by K. V. Rose
When afternoon comes, while Jeremiah deals with insurance and restoration and adjusters, Nicolas and I leave. We take one of the spare cars, a black Porsche SUV with blacked out windows and wheels. I think that in itself might be conspicuous, but Nicolas reminds me this is Alexandria.
A portion of this city is fucking made out of money.
Which reminds me of the Unsaints. Atlas, Cain, Mayhem, and Ezra. I wonder if they’re all with Lucifer at the house in Raven Park. I wonder if they’re that stupid.
Trey had stashed knives and guns in our black zip-up bags in the backseat. I make Nicolas run through a drive-thru for a large iced coffee, and then we’re on our way.
I flip on Upperdrugs by Highly Suspect from my phone and turn it up. Nicolas glances at me from behind the wheel as we merge on the highway.
“You know,” he says, speaking loudly over the music, “it is possible to be a gangster and still keep your hearing.”
I laugh, shaking my head to the beat and singing out loud. “Don’t think so,” I call out after my favorite part passes. “And besides,” I add, “what’s the point?”
Nicolas laughs and rolls down the windows. I relish in the cool air ripping through my hair, my bangs obscuring my vision. It’s sunny this afternoon, but finally turning cool. Finally changing with the season. Halloween will be here soon, and once I burn Lucifer’s body, I’ll fucking dance on his grave.
Nicolas turns down my music when the song ends, and I’m about to protest when he puts a hand on mine.
“You seem excited,” he observes over the wind blowing through the vehicle.
I crisscross my legs in the seat and he looks over and laughs, shaking his head. “I wish I could do that,” he murmurs.
“You’re driving,” I point out, squeezing his hand. “You need a foot on the gas.”
“Fuck, Sid, even if I wasn’t driving, my legs would never fit in the seat like that.”
“Chop them off,” I deadpan.
He bursts into laughter again.
I feel light. Even though I know we’re carrying more weapons than can possibly be legal. Even though I know we’re about to do something very illegal, I feel lighter than I have in ages. I’m not going to see my brother’s leftovers. I’m not going to be forced to touch their corpses. No, I’m going to do the job this time.
It doesn’t matter that I’ve never done it before. My anger, seething beneath my skin this past year, it’s enough to get the job done. And for practical matters, Nicolas is with me.
I only wished Lucifer would be there to watch me pretend to deliberate over the decision to end Julie’s life.
This is going to be fun, with or without him. I might even bring Julie’s head in bag to throw at his feet.
I don’t know much about Lucifer. But the one thing I know for sure is that he’s a psycho. And yeah, so am I. So is Jeremiah. Maybe Nicolas, too. But Lucifer isn’t a psycho on my side, and that makes him dangerous. He’s a threat to me and the fucked-up family I’ve built over the past year. Maybe Jeremiah had only been manipulating me this morning when he cleaned my foot, but I believed Nicolas when he said my brother would have killed Kristof. I kind of believed him, too, when he had said Jeremiah wouldn’t have let Kristof get to me, in the end.
And he hadn’t. In the end.
Jeremiah and I will never be close, we’ll never be like normal brothers and sisters. But we love each other, in our own sick way. And Lucifer is going to see what that love looks like. Lucifer might have ruled hell, but Lilith made it burn. And tonight, he’s going to find out just what that means.
I fall asleep on the drive, even after the coffee. I had leaned far back in my seat, the music was on high again, my hands were stuffed in my hoodie pockets, and Nicolas had left me to my music and my thoughts. I’d dozed off, and when I wake up, it’s completely dark outside.
We’re on a two-lane road, the only car I can see around us. My playlist has started over, The Old Me by Memphis May Fire is playing, and I have to turn it down. It’s a song I love to hate, because it hurts. I’m tired of hurting.
“How much further?” I ask.
Nicolas is drumming his hands on the wheel. “You sound like a kid,” he jokes.
I shoot him a glare and the bird.
“We’re coming into Acid City now.” He looks around, brow furrowed. “Funny. I don’t see anything good to trip on.”
I scoff. “That was a fucking dad joke if I’ve ever heard one.”
“What do you know about dads?” he counters.
“Wowww,” I say, exaggerating the word. “Just, wow. You are an asshole; did anyone ever tell you?”
He shrugs one shoulder. I watch his tricep flex under his black cotton shirt in the lights from the dash. “A time or two.”
“When you get married, your wife better make fun of you all the fucking time or I’ll have to divorce you two. Someone has to remind you that you ain’t shit.”
