal with him.

“It might not have been your idea, but youparticipated.” I reiterate, and he whimpers as I roll my heel along his broken ankle. “Did you think that it wouldn’t cost you anything?”

I leave him writhing, lying among the shattered greenhouse panes, roses blooming in his blood. I flick the lighter out of my pocket, sparking it near some dried leaves.

Orange flames take hold immediately, and I cast a glance back at him, and there’s terror in his eyes as he realizes the implications. If he doesn’t get up soon, he’s going to be eaten alive by the flames—just like how they burned that girl’s corpse.

He’s hurt but not dead.

Max will make it out of the fire if he’s lucky.

ALISTAIR - 19:19

Out of them all, he gets the only simulacrum of sympathy I have.

He still thinks that this is all a game, that they’re all just boys playing war, that the secret society he’s a part of just comes with being a Montague. The Montague name precedes him—my parents have paintings done by members of his family hanging in our house, statues they’ve carved in our gardens. My mother even hired his mother to paint a mural at one of our estates.

It’s a shame that Alistair ended up on the wrong side of history.

I find him in the chapel, on bended knee before a statue of the virgin Mary, praying frantically as he rubs his hands along a rosary. He looks exactly the way he should for a man tryingand failingat playing god.

Guilty.

“I was wondering when you’d show up,” he whispers as I get closer to him. “For what it’s worth, I think he’s gone off the rails too.”

He’s still kneeling when my steps slow behind him. “It doesn’t matter what youthink.Inaction is still making a choice. You had your chance,” I say with a smile.

Then I knock him out with the butt of a flashlight.

I drag him by the collar of his gold-stitched shirt to the baptismal basin that no one uses anymore. I fill it with holy water, even taking the time to read a Psalm I found on Google to consecrate the suffering I am about to inflict on him.

Alistair is a slight thing, so hauling his unconscious body into a leaning position against the basin is easy. I press his face under the water, and he springs to life immediately—he thrashes, blowing bubbles on a silent scream, his lithe fingers clawing at my own.

But it’s no use.

I hold him there.

Not long enough to kill him, of course.

Just to scare him, to make him wonder when it will stop.

To make himfeelthe weight of helplessness, of drowning when if you were given a fair chance you maybe would have had a better chance. Of what all those girls must have felt in those final moments, choking on silence.

When I lift him out, he sputters and coughs.

He begs for mercy.

“Of course, Alistair.”