These Monstrous Ties: New Adult Dark Romance (Unsainted Book 1) Read online

  But I didn’t want to leave.

  There’s blood in patches of grass and dirt among the ground. I don’t know if it’s mine, or Lucifer’s, or Jamie’s. My brother won’t tell me anything. I had hit his back as he tossed me over one shoulder, as if I was nothing. I had looked for the gun. For the entrance to the asylum. For anything to tell me that last night had been real. That it hadn’t been a dream. A hallucination. But I’d seen nothing. We were deep in the woods. There was nothing to confirm that anything at all had happened last night, except for the fact someone had cut off my bodysuit.

  I remember Lucifer doing it. I remember him on top of me. And I had seen the cut on my thigh, which was streaked with blood.

  That had been real.

  But what else? What else had happened? How had Jamie found me? After all that time…fourteen years. Over a decade, an entire country had been placed between us.

  Jamie says nothing.

  And last night, they had called him Jeremiah. I also hear one of the guards call him as much.

  He says nothing. He offers no explanation. Instead, he takes me into the hotel, puts me in the bathtub, takes off my new clothes himself and scrubs me clean. I scream at him. I cover my breasts with my hands. But he is clinical, methodical, scrubbing me down with a loofah. He hasn’t spoken a word, but he has nearly scrubbed my skin off. I’m pink by the time he’s done with me.

  His eyes linger on the cut on my thigh, but he doesn’t ask about it.

  He yanks me to my feet, pats me dry with a towel, and puts me in a white robe. Then he sits me down on a leather chair in a hotel room, and he starts to pace in front of me.

  One of his guards comes in and offers me a glass of water. I want to throw it back in his face. I want to scream at the top of my lungs. But instead, I take the water and drain it, then set the glass on the coffee table.

  The guard looks to Jamie, who gives him a curt nod, and then he leaves.

  Jamie stops pacing.

  He’s grown up. When we were separated, he had been a boy. Eight years old. Now, he’s a man. Broad-shouldered, muscular, still dressed in that hoodie and dark jeans. His jaw had angled out, his neck is corded with muscle.

  “How did you find me?” I ask him. I want to scream at him, but I don’t have the strength. I can’t get to my feet. Humiliation washes over me in waves. From the way he found me to the way he had scrubbed me clean as if I were impure. To the fact that Lucifer left me. He had broken me and then he had left me.

  Jamie tilts his head up to glance at the ceiling. The hotel has to be a five-star one. I’ve seen it before, beyond a hill past my apartment. But I’ve never wondered about it. I met clients in my home or theirs, but I didn’t do hotels. I wanted the profits. I needed them. Besides, most of my clients couldn’t afford both a hotel and my services. They had to pick one, which was fine with me.

  What I don’t understand about this place is that…Jamie seems to own it.

  “I searched for you,” he finally says, chest heaving as he stares at me. Glares at me. “I searched for you for a long, long time, Sid. Where the fuck have you been?”

  And that propels me to my feet. I leap at him, my finger poking into his chest. “Where the fuck have you been?” I growl, anger lighting my veins. “Where the fuck have you been, Jamie? You were supposed to look out for me! You were my big brother! Where the fuck have you been? How did you find me?”

  He catches my wrist in his hand and lowers it between us. “Don’t do that.”

  “Don’t do what?” I hiss. I’m nineteen now, and he’s twenty-three. But in that moment, I feel like his kid sister again, five years old and screaming his name as social services pulled us apart. We never came back together.

  Not until now.

  “Don’t blame me,” he says, shaking his head. He’s still holding my wrist in his hand. “Don’t do that.” His expression seems…anguished. Some of the anger in my chest melts away. It turns into grief. “Where were you, Sid? All this time?”

  I close my eyes. He pulls me closer to him, and when I meet his gaze again, we’re close enough to share breath. “I was moved here, right after we were…right after we were separated. Then I…” I swallow, wondering how the fuck to sum up fourteen brutal years in one sentence. “I bounced around. Last year, when I turned eighteen, dropped out of high school and moved out. Got my own place.”

