Twisted - Esme Devlin Page 0,9

you give me a minute?” I ask. Denim hesitates. Clearly, his order was to collect me straight away. “Just a minute. Please.”

He gives me a weak smile and a single nod. “All right. One minute.”

The moment he is out of the room, I don’t waste any time.

I throw the pillows off the platform and pull the mat back, not caring about the carnage.

The thing I’m looking for, I put it here years ago.

I know I did.

I’ve never had any intention of using it. Until now.

Where the fuck is it?

I hear Denim return just as my eye catches the glint of metal. A knife. A small, thin, sharp knife.

This won’t save my life against Hum—and truthfully, I couldn’t kill him even if my life depended on it. But it might just save me from my fate.

Or at the very least, buy me some more time.

I spin around and catch Denim’s wide eyes at the mess I’ve made of the bed.

Before he has a chance to react, I push the knife up flush against my throat, so close that one swallow would probably nick the skin. “Tell Maxim I will slit my own throat if he makes me do that. Tell them all I will slit my own throat.”

Denim takes a step back, looking at me as if I’m quite mad.

Women can’t kill themselves. We’re too rare. Too special. We can be played with, hurt, even tortured… and if we die, then it’s an unfortunate accident. But we are never to take the easy way out. To do so is shameful, and a sin against all those who never had the choice to live.

He stares at me and I do everything I can to show him I’m quite serious.

My fingers are trembling around the knife.

I am scared—of course I’m scared. It’s not the pain I fear, for I am quite used to that. It’s not the thought of no longer existing, for surely that would be a blessing, not to suffer anymore.

What scares me is that the place I’m going to in death might be worse than here.

“All right,” Denim says, two hands held out in front of him. “All right. I’ll tell him.”

4

Baron

Maxim has set up a table for us in his personal club room.

Like him, everything is red. The lighting, the seating, the curtains that cover the hewed stone walls.

It makes him blend in with the scenery, which I very much doubt was his intention when he designed the place.

Fool.

If I was a man who wanted to stand out—as he so clearly is with the childish devil costume—I’d have everything else green.

But he is clearly not that clever.

I sit with Andrei and our four guests. My other men stand around in the shadows, watching and listening, as they’re paid well to do.

Maxim drifts from table to table, checking that his guests are being looked after while the bids are being sealed. There is a bottle of whisky doing the rounds, and the four men I brought here guzzle it down like it’s water on a hot day, giddy with anticipation for my fucked-up plan.

The truth is, it was the only thing I could think of.

Since the second she walked out into the ring, they wanted her. I felt the atmosphere around me shift just as surely as I’d feel a change in the weather. She was pure and innocent, and yet she looked like a fucking nightmare.

The star of the show.

The one they all come to see.

The price so high that no one could ever afford to pay it, and so instead, they wank like little gremlins over the thought of her pain.

What man could resist a temptation like that?

I thought I was that man.

There is no woman on earth who could make an already insane man lose himself farther. Right?

At first, I was just curious. What makes her so special? Why is she priced so ridiculously high?

She was merely a puzzle that needed to be solved.

And then she looked at me while she danced and nearly lost an eye for the pleasure of it.

That was when everything changed.

She stopped just performing a routine, and she started fighting for her life. And it was glorious.

The panic in her movements.

The fear in her eyes.

The way I could almost hear her heart racing from across the room. A man could become addicted to that.

So I did what seemed most sensible. I acted like I wasn’t that interested, because letting on that I was would ensure her price skyrocketed.

The others were beautiful, many