He blows out a breath. “Good thing I’ll never get married, Sid.”
“But don’t you like steady sex and stuff?”
He shakes his head. “Yeahhh, we’re not having this conversation.”
But I know he has that private apartment. He’s right, though. I don’t want this conversation either.
I stretch out my legs, rotate my neck. Up ahead, I see lights. When we round a corner, there’s a lonely gas station with one car at the pump.
“Need fuel?” I ask Nicolas.
He shakes his head. “I stopped while you were knocked out. We’ll be there in five minutes.”
I frown. “There’s absolutely nothing in this town. Why would Lucifer stash his family so far from people?”
Nicolas shrugs. “It’ll make it easier for us. She won’t be able to call for help.”
I nod. “True.” It’s a good point. The flipside, though, is that if she does call for help, the police will easily spot us. This town is deserted. And we, along with the Unsaints, might have the Alexandria police in our pocket, but we don’t usually cross state lines for our worst crimes.
I fiddle with the strings of my hoodie, keeping an eye on the empty, curving road. I wish we were here to go camping. To have a bizarre family vacation. For fun. Something I haven’t had in way too fucking long. But every nerve in my body seems on edge, my blood pumping hard through my veins. This isn’t for fun. This is part of the war.
I see, out of the corner of my eye, Nicolas glance at me.
“You okay?”
I want to say something rude. Toss his worry back at him. But the truth is, for some reason, I’m not exactly okay. I don’t know why. Or rather, I do know. But I should be more excited about this. Extracting vengeance.
It’s not even the kid.
I’m not going to touch the kid.
Something just feels…off.
“No,” I answer Nicolas honestly. His eyes are back on the road, and so are mine, so I keep talking. It’s easier to talk when I’m not looking at him. “I just have a weird feeling.”
He slows the Porsche, and I see a gravel driveway to my right, leading far off the road, thick trees obscuring our vision of what might lie ahead.
“Did you map this area out?” I ask, turning to Nicolas. He hasn’t said anything about my weird feeling. He’d probably dismissed it as soon as the words came out of my mouth.
But he’s staring at me, and he hasn’t turned down the driveway. He cuts the lights, and we’re just off the side of the main road, but he makes no move to get out.
“Why do you have a weird feeling?” His eyes are intent on mine. He’s taking this too seriously. Hell, I shouldn’t be taking it this seriously.
I shake my head, reach for my door handle, but he locks the doors.
“It’s nothing, Nicky,” I say with a laugh. “Let’s go. Did you want to walk down there?”
“Feelings mean something, Sid. I know your brother would like you to believe otherwise, but they do.”
I know that. I’d been a sex worker for a year,
and it didn’t just involve juggling clients’ sexual preferences. It involved a multitude of far too many feelings. I keep my hand on the door handle, which is still locked, but I twist back around to look at Nicolas.
“It’s probably nothing.” I blow out a breath. “Honestly. What could go wrong? If we can’t get in tonight for some reason, we leave, come back another day.” I lift one shoulder in a shrug. “Right?”
Nicolas scrubs a hand over his face, but he seems to agree.
“Right. But we’re driving up.” He glances down the long driveway. “This is creepy. Like a scary movie. I want the getaway car close.” He smiles, but it doesn’t meet his eyes.
He keeps the lights off as we drive down the bumpy road, and I have to admit, it is creepy. Nothing but darkness and trees and gravel as far as we can see. But I’d ran into a forest in the middle of the night a year ago, right into the arms of a man who clearly wanted to harm me. This is a mother and her baby. How scary can it be?
We round a corner, and the house looms off in the distance. Full of lights. Because this is Lucifer we’re dealing with. Lights are deterrents. Even in the middle of fucking nowhere.
At least, they’re deterrents to most people.
But Nicolas and I…we aren’t most people.
I’m Sid Rain. If my brother has taught me anything, it’s to get the fucking job done, no matter the cost.
We pull off beside a line of trees in the expansive front yard, and Nicolas turns the SUV around, so it’s facing the road out. The house itself is moderately sized, a long, white porch out front with rocking chairs. Two stories. There’s a shed beside it, a red wagon’s handle propped up against it. And a Jeep, parked right out front, the doors to the car almost lining up to the red door of the house. A quick getaway.
I know that isn’t Lucifer’s car. None of the Unsaints would drive a Jeep, if they’re as rich as everyone says.