  His eyes darken. “I’ve been looking for you,” he says quietly.

  “I’ve been here,” I answer him. It isn’t exactly true. I’d moved from Raleigh to Alexandria when I moved out of my last foster parent’s house. A house I’d only stayed at for six months before I dropped out of school. They’d wanted the extra money they’d get from the government for giving me a closet-sized room to stay in. I barely remember their names. “How did you find me?” I ask again.

  But it isn’t what I really want to know. What I really want to know is something deeper. Where is Lucifer? What happened to me in the night? There was no sign of the party when we had left, but I’d seen the fire pit on our way out of the park, surprisingly burned down to nothing. It hadn’t been a dream. The cut on my leg…

  But my entire body still aches, as if I’ve been run over by a truck. There are bruises all over me.

  “I need to know what happened last night,” I finally whisper. “What happened to me?” I swallow down the lump in my throat. “Why were you with them?”

  He lets go of my wrist and I think he’s going to turn away from me. I think he’s going to leave me again. But instead, he wraps his arms around me, and pulls me into his hard chest.

  I resist, at first, stiffening under his touch. I don’t rest my head against him. Not at first. His scent swirls around me, fresh laundry and cologne, but something else too. Something like smoke. Bonfire smoke. From the night before.

  When did he find out it was me? How long had he watched me while I was unconscious?

  A sob creeps its way into my throat and I give in, resting against his shoulder, letting him hold me up.

  “What happened to me?” I ask again. “What happened to me, Jamie?”

  He tightens his hold on me, pulling me closer, trying to keep me from falling apart.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says against my hair. “I’m so sorry I didn’t find you sooner.”

  I know that whatever happened, it’s going to be hard to hear. Maybe I don’t want to know. I’m not sure I’ll ever want to know.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Present

  Lunch with Nicolas starts with drinks. I’m already buzzed by the time I drop down into the seat across from him at one of the restaurants in the hotel. This place really is like its own village, for the sick, twisted, and afflicted.

  But Nicolas has a drink waiting for me, what looks to be a rum and Coke, and I’ll take that affliction any day. He also has iced water, and I nod my thanks to him for both before I reach for the alcohol.

  “You might want to slow down, kid,” he warns me. I want to tell him I’m not a fucking kid, but instead I just take a drink.

  He rolls his eyes, rests his forearm on the table. No one has come to take our order yet, and I’m glad. I want to get this out of the way first. Then I’ll know if I’ll be able to eat without vomiting.

  Nicolas is wearing a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up at the forearms. He gives me a crooked smile as I finish my drink and reach for the water, but the smile doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

  “What’s going on with you and Jeremiah?” he asks me.

  The question takes me by surprise. I let the ice-cold water make its way down my throat, cooling the burn from the rum. “Why didn’t you ask him that?”

  His eyes narrow into slits. “I did. But now I’m asking you.”

  I lean back, take the cloth napkin from the table and unfurl it, draping it over my lap for something to do, even though there’s no food on the way yet.

  I clasp my hands in my lap. “What did he say?”

  Nicolas scrubs a hand over
his face. “You two are more alike than you think,” he says, groaning. “You are definitely brother and sister. One hundred percent Rain and one hundred percent assholes.”

  I laugh out loud. “We’re not alike,” I argue. I don’t want us to be alike. We can’t be alike. I don’t think I’m a saint, by any stretch of the imagination. But Jeremiah is worse than Satan himself.

  “He would have shot Kristof for you, this morning,” Nicolas says, suddenly serious, looking at me through his blonde lashes. “He would have killed him in that meeting room and had someone burn the body. Do you know that?”

  I wave away his suggestion that somehow Jeremiah has had a real change of heart toward me. I want it to be true. But he’d only pretended to, to get me to agree to getting rid of Julie and the Unsaints. And Lucifer, I remind myself.

  “Whatever. He aimed a gun at my head just last night and pulled the fucking trigger. Or did you forget that?”

