Page 7 of Deviants
My life wasn’t a movie or piece of fiction. I was and always would be worse than any made up villain. Love wasn’t going to make me turn into fucking Saint Nick. I didn’t want to save this world. It was exactly how it should be. I damn sure didn’t want to start a revolution, I wasn’t a teenage girl, and I couldn’t give two fucks what happened to strangers.
I wasn’t seeking a way to the light, only peaceful eternal darkness. If I somehow didn’t make it out of this alive, I would be happy knowing that whatever was left of me would forever burn in the hell I had created.
“Are we ready for tonight?” I asked them, getting my head back in the game.
“More than ready. This sets everything in motion. It’s been a long time coming; we deserve this. You deserve this. My sister deserves this,” Grimm answered, openly accepting Cali as his blood for the first time.
I looked at the two men who had grown up with me, who had backed every decision I ever made, and who were just as fucked up as I was. We were a family, and Grimm was right.
We fucking deserved this.
CHAPTER THREE
The smoke was coming from a fire right in the middle of an abandoned intersection.
From our vantage point, we could see everything without completely exposing ourselves. Tito grabbed my hand to prevent me from going any closer. I was so transfixed on the scene in front of us, I didn’t pay him any mind.
“What the fuck?” he whispered, summing up my exact sentiments in three words. We stared at the gathering of men—and, I assumed, some women.
They wore black robes and white masks marked with inverted crosses on either side, so I couldn’t tell who was male or female.
Every pair of eyes was trained on Romero—including mine. My legs burned to run to him, but I wanted to watch this play out.
Standing directly to his left were a man and woman with thick pieces of rope around their necks. Another man knelt at his feet.
It wasn’t until I followed the burly ropes up and over the metal base of decrepit traffic lights and back down again to where Grimm and Cobra each held an end with gloved hands that I saw Jinx.
I couldn’t say I was relieved to see she was alive because I had no idea what the hell was going on. She was staring at the ground, and her dark hair was curtaining her face.
Romero was speaking, but I wasn’t close enough to hear him. I shifted slightly and strained my ears.
He lifted his right arm, and the setting sun glinted off a metal blade.
I caught the words“punishable” and“death”right before he reached down and grabbed the man in front of him by the hair, pulling his head back before lowering his knife to the man’s forehead.
The crowd seemed to ripple the second he began screaming. You could feel their antsy excitement in the air. Their murmuring grew loud enough for me to hear, but I couldn’t make out the phrase they kept repeating.
“Cali,” Tito whispered, nervously taking a step back, tightening his hold on my hand.
I ignored him and kept my eyes on Romero, watching him work. He was dressed just as he usually was: dark jeans, black boots, dark shirt. He looked just as gorgeous, too; better, actually. My stomach twisted into a gnarled knot.
His inked hand moved left and right, up and down, carving something into the man’s flesh.
His unfortunate canvas could do nothing to stop it; his hands were bound behind his back, and even if he triedto stand up and fight, he knew his death was inevitable.
Blood rolled down his forehead, dripping onto the white robe I belatedly realized he was wearing. He was one of David’s. The other man was Romero’s, and the woman looked like a run of the mill outlier.
I tried to piece together what the fuck he could be doing, but I couldn’t determine what his end goal was. It was becoming increasingly obvious Romero had never truly let me in.
Because he doesn’t trust you,an inner voice chided. I couldn’t even be pissed about it because I didn’t exactly trust him, either.
Breaking my hand free of Tito’s, I cautiously moved down the embankment so I could get a little closer.
“Cali,” he hissed in warning, following me anyway.
Romero stepped fully behind the man and gestured down to the bleeding leviathan cross he had just carved. From the infinity symbol that made up the bottom of the uneven bars that sat above it, he’d engraved the design perfectly.
I stopped walking, shooting Tito an annoyed glare when he grabbed my hand again.
