Why the fuck have I put myself on their destructive path?For what?I had a plan, a way out of here, and now I've fucked it all up for her. A girl with pretty purple hair who looked back at me and made me believe in an instant I could be something different, something better. She seems to have breathed new life into this place and hope into my weary soul, even if it's unfounded and unrealistic.She's just a one-night stand; you need to get over it and move on.I try to reason with myself, but something within me is refusing to acknowledge the logic thatis glaringly apparent to anyone with half a brain cell. I'm not a chivalrous white knight, or a fucking prince from a fairytale, and she's not some helpless princess waiting to be rescued. There is no happily ever after here to be found.
I curse under my breath, and cut through the main path toward the library. The air tastes like cut grass, heat, the scents of fall, and my desperation. Students are still moving around, chatting, laughing, blissfully unaware of the rot that festers beneath this campus. The kind that wears letterman jackets and family crests, calling itself a brotherhood. Mayhem ruins everything it touches, and no one is truly out of their reach, including me.
I wave back at those greeting me, trying to look inconspicuous. I’m almost to the main doors of the library when I see movement up ahead. A large, daunting figure in all black stumbling from the side entrance, moving like he’s barely holding himself upright, and that has me halting in my steps as alarms ring inside my head.
Damon.
Jesus fuck, he’s a mess, even more than usual.His shirt's ripped, his hair is in complete disarray, his face is all bruised up from Olly's fists the previous night, and his lip is freshly bleeding. I watch him stumble forward with glassy, unfocused eyes, and he swipes at the air like he’s seeing something crawling before him, or he's on another one of his benders. He looks unhinged, furious, and half gone. I should walk away, and avoid him like the pestilence he is, but instead, I step in his path without hesitation, squaring my shoulders and preparing to fight him if necessary, when I spy a familiar backpack hanging from his clenched fingers. “Damon!” I call out, stepping forward until only a few feet separate us. “Where the fuck is she?”
He freezes, and the silence stretches tight and menacingly between us, filled with deadly intent. His mouth twists intosomething that might be a smile if it wasn’t so full of hate, as his hazel eyes narrow and focus on me. “You got some fucking nerve asking me that,” he declares, voice raw. "I should carve out your heart right here, so the world can see what happens when you go up against Mayhem."
I take another step in his direction, and my self-preservation disappears, as fear for Olly courses through my veins. “Did you hurt her?” I demand, and every muscle in my body spasms, as adrenaline floods my veins. I know I can take this fucker in a fight. I've been holding back in the cage, but Damon doesn't deserve my restraint. He needs to be taught a lesson that he's not as powerful as he believes. If he's hurt her, I'm going to rip him limb from limb, consequences be damned.
He laughs, a low, broken sound that has the hairs on my arms standing on end. “You think you can protect her from us?From me?” He sways forward, dropping her bag on the ground, his eyes burning with something I can’t name, and his head suddenly quirks at an angle, as if he's listening to something I can't hear. “You don’t even know what she’s done. She deserves to bleed.”
His rambling is making no sense. Before I can stop myself, I grab his arm and shove him back against the side of the building. “Tell me where Olly is!” He hits me hard and fast in the ribs, with practiced ease that I underestimated. Pain explodes through my side, but I don’t dare let go, even though my breath is hissing between my lips. I slam him back again, and for a second, we’re both breathing hard, glaring, caught in that place where neither of us really wants to back down, and that will have deadly results. I stare at him, at all the bruising, some of it fresh, some of it already changing color. Did Olly hit him again? Is she lying somewhere, bleeding and hurt, thanks to this psycho?
The shadows seem to shift behind his bright eyes, filled with madness, and he grins, feral, with too many teeth, his mouthstained red with blood. “You’re in over your head, Sim. You should’ve stayed out of this, away fromher.She belongs to Mayhem. Cross will make an example out of you now. Watch your back, you don’t have long to live.”
He shoves me off, hard enough that I stumble, and stalks away as if he doesn't fear my retaliation, muttering to the empty air like it’s answering him back. The smell of iron and sweat trails behind him, leaving me filled with further unease, and too many unanswered questions. I watch him go, chest heaving, trying to decide whether to go after him, and what the repercussions of that will entail. The quiet that follows, as I lose sight of him around the next building, is worse than the fight. My hands shake, and I force them into fists. It's not from pain, but from the knowledge clawing at the edges of my mind that whatever’s coming, it won’t stop with Damon. The others will come too, and I can’t walk away now.
