PROLOGUE
There are no heroes to be found here, only monsters.
I am not an exception.
I am the devil's confidante.
I am guilty of unimaginable sins.
I was better off without him, and he was better off alone, but the red string of fate tied us together. No matter how much it tangled or stretched, it would never break.
In him, I found my absolution.
He saved me from the light by showing me the beautiful depravity that could be found in the dark.
My beloved devil made every withering parcel of my being bloom and thrive by nurturing it with his sinister mind. He tattooed himself across my heart and took up permanent residence inside my head.
Ours is not a story full of sickly sweet nothings, nor is it a fairytale built on illusions. The world we lived in had long ago turned cold, and our hearts turned with it. Love was a four-letter word neither of us had ever learned, and trust was a foreign concept we didn’t know the meaning of. The odds were stacked against us on all sides of the spectrum.
Our dark paradise could only be reached by paving the way with blood and corpses.
Some might find it hard to understand how mere human beings could do all that we did: kill without mercy. Lie through our teeth. Take what we wanted just because we could.
It came to down to nothing other than DNA, the genes that made us who we were. The blood pumping through our veins carried a beautiful madness only we understood.
He was born sick.
I was fucked in the head.
Together, we were Savages.
CHAPTER ONE
Past-Four years ago
He set her on fire, but it was me he watched burn.
Within seconds, her body was drowning in an inferno. The blaze glowed red, bathing the night sky in blood. A sheet of flames danced across her naked skin, shrinking and splitting open flesh, leaving body fluid to expel. They reached for her dark strands of hair and singed them to the scalp.
Her mouth had been sewn shut after she was forced to repent for her sins, silencing her shrills of agony and fear. The familiar aroma of charred flesh permeated the air, filling my aching lungs with every ragged breath I took.
The Orderstood by, watching with bored expressions on their faces as the faux nuns held hands and whispered their synthetic prayers.
I wished it were a dream, but I was wide-awake. I wished nothing more than to take her place. I wished someone would have saved us from the hate, but not one person stepped forward.
I had tried so hard to warn her away.I’d begged her not to come back for me. Why didn’t she listen?
My body shook with silent sobs, constricting my heart in my chest. I couldn’t move. It hurt to breathe. I felt like I were burning with her.
I was forced to watch on as the life vacated her body, leaving her limbs dangling limply above the flames. The bones that had been exposed were slick with the greasy residue of melted flesh.
As two men moved forward to begin extinguishing the fire, still no one said a word.
I tried not to picture what would happen to what remained of her blackened body, knowing she was to be discarded for crows and wild animals to feast on.
“It’s unfortunate it had to come to this,” my father sighed, removing his heavy foot from my spine. “You let me down, Calista.”
He stepped over my body and knelt down, lifting my battered face from the dirt. His skewed logic made him believe that if my pain wasn’t visible, then I wasn’t hurting—when he was the one who’d taught me to handle abuse.
