These Monstrous Ties: New Adult Dark Romance (Unsainted Book 1) Page 12

  “Do I have to wait for Halloween to do this, too?” I ask.

  Jeremiah shakes his head. “Open season.” He stands up, pushes his chair in, and presses his fingertips to the table, leaning over. “Alright, let’s go,” he says, looking to Nicolas. He glances at Brooklin, then clears his throat.

  His gaze slides to me.

  “Before you meet with Nicolas…” He nods toward Brooklin. “You’ll have brunch with her.”

  I stiffen, my eyes darting from Brooklin to my brother and back again. “Why?” I ask, staring at her.

  She laughs. It’s fake.

  I force myself to face my brother. He never tried to make me and Brooklin like one another when he brought her home six months ago. For good reason. I didn’t want to be friends with his fuck toys. I still don’t.

  “She’s going to tell you all about the Unsaints, Sis.”

  I think I might faint. I hounded him with questions about them in the first few months I was here. Nicolas, too. They wouldn’t tell me a fucking thing. I knew that Jeremiah had always been the one on the outside; the Unsaints hadn’t cared that he hadn’t made it to Raven Shores for the Death Oath. They hadn’t waited for him. And Lucifer had threatened him in the park, by the merry-go-round. I knew, too, that my brother hadn’t been born here. How he’d found his way into the gang, I still didn’t know. No one would answer anything for me.

  How the hell would Brooklin know?

  She flashes him a smile, and I note it doesn’t look fake.

  She stands, her cheetah-print dress hugging her hips, and she sashays toward the door, blowing my brother an air kiss. Then she looks to me. Waiting.

  Nicolas’s and Jeremiah’s eyes are on me too, along with hers.

  I don’t quite believe this, but I’m too greedy for information to argue with my brother. I stand on wobbly legs and cross the room. Brooklin pushes the door open and holds it out for me.

  I give her a nod, and we walk out together, a guard that isn’t Kristof trailing behind us.

  The door falls closed.

  “You wanna drink before you hear this shit?” Brooklin asks me. Probably the most words she’s ever spoken to me at one time.

  I swallow, open my mouth. Close it.

  Then I nod.

  “I want more than one,” I say, and together, we head to the bar.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Present

  I toss back my second shot of whiskey.

  Brooklin sips on something bright purple and twirls the paper straw in her glass. We’ve said about three words to each other since we’ve been sitting here, and I’m waiting for her to get to the fucking point. To tell me what I want to hear so I can get away from her. It isn’t fair to her, my awkwardness around other women. It isn’t fair to women in general. But here we are.

  I motion to the bartender, Monica, for another shot. Monica shakes her head, her lips tugging into a smile.

  She brings it to the table, sets it down, and folds her arms over her chest. “You Rains are exactly the same,” she says.

  Both me and Brooklin glare at her.

  I bristle against those words. She tucks a strand of honey-colored hair behind her ear, a piece that had fallen from her low ponytail. She pushes the shot toward me. Her hands are flat on the table as I throw back the shot, relishing in the burn, aware that both her and Brooklin are watching me.

  “No, we’re not,” I answer her, slamming the shot glass on the table.

  She arches a brow, refolds her arms. She’s probably in her early thirties, if that. I have no idea how she’d come to work for Jeremiah. I don’t know how most of his people came to work for him, but I suppose we all had one thing in common: We had been strays. He’d plucked us up off the streets and put us in this fancy prison instead.

  “Look around, Sid,” Monica says, glancing around at the empty bar, meeting Brooklin’s gaze briefly. “Your brother is the same. Drinks at the worst times.”

  “Worst?” I ask, shaking my head. “There’s no such thing.”

  “Agreed,” Brooklin chimes in, glancing at her nails and taking a sip from her purple drink. She has a bleached blonde pixie cut, and she ruffles it with her hand, blue eyes swiveling back to Monica.

  Monica smiles, and her eyes light up with that smile. She could’ve been something more than my brother’s bartender, if she’d wanted to be. I know she, like everyone else here, gets paid well. But still, she’s beautiful. She could be a model. An actress.

