He did not wear a mask. He stripped it from himself and stood in front of me bare and vulnerable, bleeding emotion.
“You killed our parents?” I asked. My blood hurried in my veins. I had so many questions bumbling around in my head, itching to get out. “You’re Soulless? But… you have a Soulmate.”
“I offered a deal to Cynthia to be my Soulmate in exchange for a lavish lifestyle. I was going to organise a fake connection for yourself after Dig’s death. It's not safe to put on a fake insignia when your Soulmate is still alive.”
I looked at the floor, eyes wide, trying to catalogue all of what he was saying, trying to comprehend.
“But Duckie,” Magnus said, his voice smoothed into a whisper. “I do not love her, I never have. It’s only you Duckie. Only you that I can ever love.”
I looked back at him, throwing a verbal dagger, “What?”
Magnus smiled, his arms opened. “I love you.”
I stared at him for a long moment. The rich pause between us savoured in the air and grew louder.
“Delphine,” my older brother said. “I have told you every day since you could hear my voice that I loved you, and every day I did not lie. Everyone else in the world, they have another person just the same as them, a Soulmate. Everyone, but you and I. We were made the same. We are ourownSoulmates.”
I held my stomach, the pulsing ache of acid rising. “Oh.”
He leaned forward, bringing his face close to mine, his hands coming to clasp my cheeks. His lips pursed to kiss and he dropped his eyes to my mouth. “I love you.”
I was about to smack him away from me, when he collapsed onto the floor, under duress of Dig Graves’s fist. Magnus gasped and squirmed over my antique rug as Dig pulled himself on top of my brother. He punched. Dig Graves summoned his easy fury, the one sated only on the battlefield, and balled his hands into fists and pummelled them into Magnus’s face.
I stayed frozen, stuck to watch the perversity of this performance, my heart trouncing against my chest while Dig’s fists nailed into my brother’s face.
As Magnus cried out, Dig punched. As Magnus begged, Dig punched.
Dig punched Magnus until skin turned into bone and cartilage, until my brother no longer had eyes and teeth, until his chest stopped sucking in air and deflated like an old birthday balloon.
“Dig!” I screamed, but it turned into a choke. I decked to the ground, my hands slapping the floor. I shuddered out breath. “What… what are you doing? What… what did you do?”
Blood freckled over his face, his shining dark eyes locked onto me and then back down to Magnus. He held up both of his hands, twitched with mild alarm. “Self-defence?”
“No!” I cried, tears weeping from my eyes as I felt over the fibres. “My antique rug. You ruined it!”
44
Two Years Later
Dig slapped his hand over my mouth, and with his other, he dug his fingers into the soft flesh of my thigh, holding me still as he thrust into me from behind one last time. I drowned under the orgasm, moaning into his hand.
He let me go.
Echoing with pleasure, I launched into the tabletop, embracing the cool skin of the wood and breathed out the tension that had been winding up in my nerves. While I focused on my inhalation, Dig cleaned his seed from between my legs, put my underwear back on me and pulled down my pencil skirt, making sure it was without a wrinkle.
I took my time standing up, still ringing high from the explosive bliss and funnelled my arms back into my matching pink blazer that Dig held out for me.
He wore a neat blue suit and there was something about his scars and tattoos concealed behind prima dry-cleaned cotton and a five-thousand-dollar watch that got my heart ticking quicker than normal.
As he pulled out my lipstick and fixed my lips, I took a strand of his black hair out of its tousled wave to put a little more roughness back in him. His lower lip spotted in blood from my biting him during a furious kiss. Underneath the soaking of my hairspray and his cologne, he smelled a littlelike metal and leather again. It brought nether memories from years ago. We could have almost… almost been back in the Execution Battle.
He didn’t wear his sunglasses anymore.
Only at home.
I wondered if he had brought them with him. “Do you have—”
“Del!” He slapped the table, his voice peaked with irritation, made the sting of my orgasm resurface.