  Nicolas’s expression is serious. “No,” he says, his voice clipped. “I did not forget. And I won’t.” He leans forward, both elbows on the table. “But I don’t think Jeremiah will forget either. I think he regrets it.”

  “Is that what he said?” I ask, knowing he hadn’t.

  Nicolas doesn’t look away from me. “No,” he answers truthfully. “But I know him. More than you. More than nearly anybody. He regrets it. And he regrets he’s putting you in this position, to do something he knows will hurt you—”

  “Woah,” I interrupt, shaking my head. “Who said it will hurt me?”

  Nicolas leans back and clears his throat. “Jeremiah knows about Lucifer. He’s the one that found you, remember? Or have you forgotten?”

  “He doesn’t know what happened before he found me.”

  I don’t even know what happened before he found me. I remember learning my brother was no longer called ‘Jamie’. That he had morphed into Jeremiah. I remember waking up in the park, deep in the woods, far from the asylum. My eyes burn with that memory. But I didn’t know what had actually happened.

  No one did.

  No one but Lucifer.

  And he had run away, like he promised he wouldn’t.

  I push that memory aside. I have no time to think about that shit now. It’s far too late for regrets, from either me or Jeremiah.

  “If he feels so damn bad about it,” I snap, trying to clear my head, “then why is he making me do it?”

  Nicolas raises his brows. “You really don’t know?”

  I shake my head, my temper rising. “No, I really fucking don’t.”

  He sighs and motions at the bar for another drink. I notice he only has water, but I don’t care. I can spiral out of control. Jeremiah can pick up the pieces or let me die. Either one is fine with me, so long as I can get out of my own goddamn head.

  The bartender, a man I barely know, sets the drink down. I don’t usually come here. This is Jeremiah’s and Nicolas’s spot. Usually reserved for the men.

  I take the drink without looking at the man, who walks away.

  “Because he wants to let you have your vengeance.”

  It takes all of the self-control I possess—which is already on short supply as it is—not to fling this drink against the wall.

  “Fuck that,” I seethe. I take a sip, set it down, cross my arms on the table. “Fuck that. You and I both know that’s not why he’s doing it. He’s doing it to punish me. Because he thinks, for some reason, that there was something between Lucifer and me. But he has no fucking clue. None. There was nothing between us. So I’ll do this job,” I rake my bangs out of my eyes, “and I’ll kill whoever the fuck it is he wants me to kill. But don’t you dare fucking pretend this is for me.”

  Nicolas watches me from hooded eyes. I’m breathing fast, the anger like a living thing in my blood. I’m not angry at Nicolas, not exactly. But if he actually thinks my brother—conniving, manipulative, fucking batshit crazy—is offering me these kills as vengeance, he’s lost his goddamn mind. He’s drank from the Kool-Aid for far too fucking long.

  The longer he watches me, the angrier I get. Until I’m about to stand to my feet and walk out. But he must sense it, because he finally opens his mouth to respond to me.

  “You forget so easily.” He runs his tongue over his teeth, and stares past me, as if he’s remembering. As if I had forgotten. As if I could forget. God, I want to. I want to forget it all. More than putting the pieces together, more than remembering the holes from that night, I want to forget it all.

  “You forget that Lucifer raped you.”

  I flinch at those words.

  “You forget he left you, naked, in a fucking insane asylum. You forget he didn’t give a shit about you, about what happened to you. He used you like a piece of fucking trash, Sid, and you don’t want to make him pay for that? Because I fucking do.”

  I scoff. “You would’ve let Kristof rape me,” I counter, my hands curled into fists.

  Nicolas shakes his head. “I knew Jeremiah wouldn’t let it happen,” he says firmly. As if he believes it. I sure as hell don’t. “He wouldn’t have, and if I had thought he would, I would have been there to stop it myself.”

  I laugh, loud and low. “You’re an idiot.”

  Nicolas slams his fist on the table. “And you’re a fucking stupid little girl,” he snarls at me, leaning across the table to get in my face. “He. Raped. You. Your brother saved you. All that you’ve been through, all that you had to do to survive, and you still act like nothing more than a child.”