  But maybe she hadn’t wanted to be any of that at all.

  “You can’t run from your demons in a bottle, Sid,” she says quietly. She turns to Brooklin. “That goes for you, too.”

  I frown. “Who said I’m running?” I twirl the shot glass around, watching it catch the low lights of the bar.

  “Only runners drown.”

  I sigh. “Haven’t you ever heard of the Ironman? Those people, they’d probably beg to differ.”

  She rolls her eyes and slaps the cleaning rag that had been on her shoulder on the table between us. “You know what I meant,” she teases.

  I shrug. “Maybe.”

  She winks at me and turns, heading back to the bar.

  The three shots have warmed me up. I place my hands on the table and lean in toward Brooklin, who sips on her drink. She’s only halfway done. She needs to hurry up.

  “Tell me,” I demand. “Tell me about the motherfucking Unsaints before I lose my goddamn mind.”

  She chews on the straw, licks her plumped lips, and then leans back in her chair. She has giant silver hoop earrings on and she fiddles with one now. She’s beautiful, which is no surprise. My brother has a type.

  She finally sighs, crosses her arms. “The Unsaints really do own Alexandria,” she says, echoing Ria’s words from a year ago. I don’t say anything. I want to hear it all. She glances out the window, at the manicured lawn round the back of the Rain mansion. “Kids of the Society of 6.” She shrugs, still not looking at me. “The Society is made of all kinds of rich ass people. A chairman of an investment conglomerate, CEOs of billion-dollar companies, heirs of fortunes that would bring you to your knees.” She shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter, really. The kids are worse than the parents.”

  I swirl the dregs of my shot glass. There’s nothing really in there except a few drops of whiskey, but I have the urge to lick it all up. I resist.

  “How do you know all this?” I ask Brooklin. There’re obviously things I don’t know about my brother, but I can’t imagine he’d tell her any of this.

  She meets my gaze. “I’m Mayhem’s sister.”

  I stop fucking around with my glass. “What?” I ask her, sure I’ve heard her wrong.

  She sighs, taps her perfectly manicured nails on the table. “Mayhem is one of the Unsaints—”

  “I know who he is,” I say, brushing off her explanation. She seems surprised that I know, but says nothing. I wonder what my brother told her about how he found me. “But you…then why the fuck are you here?”

  She frowns. “Mayhem and I love each other a hell of a lot less than Jeremiah and you do.”

  Which is to say, they must really, really hate each other.

  I arch a brow, waiting for her to continue.

  “He’s my older brother. I was always trying to follow him around to the Unsaint ceremonies. I went to Lover’s Death one night, when I was fifteen, he was seventeen. I snuck out, followed him to the park.” She trails off, working her lip between her teeth. I wonder if her story is as fucked as mine. “I got caught up with Atlas, took the Death Oath. But I wore a mask, covered my whole face. Atlas didn’t know it was me, his blood brother’s sister.” She shakes her head and sighs, looking at the ceiling. I marvel at how much my brother is rubbing off on her.

  And then I realize why my brother is keeping her around. She’s probably a boon of information.

  “When Atlas found out, after he, um, knocked my mask off, he told Mayhem immediately.” She closes her eyes. “Mayhem lost his shit,” s
he whispers. “Beat the fuck out of Atlas on that merry-go-round in Raven Park. His blood was all over it. Then Mayhem told my father. My dad…he kicked me out.”

  I feel rage bolt through me on her behalf. I think of Ria’s story, about the merry-go-round. Turns out it was fucking true. “What?” I ask, slamming my palms on the table. “Why?”

  “Girls aren’t allowed in the Unsaints. They’re like…the Masons, you know?” she asks, looking at me again. She brings her drink to her lips but doesn’t take a sip. “And for me to be tainted by one…”

  “Tained?” I spit out, angry all over again. “What the fuck?” I see Monica glancing at us from behind the bar, where she’s rubbing down a clean spot. But what else is she supposed to do? It’s an empty bar. And I’m sure as hell not going to lower my voice.

