water, someone calling my name. Someone yelling, angry voices.
When I snap open my eyes, Sid’s back is to me, pressing against me, and she has a knife in her hand. She has a knife.
The boy I held under is gasping for breath, and his friend is yelling at my sister, Nicolas and Ria on either side of her.
The other guy’s finger is in her face, but his dark, angry eyes flick to mine.
“Back the fuck up,” Sid is saying, holding up the knife, the blade glinting in the sun. “If you know what’s good for you, you’re going to—”
I wrap an arm around her chest, pulling her to me, cutting off her words. I grab the knife from her fingers, tuck the blade back in and pocket the knife.
“If you yell at her again,” I interrupt the second asshole, his jaw clenched, fingers still pointed toward us, “I’ll finish what I started.” I glance at his friend, his eyes red, chest heaving. “With both of you.”
I watch the girl grind on my brother’s dick, her fingers threaded through his as she brings them up to her tits, spilling out of her red bra. He’s smiling at her as she moans, directing his fingers inside the cups of her bra, throwing her head back, her long, black hair spilling down her shoulders.
But his eyes are on me.
Pale green, framed by thick lashes, he doesn’t look like Satan.
He looks like a god.
The dancer guides his hands around to her back, and he doesn’t need her help unclasping her bra. She shifts her hands to his thighs, and even though I don’t want to, I glance down, see the thin material of her thong sliding to the side, exposing her pussy as she grinds up and down the thick bulge in his tailored pants.
I swallow, hard, turn my attention to his hands, his fingers sliding down the red straps of her bra. When he gets to her wrists, her tits free, she moves her hands from his thighs, dips her chin and presses her brow to his, her black hair spilling around the both of them so I can’t see his face.
Jeremiah tosses the bra behind her, on the floor of the private room we’re in at Remorse, a club he owns in Virginia.
This is Cindy, the same girl that gave him a lap dance at Nicolas’s party. She actually works here, came down for the party just for Jeremiah.
His favorite dancer. I’m gathering that, since his hands are now squeezing her round ass. Her breaths come out in labored pants, her hands on his shoulders, manicured nails digging into his black shirt. He helps guide her as she dry humps him, digging his hands into her ass so hard I know there’s gonna be bruises.
I hear a groan come from his throat, and at that sound, my skin crawls.
I need to get the fuck up.
I need to get out of here.
Ria, Nicolas, Roman and some other people who work for my brother are right outside the doors, on the main dance floor of the club.
I need to get up.
It smells like sex and perfume and marijuana, nothing like the usual clean scent of my brother. And I know what he’s doing.
Fucking testing me.
He’s pissed I flirted with that guy he almost drowned.
We went to dinner, he barely spoke to me, made a few phone calls to tell his employees to meet him here.
He wanted me to have a good time, he said in my ear as we all sat in a booth together. When he spoke to the dancer in private, stepping away from the booth, then beckoned me back here, I assumed he had business to take care of and didn’t want me out of his sight. Maybe money to exchange. Maybe someone to fucking murder.
But then Cindy sauntered in, locked the door, and perched herself on his lap, right beside me on the seat built into the wall of this dimly lit, small room, and I realized there was no business.
No business but pissing me the fuck off. Rubbing salt in my fucking wound, knowing Lucifer isn’t far from here. Knowing he’s probably doing just this with someone else.
Jeremiah has always been a fucking dick.
Nothing has changed.
I glance at his finger digging into the tan flesh of her ass, see the muscles of his arms flex. I know on the inside of his left arm are those scars. Vertical lines.
For me.
But here he is doing this shit, not too different