to do, Nicolas? Interrogate everyone in the club? Burst through Elijah’s security, risk getting shot in the back, so I can ask if he was tiptoeing around the forest to snap pictures? She’s not even here. The fuck does it matter who was in the woods?” I bite the inside of my cheek, shake my head. “You said you were on top of the club shit anyway.”
“They claim they didn’t see anything, but someone disabled our cameras. Someone knows what the fuck they’re doing. Someone had pictures of Sid.”
As if I don’t remember.
“And someone has abducted Elijah Van Damme’s wife.”
I arch a brow, this being news to me, but I’m not quite surprised. “When did you find that out?” It’s pretty bold. Go straight for the fucking Dominus. I hate their bullshit. Their Latin. I fucking hate all of it. All of them. Anything and anyone connected to them. But this…this is news.
“Yesterday,” Nicolas admits. “Police reports. Sealed, of course, since they’re stonewalling us now that they’ve got what they want.” I know he means the 6, and the fucking Unsainted. Not the police. The police wouldn’t stand a fucking chance trying to keep us out of their business. I’d set their entire precinct on fire and dance in the fucking flames if they tried to do that.
“Any leads?”
Nicolas’s brows raise high on his head. “No, but it doesn’t take an idiot to figure out it’s probably the same person fucking with all of us.”
“There is no ‘us’, Nicolas,” I say sharply, my skin crawling with thoughts of it. “And trust me, I’m concerned. But one fucking thing at a time. Great things come to those who come in like a sledgehammer and destroy everything in sight before anyone sees them coming.”
Nicolas is staring at me, confusion etched on his face. “Can you explain what the fuck you just said?”
I roll my eyes, go to work on rolling back my shirtsleeves. “No. Now, I need you to get eyes on Elizabeth and Maddox Astor, and keep them there. I don’t want them to leave that house for a fucking grocery store run without us knowing about it.”
“Don’t you think we should work on getting Sid—”
I finish my sleeves, drop my hands, slip them into my pockets. “I am.”
That night, with her not sleeping down the hall from me, as I toss and turn and hope to Satan I’m doing the right fucking thing, I dream about someone else entirely.
I’ve come to love the darkness.
It means they aren’t here for me.
I’m alone, and I’m cold, and I’m hungry, but…they can’t hurt me in the dark.
It’s when the light spills down the stairs from the basement door that I can’t breathe. That I seize up with fear, curled into a ball, my aching back pressed against the steel bars of the cage. Too small for me to stand. Too small to lie down completely.
I’ve been coming here for years now, for days at a time. Sometimes only hours. If I’m really lucky, if I say all the right things, if I get the Latin words and the kneeling positions and the promises to Satan that I’ll be better, if I get all of that right, it’s only minutes.
If I get it wrong…
I’m here longer.
I think this is the longest. It feels like an eternity.
And lately, with my seventeenth birthday coming up, I’ve been thrown in here more frequently.
I’m the holy one.
Chosen.
No longer Jamie, the name I was born with. Since the Forgues became my parents—that word leaves a bad taste in my dry, cracked mouth—I’ve been reborn.
Jeremiah.
They don’t speak my last name. They don’t join my first with theirs. And I know why.
It’s because I don’t belong here.
They all ensure I know exactly that.
All of them except the younger sister.
Sometimes I think I hate her more for it.
She's quieter. Doesn’t often look at me. Doesn’t often speak to me, save for that one word. That lie.
“Sicher.”
Even when I try to believe it, even when she tiptoes down in the dark and offers me scraps of food that I snatch from her with shaky hands, I despise her for that word. For the fact I took up learning German because of her. Because of that. Her deep blue eyes are haunted, I’ve seen when I’m free—although am I ever really that?
But her eyes are full of her own demons, and she isn’t doted on like her older sister. It makes my skin crawl for the way she might taste my pain. Sometimes I