Page 20 of Divine Violence
All these people invited here were just a coverup for the real thing.
They were pawns I used to mask what was really going on. This girl in my arms, this extraordinary creature would be ours—one way or another.
The first time I saw her on the cameras in my building, I thought I was seeing a ghost. She seemed so tiny in comparison to me, so fragile, but the moment she started dancing, I forgot that I wanted to kick her out.
I thought she was just another homeless person looking for a place to crash for the night, but she wasn’t.
From that first moment when my eyes followed her every move, I knew she had to be ours. There were no words strong enough to describe the war waging inside of me when she looked at me, even though I knew she couldn’t see my face.
Alexander and Dominic often said that I was a cold and callous bastard, always thinking, planning, calculating my every move, but she… she wasn’t a part of my plan.
Up until that moment, the old tale we were told was nothing but a story told by those that came before us. A miserable excuse to have that kind of a relationship like previous members of the Triumvirat that some girl could be the glue holding the three members together. I went along, because no matter what I was still a superstitious bastard, but I never intended to keep any of them.
None of them made my blood boil.
Not one of them made my cock as hard as steel, pushing against my trousers, by simply showing their real faces. And this girl,our girl,wore her heart on her sleeve. Every movement of her body as she danced represented parts of her that she kept hidden from other people.
Even tonight, as she entered the Manor with Alex in tow, she looked like she already owned the place. Like a true Queen, a ruler in its making. God, I wanted to take all three of them and take them far away from here.
But there was a ritual that needed to be done, and judging by the look on her face, she wouldn’t exactly be all too willing to give us what we wanted.
But it was okay. I could break her. I knew that Dominic itched to do so as well. This defiant siren that clutched to me even in her unconscious state would either be our beginning or our end.
We were yet to see which one would prevail.
“Where are you taking her?” Dominic asked from behind me. I didn’t miss the strain in his voice, the madness tethering on the edges of sanity and his insatiable hunger for destruction.
“To her room,” I answered, instead of dwelling on what had gotten into him tonight. He’d been on edge ever since I told him about her a couple of days ago. If he thought that he could avoid talking to me about the things that bothered him forever, he had another think coming. “We need to get her ready for tonight.”
I expected him to protest, to say that he didn’t want to do this. It was there in his eyes, in the way he avoided Alex and me, but he didn’t say a thing. Dominic simply fell in line, like he always did, but something about this time bothered me.
Stopping abruptly, I turned toward them, seeing as we were all alone now in the east wing of the Manor, and looked at them—really, really looked at them.
They were my best friends, my blood brothers, the reason I agreed to do this in the first place. All three of us came from wealthy families, but also families that hid their skeletons in their perfect little closets—flawless in the eyes of the public, yet rotten to the core behind closed doors.
We saved each other in a way and committed to this insanity when we agreed to form a new Infernal Triumvirat. It sounded insane just talking about it, but the previous Triumvirat found us when we were in our early twenties, starved for attention, for power, for anything that could help us forget the insanity we went through as kids.
I was the oldest one at twenty-seven, Alexander just three years younger than me. Dominic was the baby of the group, barely twenty-three, and he worried me the most. The descent into hell was paved with good intentions, and more often than not, those good intentions landed us in the purgatory we didn’t know we were entering.
The scars he hid on his body, covered by tattoos, were proof enough that those who presented themselves as perfect, God-fearing families were the demons in the making, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike.
And they struck him.
“Dom,” I murmured, pulling his attention back to me. “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked, fearing what the answer would be.
I knew he was pulling away from us. Day by day, month by month, he was becoming more and more distant, disappearing for months on end, coming back ravaged by the demons he was trying to fight. But he always came back.
I feared the day he wouldn’t. I feared that one day the madness pushing and probing at his mind would take over, leaving us with nothing more but a shell of a man he used to be.
“Dom,” I said again when he just kept staring at Echo.
“She’s beautiful,” he murmured, as if he was remembering something. “She was always so beautiful, even as a kid. Pure, untouched, happy, and so full of love. We are going to destroy her.”
“What are you talking about?” Alexander asked, his gaze bouncing between Echo and me and Dominic. “Do you know her?”
Dominic shrugged, his eyes never leaving Echo’s sleeping face, but the torment on his face almost knocked me off my feet. I had never seen him look like this. Every other girl who came to us was nothing more but a way to pass time.
A fun, new thing we all played with, before we discarded her, giving her back to the world.
