He’s leaving. Again.
It’s always worse when he’s not here, but he doesn’t allow me to beg him to take me with him as he turns me to face him. “Find our baby,” he says with watery eyes. “I’ll make sure we’re safe, okay?”
I bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from telling him the truth. If he knows the baby isn’t here, he won’t have an excuse to take me with him. There’s still a foolish part of my useless heart telling me he won’t. “What if I don’t find them?”
“You will. No one will take anything away from you again. There’s something I have to do. I need you to keep remembering, keep fucking fighting, because we can’t leave until that’s done. I made someone a prom—” He drags in a pained breath. “I gave my word to—” He turns rigid and looks at the wall before he wraps his hand around my neck, whispering, “It’s time to play again. Trust me?”
I nod like an idiot who doesn’t know how to learn from the events of their life.
The door slams open as he loosely holds my neck with both hands. They tighten as he grits, “Have some respect for what we’ve allowed you to have. If you dirty the walls again, I’ll make you sleep outside with the other bitches who aren’t housetrained.”
Helene coos, “Sweet boy?”
“She’s too thin,” Kane snaps, pushing me onto the bed. “Make sure she eats. I’ll have Rowan send you my requirements.” He turns to face his cunt grandmother, blocking her from seeing me. “She’s not going to fuck my life up by refusing to eat so her body can’t do the only thing it’s useful for.”
I knew he was intelligent. He proved he’s a manipulative planner by fabricating an entire life. Watching him use thosethings to keep me safe makes me love him, even as he walks out without looking at me. I am very clearly a fucking idiot who was starved of care, so I accept his shit, desperate for one morsel of attention he might give me.
For once, Helene doesn’t attack me. She simply closes the door, content on ignoring me now that Kane has satisfied her need for my misery.
44
KANE
Sasha is moody as fuck for the entire flight back to Austria. If she kicks me one more fucking time, I’m going to smack her in the fucking face. Thankfully, she’s stopped eating with her mouth open, but her thick boots slam into my ankle as she kicks the passenger seat.
The hood over my head doesn’t allow me to see her and my hands are tied so I can’t grab her leg. When she kicks the seat again, I swing my knee into her thigh to get her to stop.
The little nutcase whines, “Owwwww, don’t hit me.” Then full fucking force punches me in the thigh.
I slam my knee into her again as I blindly lift my hands to hook my bound wrists around her neck. They get caught on her forehead and her mask is a weird texture as she continues hitting me while screaming, “Don’t touch me!”
We slide forward as the car comes to an abrupt stop, then Lennox’s authoritative voice fills the car. “Stop fighting.”
The little weirdo digs her elbow into my stomach, muttering, “He started it.”
I still don’t know how old she is, but I thought she was an adult. The more I’m around her, the more I’m starting to thinkshe’s a child instead of immature. A child who hasn’t learnt to travel without snacks or fidgeting. We start moving again as she’s still muttering to herself, “My face better not be broken or he’s making me a new one.”
She continues grumbling to herself like a child would when they’re mid-tantrum. I can’t get attached to another child only to lose them. I shift along the seat until I feel the door against my arm. My grief currently has a pause button over it. As long as I focus on anything other than the reason for it, I can continue existing. Even a name brings it back but as soon as it enters my mind, Asher whispers,“You should kill everyone.”
I will.
“No, do it now. Lennox doesn’t really care about you. He pities you.”
He’s helping,I correct.
Asher falls silent as we stop again. The whispering is becoming more frequent. It’s starting to make sense when he urges me to go further into evil than I’m instructed. This is the same as any other business, so my performance is constantly being reviewed. If I do more than what’s expected of me, Rowan will see I can be trusted. He’ll mistake me for someone like him.
I don’t want to be someone who violates the dead. The guards regularly take it in turns to entertain him with the same bodies on rotation. Some violate them the same way I did to be initiated, others go above and beyond. There has to be a line, even if there’s no saving me. There has to be a fucking line.
Slicing pieces of their flesh off to feed Sasha clearly wasn’t.
Shitting and pissing on the dead has to be that line.
Lennox removes the hood as he instructs Sasha to free my hands. She huffs as she twists the plastic tie, pinching my skin in the process. I resist the urge to rub the sting away as I get out, with her pushing me to get out of the way when I don’t move quick enough. “I’m hungry.”
I catch her ankle as I stand off to the side. She stumbles, nearly falling headfirst into the snow, but Lennox grabs her arm, dragging her with him.
As I stand back, watching them walk ahead, I notice how small Sasha is. The mask is creepy as fuck, which distracted me, but she’s tiny. Her shoulders slump as she drags her feet, so she’s definitely a teenager, probably freshly eighteen. The most normal experience I have is fucking with her. I catch up to them and push my foot against her ankle as we walk into the brick cabin. Her head snaps to the side as she glares at me. “I hate you.”
