Twisted - Esme Devlin Page 0,77

her clit.”

“Fuck’s sake, Baron,” he huffs. He takes two slow steps forward and punches me in the stomach, frustration clear on his face.

I stumble back from the impact and straighten, letting out a laugh. “Oh, do calm down, Galahad. I wouldn’t have done it if I thought she couldn’t handle it.”

“She’s not like the others, Baron. I can see that—and I’m not even allowed to fucking look at her. She is weak.”

“She is not weak,” I snap. “She is… sheltered. And I happen to like that.”

He shakes his head, lowering his fists. “What did she do?”

I let out a sigh and turn my back to him. “She tried to take the mask off.”

Andrei is quiet for a long moment, and when I eventually turn around he’s just standing there, staring at me.

“Did I go too far?” I ask him. I honestly can’t tell. Andrei isn’t exactly the perfect example of a moral compass, but he plays the good guy so frequently it’s hard to remember that sometimes.

He shrugs and opens his mouth to reply, but before he can we’re interrupted.

One of my guards—I don’t even remember his name, Andrei does that—clears his throat. “We have a situation downstairs.”

“How long has she been like this?” Andrei asks.

The guard shakes his fat, bald head frantically. “We heard screaming, but it wasn’t nothing out of the usual.”

The brunette is sitting on the floor in front of the bed, clutching and hugging the metal leg as if it’s her best friend. The room is a mess, the bedsheets twisted and covered in speckles of blood. I take a few steps toward her, and it’s like she snaps back into the room. Her eyes go wide at the sight of me and she starts chewing on the inside of her jaw. “Devil, devil, devil, devil.” She’s whispering it like a curse in between chews and trying to back away, but she’s not even in control of her own movements.

“Baron,” Andrei shouts.

I spin around and give him a nod before walking back over to the group. Probably better he does it than me. Good cop/bad cop and all that.

“The man who was with her, he has an explanation for this?” I ask the guard.

The poor girl is delirious. I’ve seen the point just before the mind decays… the immediate aftermath of it splintering into a thousand tiny pieces. Those girls don’t generally chew on their own faces, though.

“He claimed she just went all crazy on him.”

“Did you search him?”

He shakes his head again. “No.”

Imbecile. “Then do it. Then take him outside and shoot him.”

The guard doesn’t even pause before his shake turns into a nod. I have no tolerance for cunts who bend my rules.

Alone now, Andrei looks over at me. “Ketamine?”

“Probably,” I say.

“How much?”

I look the girl over. She’s back inside her own head, no longer in the room. “She’s going to the K-hole.”

I like to think there are four levels of ketamine, ranging from the nice floaty feeling to the K-Hole, where you’re not even a person anymore. She’s about to become nothing. Her everything is about to become nothing. She’ll be thunder in the clouds and then a particle twisting through the universe. That’s how the K-Hole feels.

“How long has she been with us?” I ask him.

Andrei crosses the room and tilts her head back, opening one of her eyes. She stares blankly back at him. “Long enough, I think. I’d need to check the files.”

I shake my head. “No matter. Get rid of her.”

His eyes widen. “Like this?”

“No, not like this! Lock her in a room upstairs until she comes to her senses. Give her a few days to recover. Then make arrangements to get rid of her.”

He nods and lifts the girl into her arms. Her wild dark hair spills over, and for a second she reminds me of my Sapphire.

My Sapphire.

“I need to go,” I tell him. “Deal with this.”

22

Sapphire

Something hard is tapping against my cheek.

My eyelashes flutter open. I lift my head and let out a sigh as soon as my brain clears enough to process what is staring me in the face.

“Hello, pretty girl. Did you miss me?”

I stare at Baron blankly, my bottom lip the only part of my body that has any energy left to tremble.

“Don’t worry. I’m going to make it all better.”

All better? Something tugs in my mind. He said that last time. He said he was going to make it better last time, and he did—but also so much worse.

I take a breath,