Page 207 of The Devil We Crave
So, to answer Lochlan’s question…no.
No, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about the cold sensation of drowning from the inside out when I watched Yelena walk away from me and get into that car last night.
I’ve since pictured, several times, the ways I could have made that go differently.
Grabbing her. Telling her I refuse to let her go and that her safe word actually means fuck all.
Maybe tying her up and throwing her over my shoulder before bringing her to my room and locking us in there for, I don’t know, a month or so.
Murdering Laz Kislev for having the audacity to butt in on my life. Sending Wren home before going back into that club, murdering every last greasy motherfucker who was eye-fucking Yelena when I first walked into that shithole, and then fucking her in a giant puddle of their blood to remind herwhose she is.
You know, just basic, perfectly normal hindsight fantasies.
“Achilles…”
I scowl as I look up at Lochlan over the poker game the three of us abandoned half an hour ago.
“Nope,” I grunt. “Why, you want to talk about your thing?”
He frowns. “What thing?”
I eye him. “The thing that probably has to do with you throwing Galina Nikitin over your shoulder and walking out of the bar last night like she was your personal hand luggage?”
My cousin shoots me a glare. “Nope.”
Selene snorts and I turn to grin at her before I look back at Lochie.
“Nope as in you don’t want to talk about the very obvious thing happening there, or nope as in you’re trying to convince me…and failing, I might add…that I don’t have eyes anddidn’tsee what I saw?—”
“You didn't see shit except Yelena dancing with that fucker,” he grunts. “Should we talk about the fact thatyougot home at four in the morning covered in dirt?”
“Oh,smoothsubject change,” Selene grins. Then her brow furrows as she glances at me. “Wait, is that true?”
I shrug. “I was doing some soul-searching.”
By which I mean, when I went back to check, Travis, whose real name is—was—Mike, and whowasn’tactually a pre-med student at Yale, was in factverydead from the lethal dose of his own date rape drug that I forced him to swallow. I couldn’t exactly leave him just lying there with bruises the exact size and shape of my fists all over his face and throat.
Hawthorne Hollow has enough foul-play-assumed bodies in its morgue. There doesn’t need to be another one from the next town over.
So, Mike the serial rapist from Worcester, Massachusetts, who likes “hunting” along the Connecticut shoreline for college girls, is now buried a few feet under a cleared area in Danbury where they’ll be pouring the cement footings on Monday for—fittingly—a sewage treatment plant.
Do I feel extra satisfied knowing that I was justified in killing a man for daring to touch her?
Definitely.
Did I get a little hard while dumping his body into that shallow grave, knowing his last moments on this Earth were spent watching me claim Yelena, and realizing how fuckingmineshe is?
Fucking yes I did.
Lochlan rolls his eyes. “Soul-searching. What kind of?—”
“The burying a body kind.”
He shrugs. “Ah. Fair.”
Selene sighs. “I don’t get it. Your parents are lovely, well-adjusted humans, and you both were given heaps of love and support growing up. So how thefuckdid you both turn out to be such psychos?”
Lochlan snickers. “You think my dad and Uncle Ares arewell-adjusted?”