Somewhere out there, Olly is running from all of us, me included. There's something haunted about her. It's as if the world has beaten her down, and she's suffered some great injustice, and that has made her hide behind thick, impenetrable walls. I can’t decide if I want to find her to save her... or to make her explain why she made me forget who I was supposed to be. Either way, this is not over between us.
I reach down and grab her bag, throwing the strap over my shoulder, determination filling me to find my pretty purple pixie. She needs me to watch her back. I just wonder who's going to watch mine.
CHAPTER 25
CROSS
People always think I'm the calmer one of our trio, because I keep score in my head and don’t waste energy on theatrics like Damon. If I want to hurt you, I just do it. I don't bother issuing the threat. My mind is my greatest weapon. I see the moves on the chessboard so far ahead that you have no idea what's coming, and I always play to win. Nothing usually breaks my concentration or my steadfast control, which I take pride in. Nothing, it seems, but a purple-haired, violent vixen, that hasn't left my thoughts since our encounter early this morning. I swear I can still smell her sweet pussy on my fingers, and her heady scent in my nostrils, despite washing her off of me. Her bite mark throbs on my flesh like a beacon, demanding that she come back and face me once more. The knowledge that I haven't been able to get her out of my thoughts all day enrages me. It doesn’t help that I tried to fuck a random chick in the school bathroom earlier, and wasn’t able to stay hard without picturing my stepsister, and even then, I couldn't finish. She’s destroying everything.
Damon bursts through the door of my home gym, covered in sweat, blood, and outrage, every muscle tense and ready for war.He slams the door, like a lunatic, causing all the mirrors on the walls to rattle violently. I watch with a mixture of trepidation, and wry amusement, as he silently approaches the dumbbells on the metal rack, wordlessly rips one free, and proceeds to launch it against the wall like a deranged psychopath. Metal scrapes, mirror shatters, and a loud echo bounces off the concrete floor. River looks up from the weight bench, mid-press, like he’s watching a stupid movie, and smiles without surprise. Not a good smile, no, it's the kind that knows the punchline before the joke lands.Fucking Damon, and his constant unhinged behavior.
“Calm down,” I demand, my voice flat and emotionless. I can feel my growing agitation tightening in my chest, and the need to bring this deranged idiot to heel is almost overwhelming. We already have so much going on, and out-of-control and ungovernable Damon is just one more task to manage. My voice is steady, because the world is unshakeable when I hold it like this, measured, cold, inevitable. Damon doesn’t hear me, because he's once again lost to his escalating wrath. Wrapped up in the darkness, and anarchy, that dominates him like its favorite pet. He’s ranting incoherently at everything, at River, at me, at the thin air where the shadows only his mind can see live. “You hear me, asshole?” I demand, louder. He spins, and for a second, the room tilts as his eyes lock on me, wild and feral, and I'm reminded that one day soon I may have to put him down like a rabid dog.
“You saw her,” he snarls at an empty corner. “You let her... FUCK!” His hands tremble as he drags them through his dark, inky hair. He grabs a metal weight bar, and threatens to flail it like a weapon, like he could strike whatever ghost of hers is still stinging in his gut, and it makes me wonder how my violent little psycho behaved this time. “She hit me. She... God... fuck... I... she... him.”
None of what he's saying makes any sense, and it starts to worry me about how bad shit must have gone at the school. River puts the weight down and sits upright on the bench, and his laughter fills the air, slow and loose, unhinged with amusement at our best friend's behavior. “He lost again to a girl half his size. I told you, Cross. You owe me a Franklin,” River states, amusement dripping from every syllable. It’s not even a taunt, it's more like a weary observation, and an inevitable outcome where Olivia seems to be concerned.
Damon roars and slaps a large medicine ball across the floor, and it thuds hard enough to rattle the windows. He mutters to the shadows in the corners, which seem to come alive with the noise, based on his reaction. He argues under his breath, as if they were a jury he can’t convince of his power and worthiness. "Always losing... she's a hurricane... I... fuck... I can... I want... no, not that, not yet, first she bleeds. I'm not weak!"
I watch him struggle within himself, and the demons that inhabit his mind, and never seem to give him a moment of needed peace. It fills me with both fury and pity to watch him flounder, and know that I can't protect him from them, no matter how much I'd like to. I need to bring him back to us, pull him from the darkness that seeks to claim him. I won't allow it to take him from me, from us. He belongs to me, and I'll fight everything and everyone for him, even if it's just his damaged mind. “You are afucking storm,Damon. You areMayhem,” I attempt to reassure him, and force him into the here and now. The sinister wrath that surges through me is not for the moment, but for the predictability of it. I’m not surprised. I never am. I expected him to fail, after all, and for her to fight back. That’s why I made my own plans for her destruction when I set him loose on her, filled with bruised pride, rabid violence, and sputtering threats. He was the distraction we needed, as horrible as that is to admit.