  “Look, Sid, I know you were…an escort…” she says it like it’s a dirty word. “But my family, the Astors, we don’t…it’s just not done for girls. They’re old school.”

  I swallow back the angry retort I have for that, trying to empathize. I find I can’t. “But wouldn’t that be a good thing, for you fuck one of the Unsaints? I mean, it’s a super-secret club for naughty rich boys. Your brother was in it. What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is no one fucks anyone’s family in there without permission. I forced Atlas to break his own oaths to Mayhem.”

  I see tears glimmering in her eyes. This shit is fucked. It makes no sense. But I swallow back all of that. It won’t do any good for me to say it now. Either Brooklin gets it, or she doesn’t. But there’s no use arguing with her on some shit her family did to her.

  “Where does my brother come into this picture?” I ask quietly. That’s what I really want to know. I get the Unsaints are fucked. I know they like blood oaths. I know they’re misogynists. I just want to know how Jeremiah Rain ended up running with them when he’d been born on the other side of the country. “I mean, they’re all old school families from Alexandria, right?”

  She nods, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Yeah,” she sniffs, taking a sip of her drink then setting it down, spinning the glass. “Yeah, they are. But your brother’s last foster family was from here. They were richer than everyone else, save for Lucifer’s family.” Her eyes flick to mine with his name. I don’t comment. Of course, Lucifer would be the wealthiest fuck among them.

  “Did he really kill them?” I ask. Because if my brother killed a family that rich, I have no idea how the fuck he isn’t in prison.

  Shocking the shit out of me, she nods. “He killed them. And the blood kids.”

  My mouth falls open. “What.” It isn’t really a question.

  “When he was seventeen. They’d left him locked up for two weeks at that point,” she explains, and my blood grows cold. “But not their kids. They just didn’t like him. Maybe because he was always getting in trouble at school. Bad attitude.” She laughs a little at that, and I do too. I don’t even know why. It’s not amusing. My heart is hurting for my brother, but I can’t stop the laugh anyway.

  “One of the girls—both of them were older than him, by the way, a nineteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old—let him out, and he grabbed a gun from his foster dad’s bedroom and shot them all.” She shrugs. “The will deemed he got the money, because the family was fucking stupid and never updated it. It just went to the remaining kids, him included, evenly distributed. He was the only one left. He hired a good lawyer. Self-defense. It didn’t even go to trial. Because that’s what that kind of money can do.”

  “And the Unsaints just let him in after that?”

  She laughs. “Are you kidding me? They would’ve killed to have him. I was already out on the streets then—”

  “On the fucking streets?” I ask her, bewildered. I knew she said her dad kicked her out but…

  She nods, lip trembling again. This is clearly a sore spot for her. I can’t blame her. “Yeah,” she says, “they wrote me out of the will and gave me a few thousand for a hotel, and that’s about it.”

  I let loose a breath. “Wow,” I say, shocked. “Continue.”

  She frowns but does. “The Unsaints wanted him. They all more or less hate their parents. They thought what he did was cool. But obviously, he was always on the outside looking in. Even though he’d been in for a few years by the time you came into the picture, he still wasn’t fully one of them. These kids had grown up together. They’d started the Unsaints when they were just kids, and their parents supported it. Encouraged it, even. So Jeremiah didn’t quite fit in. And you…well…when he saw what Lucifer did to you…” She lowers her voice, as if that’ll take away the fucking hole in my heart. “He couldn’t stay in it anymore. He left, after that night. He had nothing to do with them. He already had this place, already had his people who were loyal to him and not the Unsaints. He became the Order of Rain, and,” she shrugs, “here we are.”

  I sit in silence, letting it all digest.

  It doesn’t make sense.

  There are things I still don’t get.

  “Why are they coming after him? After you?” I ask, gesturing toward her. Finding out Mayhem is her brother blows my mind. It makes burning down her house all the worse.

  “I’m surprised they took this long. But you don’t just get to leave a gang like that and survive to tell the tale, Sid. They came for me as a warning. I met Jeremiah at one of his clubs. They would have had eyes and ears all over the city. They do have eyes and ears all over the city. I’m dead to Mayhem. He wouldn’t lose sleep after burning down my house.”