  I try to calm my temper. I try to breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth. I try to relax. “If you’re so fired up about this, about defending my honor, why don’t you kill them?”

  Nicolas’s fist uncurls and he shifts in his seat, holding my gaze steady, aiming. Ready to pierce my heart. “Because you need to grow the fuck up, Sid. Jeremiah won’t always be around to protect you. One day, you might lead the Order of Rain. One day, you’ll have to deal with the shit he goes through on a daily basis. One day,” he gestures around us, “this might be yours. And if you’re going to be in charge of something like this, you need to grow some fucking balls.”

  “I don’t want this place, Nicolas. What don’t you get about this? I was ready to fucking die that night before my brother dragged me out of the asylum. I still am!” I stand to my feet, swipe my hand across the table, knocking my drink to the floor, the sound of shattering glass piercing the quiet of the nearly empty restaurant. “Did he tell you that?”

  Nicolas is so angry, his hands are shaking. I know he probably wants to punch me in the face. I want to do the same to him. We’ve never physically fought, not since those two weeks I spent in a cell and he had to force food down my throat and fresh clothes on my body every day. But I’m ready for it now.

  “You told us,” he spits, standing to his feet now too, staring down across the table at me. “You fucking told us. You screamed at me every fucking day in that cell that you wanted to die. That you had tried to die. That Lucifer had saved you and you didn’t want to be saved.”

  My face burns with that memory. I’d conveniently forgotten it. Everything after that night had been a blur, for a long, long time.

  “Lucifer fucked you over, Sid. In more ways than one. I know what Jeremiah asked you to do this morning isn’t easy, no matter what you might say to the contrary. He’s also not expecting you’ll follow through on all of it.”

  My mouth drops open, some of the anger washing away. “What?” I hiss.

  Nicolas shakes his head, pounds his fist against the table. “Obviously, I’m not supposed to tell you this shit. But kill all of the Unsaints? You, who have never killed anyone in your life? No, Sid, you’re not going to take all five of them. He knows it. But he wants you to get Julie before you get Lucifer. To let Lucifer panic. To let Lucifer get some of the payback he deserves.”

  Despite myself, I can’t hide my smile at that.

  “And who is going to help me kill all of them?”

  Nico
las shrugs. “We will.”

  I bite my lip, biting back against the pain. Pain Nicolas has no idea he’s causing me. Because I might not remember the rape, I might not remember the worst of that night, but I remember our promises. What Lucifer and Lilith had sworn to each other in the darkness.

  But he’d broken those vows as soon as he made them. The Death Oath didn’t mean shit to the Unsaints.

  I’m going to fucking enjoy breaking him, too.

  “Tell me what I need to know to get this shit done.”

  Nicolas stares at me a moment, reading me. Trying to gauge my mood. But it’s impossible to do that. I don’t even know my own mind in this moment. I just know what I want. What I’m going to take.

  What I fucking deserve.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Present

  I have to hand it to Lucifer. He’d hidden his girl and his baby boy well. Not in Alexandria. Not even in the state of North Carolina. No, he’d taken them north, to Virginia. A small town just outside of Roanoke called Acid City.

  Fitting, really.

  Acid City is a four-hour drive, which was his first mistake. That isn’t far enough. Especially not for a Rain. Nowhere would have been far enough, but this just makes it easier.

  His second mistake is staying at that house in Raven Park. It means my brother can keep an eye on him, make sure he has no idea anything is amiss. I don’t know what kind of war him and my brother have, what exactly it means for an Unsaint to desert, but Lucifer wants to hurt Jeremiah just as bad as Jeremiah wants to hurt him.

  That much is obvious when one of my brother’s clubs, Dead Weight, burns down in the middle of the day, right after Nicolas and I finish our lunch. It’s a loss that my brother takes lightly enough; he has more than half a dozen clubs in and around the city. But to be so brazen about it, to bypass the security cameras completely…it’s bold.

  But it means Lucifer is still around.

  And Jeremiah knows it had to be him; he’d left a skeleton mask at the entrance to the parking lot. Motherfucker.