Page 33 of Apathy
My body tingled everywhere he touched, and I fought against this attraction I felt toward him.
“No.” I pushed him away. “We can’t do this.”
The playful smirk he wore earlier disappeared, replaced by a wicked smile and the promise of retribution in his eyes.
“We’ll see about that.” He came closer and placed a kiss on my cheek. “I’ll see you later. Have fun with your brother.”
He exited through the sliding door, taking away all the warmth I’d been feeling with him.
What in the ever-loving fuck was that?
Ash
My lips still vibrated, remembering the feeling of her lips on mine. Her taste, her touch, her moans and cries, they were already etched in my mind. I expected to feel disgusted, revolted, but my body wasn’t listening to my mind, and I wanted more.
I wanted to bite, lick, and suck every inch of her body, and I couldn’t, because succumbing to my desires would mean betraying my family. Skylar Blackwood was my enemy. Her entire family was an enemy we vowed to eradicate. It didn’t matter that my body wanted to feel her hands on me, my mind had to win this war. It didn’t matter that she tasted like the sweetest sin, and I wouldn’t mind being the sinner, or that her eyes flashed with desire that could consume me, because she was who she was and I was on the opposite side.
We weren’t a match made in heaven, but she didn’t know it yet. I could see it there, the fight she was trying to start, how she tried to push me away, but she felt this just as much as I did. She just didn’t know that what we felt meant nothing, because there were forces stronger than our desire.
I made a promise when I was just a child and I planned to fulfill it. Nothing, and nobody, least of all a Blackwood, would stand in my way. I waited my whole life for the moment when I would be able to avenge my parents for what the other founding families did to us. The scars on my back were the constant reminder of that vicious night, when they betrayed us, throwing us aside.
Now was the time to get it all back. To get the Crowell name back into town.
They thought they destroyed us all, but they forgot the first rule—never leave any survivors. And me and my brother, Sebastian, we were the survivors. We were going to be their worst nightmare. They just didn’t know it yet.
As I drove down the street toward the bridge connecting the two sides of Winworth, I couldn’t stop thinking about the sick history this place had. Winworth had so much beauty and so much depravity, that no matter what we did in the upcoming years, nothing would cleanse it from its sins. My uncle used to say that there were places on earth whose soil was filled with so much blood, that nothing good ever came out of them.
Winworth was one of them.
I always wanted to laugh when people talked about the history of this place, and the alleged witches that had escaped the trials and settled here. They weren’t completely wrong, but it wasn’t the witches that built this town from the ground up. No, there were darker forces that played their wicked games here, building the town on skeletons of those they sacrificed.
When our ancestors came from Europe, they didn’t just bring their families, food, and clothes, they brought something much darker, wicked in its nature.
The Black Dahlia.
The worshippers of Satan. Sons and daughters of Central and Eastern European pagans, who hid under the cloak of night, worshipping the dark forces rummaging through earth. They hid until the church found out about their wicked deeds and then they had to run.
And they ran, until they came here, loving the nature and seclusion this area offered. Loving it so much that they decided to shower its soil with the blood of their sacrifices. And my family was one of them. My ancestors were one of those who came here, and who destroyed the land and everything surrounding it. They poisoned young minds, turning brothers against each other, taking children in the middle of the night, and controlling the entire town.
They were still doing it.
The Order was created by five families, who tried to gain more power, more money, more territory, because what they had wasn’t enough for them. Others followed, seeing the growing riches of those families, thinking it was all due to the satanic worshipping they were doing.
I liked to think that they managed to get more money and more power because they were shrewd, ruthless, and without remorse. Because they knew how to play people, how to get what they wanted using their silver tongues and the money they already had. They sold their souls for power, tricking others to join them, making them believe in the dark forces.
But there was never Satan or a demon who came to claim their souls. People loved blaming the underworld for their depraved deeds, because they didn’t want to accept that their souls craved it and Heaven or Hell had nothing to do with it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know enough about the Black Dahlia to strike immediately, which was why I needed to be here. I needed to learn their secrets, to get to their meetings, because you couldn’t take down the empire from the outside. No, you had to get in, make them trust you, make them see you as one of their own.
Our uncle was never a part of The Order since he wasn’t related to us by blood. He and our father were best friends, who met at university, sharing the same love for history and the written word. Before he died, our father shared some things with our uncle, but not enough for us to understand how everything worked.
Besides, I couldn’t go against the four most powerful families in the United States with only memories of a traumatized kid and a couple of documents that only mentioned meetings and those involved, but nothing else.
Our father wanted to leave The Order and Winworth. When I was six years old, he and our mom were getting ready to leave all of this behind and disappear when the Blackwood, St. Clare, Lacroix, and Maddox families decided that the only way to leave this place was in a body bag. So they hunted us, burned our house down, and killed my parents in front of my eyes.
I still couldn’t remember how Sebastian and I got away. Maybe we were lucky or maybe somebody saved us, but it took me years to remember everything about that night. Years to understand that my parents dying wasn’t just a freak accident, but an act of monstrous human beings who didn’t want to risk their secrets.
I could still remember cloaked figures surrounding us, chanting the song of death, and my mother’s tear-stained face as she pleaded with them to let us go. Sebastian was four at the time, and I was glad that he didn’t remember any of it. I, on the other hand, remembered everything.