  I need another shot but I’m momentarily speechless. A cult of rich pricks that are loyal to one another to a fault but abandon their true family over something as ridiculous as sex and made-up oaths on Halloween night.

  I drum my fingers on the table, staring at nothing in particular.

  “Sid?” Brooklin whispers.

  I incline my head in her direction, wondering what fresh new wave of information is coming.

  “If you hurt Julie—”

  “I’m not going to hurt Julie.” My eyes snap to Brooklin. “I’m going to kill her.”

  Brooklin visibly recoils. She might be the estranged sister of an Unsaint and my brother’s current toy, but she clearly isn’t suited to this life, even after what her own family did to her.

  “If you do, Lucifer and the rest of them will come after you.”

  I flash her a smile. “I hope to God they do.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Halloween, One Year Ago

  The first thing I feel is the pain.

  My head is spinning, my mouth is dry, my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. And my legs ache. I try to open my eyes, but they’re so unbelievably heavy, it takes a herculean effort.

  When I finally manage to pry them open, I close them again, immediately.

  The light is too bright.

  I register that I’m lying on the forest floor. And everything from the night before comes rushing back to me in painful waves.

  The gun on my hip, now gone. The walk from my apartment. My plan that had been torn to pieces. Lucifer. His mouth. His tongue. The knife. His voice. His scent.

  The Unsaints.

  The pregnant girl.

  Ria.

  The fire.

  The rum.

  The asylum.

  The Death Oath.

  Oh God.

  I try to open my eyes again, but then I feel something dig into my side.

  “Good morning, sleeping beauty.”

  I recognize the voice, and fear ripples through me. I need to move. I need to get up. But I can’t. Everything hurts. I grit my teeth, and push myself over, rolling onto my back, so I can at least see.

  A man stands over me.

  It isn’t Lucifer.

  “Lucifer,” I whisper anyway, hoping he’ll come out from the trees. Surely, he’s still here. He had promised me he would be here.

  I swallow past the dry knot in my throat, and taste blood. I wonder
if it’s my own, or his.

  The sky is pink and blue above me, and I shiver. It’s only then, as a breeze hits my chest, that I realize I’m not wearing anything. My bodysuit is in tatters on the ground beside me, and even my boots have been ripped off. I can’t feel the weight of the horns on my head, and my hand flies to my face, but I don’t know what I’m checking for.

  Bruises? Cuts?

  The man standing over me smiles. It chills my blood.

  I know him.

  Jeremiah.

  The one who followed me last night. The one Lucifer took me from.

  “You’re in one piece,” he croons. “But barely.” He’s wearing a hoodie, but the hood is off of his face now. I squint up at him, trying to think. Trying to put together the pieces of what happened last night.

  But the only thing I remembered after making promises to Lucifer is…blacking out. I’d blacked out. I don’t know if he had known that; I know sometimes people can’t tell. It isn’t the same as passing out. I have no idea what happened after that. But I’m naked. I feel dirty.

  The man standing over me seems to sense my confusion. He crouches down beside me and grips my hand. I let him hold it, but I don’t squeeze back.

  “Do you remember me?” he asks.

  I make to shake my head, to pull my hand from his. To cover myself. But then I see his eyes.

  Pale green, like the lightest jade. Like a blade of new grass. And his hair, dark and thick. Heavy brows, perfectly arched, like my own.

  I bite back a gasp.

  “Jamie?” I whisper. My throat hurts with his name, but I need him to tell me it’s true. I need to know.

  My brother’s hand on mine tightens. But a shadow crosses his face. “Yes, Sid. Yes.”

  He had carried me out of the asylum in his arms. At first, he had had to drag me away. I had scrambled to stay, to look for Lucifer. To fight. But there’s only Jamie and two guards with him—the latter of whom thankfully has clothes for me to pull on. I had willingly worn the hoodie and sweatpants, looking at the scraps that remained of my bodysuit on the forest floor.