“You think I wanted this?” he screams, addressing the air like it spat in his face. “You think I wanted to...” His words break into the hum of the fluorescent lights. He looks like a wounded animal that has forgotten how to hide its teeth, and is baring them for the world to see. I can't have that. I need him by my side. It's always been the three of us against everyone. I won't allow him to lose himself to the madness that threatens to take him away. We’re his family, his brothers, and we stand together.
He suddenly turns away from the empty corner, and I prepare myself to have to defend against his outrage. "You knew." His accusation feels like a shard of glass piercing my skin, his hazel eyes staring into mine without flinching. "You knew I would fail, but you sent me in there after her anyway. Am I a fucking joke to you, Cross?" Damon spreads his arms, wide and dramatic, as he stares me down, as if through his sheer will, I will cower before him.Fat fucking chance of that happening.
“What I did was buy some time, and test the waters,” I inform him, slowly so the syllables catch his attention, like rocks being thrown at him, “I knew she would fight you. Everything we have seen so far suggests it. What I needed was to have her off her game, watching her back for the threat in front of her, while I made sure she couldn’t run tonight. You weren’t the only one working on a way to bring her to her fucking knees, Damon.” My throat is tight with a different kind of heat, one caused by the image of Olivia, strapped tightly by ropes, on her knees with my pierced cock lodged firmly and mercilessly in her throat, and crystal tears sliding down her face as River and Damon take turns fucking her bloody, as she begs us to stop. I see him deflate a fraction, his anger instantly replaced by something worse:calculated fear.I can read Damon like a two-bit carny at a fair. He thinks we don't value him, and his mind is trying to convince him once again that he's worthless.
River wipes his hands on a towel and leans back on the bench, like he owns the whole room, and nothing can faze him. The picture of calmness, as if he's enjoying the show, and our best friend is not moments away from lashing out at us again, and on his way to needing to be incarcerated in a mental institution. “We handled it, after we took care of our little in-house mole issue,” River declares, and the amusement edges into satisfaction. “Didn’t we, Cross?”
A part of me wants to slap him upside the head for further baiting Damon. Instead, I take a deep breath to steady myself. The gym smells of rubber mats, iron, and River’s strong cologne. Yet my memory replaces it with her: the faint sweetness that clings to a woman who doesn’t try too hard, the perfume of skin after a good fuck, and a satisfying orgasm. It's the intoxicating smell of someone who believes she’s been left alone, that she's won. I can taste her, a tang added to my taste buds when I think about her, and the way her eyes stared deep into mine, as she came on my digits.
When I was in her room earlier, the world narrowed down to the small tasks I assigned myself. The mini-fridge hummed with the ordinary buzz of life. The various neat rows of bottled water were small promises and enticements. I moved quietly and confidently within her space, because destruction needs calmness and conviction. I remember the light streaming through her windows, falling softly across her bed, and I pictured the way her hair would look fanned across her pillow. A small and ridiculous urge had washed over me to touch that spot, and to rewatch the video from the hidden cameras of her first night here, so that I could catalogue every detail about her. Her scent was so strong in her room, even after just a limited time spent in it, as if the walls had pores that breathed her in, a deadly reminder that she has tainted everything she’s touched, including me.
Even now, just remembering the scent so clearly makes my hands clench, and my cock swell. It's not a perfume, but the deeper, private smell of someone who belongs in a life I don’t want; it dictates my failure, and recent loss of control. It seizes me, and I taste disgust and desire at the same time, the two tangled like a poisoned, vicious knot in my throat, choking me, and restricting my fucking air. She's become a vicious itch under my skin, one I would give anything to be rid of, and at the same time, I hope never leaves. I’d promised to remove her from the equation, and show her no mercy, no second chance, and instead I found myself hunger-struck in her doorway, wanting, needing, something I couldn't even name. It's not just sexual desire, although that was wrapped in it too, into a twisted something inside me, a new beast that hungers for her, my stepsister, myviolent little psycho.
I should hate her cleanly, rationally. She's arrived in Soule and disrupted our lives, having the steel balls to confront us head-on, instead of cowering like everyone else. I should just kill her, and dump her body in one of the forests that surround our town, leave her for the animals to consume as an offering. Instead, the growing parasite inside of me has made me plan for her slow demise. It's what drove me to taste and savour her on my fingers, even after she was long gone, and that infuriates me more than anything.I will not be weak. I will not allow a woman to lead me by my dick. She's nothing, and no one.