Shockingly, I don’t hear or see any dogs.
I had begged Jeremiah for dogs at the hotel. Said they would be great guard dogs. He told me he didn’t want another mouth to feed and that’s what guns were for. Guarding.
Seems he and Lucifer share that sentiment.
My eyes linger on the wagon in the side mirror as Nicolas and I sit, waiting. To see if anyone notices us. To see if we see any movement of the curtains from the windows.
My gut twists.
Julie.
Lucifer’s kid.
He hadn’t known, he said. Although that could very well be bullshit. He hadn’t known, but he had stuck around. Meanwhile, he’d left me naked in an asylum, full of bruises and a permanent scar.
My fists clench and I reach for the black zipped bag behind my seat.
Nicolas catches my arm.
I shrug him off but don’t grab the bag, narrowing my eyes at him instead. “We can’t sit here all night.”
His brows flick up. “I know. But what do you want to do? After Julie is dead?”
I don’t know why, but it suddenly occurs to me that Lucifer doesn’t know my real name. If he has one, I don’t know his either. Which is good.
I want to stay Lilith. It’s the only way I’m going to get through this.
“What do you mean what do I want to do?” I snap. “I want to get the hell out of here and go home.” But I see the red wagon again. I know what he’s asking. I just don’t want to deal with it.
“Sid, look, I know you hate this guy. You should. He’s a piece of shit for what he did to you. All the Unsaints are pieces of shit. But that doesn’t change the fact that inside that nice little white house is a baby sleeping soundly in a crib or a tiny bed and we’re about to murder his mom. So I’ll ask you again.” He grounds the steering wheel in his hand, I watch as his knuckles blanch. “What do you want to do afterward?”
I throw up my hands. “You and Jeremiah should have thought about this before now. We can’t kidnap the kid. We won’t live that down without spending time behind bars.”
He snorts. I know what he’s thinking, but the truth is, murder is easier to get away with. For us. Kidnapping a baby…no police station in America will let that shit go. And Jeremiah will kill us if we bring a kid back into the hotel.
Nicolas drums his fingers on the steering wheel, staring at the house in the rearview mirror, thinking. I have no answer. This should have been planned better, but I was so eager to get back at Lucifer, to keep my brother pacified, to prove myself, that we’d made this drive without working out all the angles.
This was a mistake, and we can’t afford to make mistakes. I already made enough of those as it is, according to my brother.
“If you don’t want to do this,” I taunt Nicolas, “we can always go back home and tell Jeremiah we pussied out.”
Nicolas frowns. “I’m not scared of your brother, kid.” I actually believe him, although he’d be the only one, save for me. Most days, though, if I’m being honest with myself, I’m scared, too. “We’ll deal with the mom, then we’ll call 911 from inside the house, and then we’ll go. First responders will deal with the kid.”
He unbuckles his seatbelt. As if that settles it. As if that makes sense. Murdering in the night is beneficial because it will give us much more time to get the hell away from the victim’s house. Calling the cops while we’re still inside the home seems like a horrible idea. But I also don’t have any better ones.
“Okay,” I agree. “I guess we gotta do what we gotta do.”
I open the car door, close it quietly. On the other side of the SUV, Nicolas does the same. Suddenly the vengeance I’d imagined taking against Lucifer is a lot more complicated than it should be.
I open up the rear door, Nicolas opens the opposite one.
“Which?” I ask, glancing at the black bag.
Nicolas shrugs. “Gun is quicker. Knife is more painful.” His eyes flick to mine. “Which do you want it to be?”
“I want to get out of here.”
Nicolas nods. “Got it.” He unzips the bag, tosses me a pair of gloves. When we both have them on, he hands me a Glock, and I take it by the grip. He gets the same, and then we duck out of there, pressing the doors closed to avoid any unnecessary noise.
We stand outside of the pool of lights for a moment, looking the house over before we make our way in.
“The back?” he asks me.
As if I know.
But I nod. He’s letting me think this through. Letting me feel in control. There are lights around back, and we could have just as easily went in through the front. But most homeowners take more precautions with their front doors. As if criminals won’t have the audacity to scuttle around to the back.
Criminals have the audacity to do most anything when they’re already planning to break into a house in the middle of the night.
We circle around the house on opposite sides, keeping out of the pool of light until we absolutely have to step in it. I take the side of the house away from the shed. I don’t want to see the fucking red wagon again.
We meet in the backyard, both nodding that the coast is clear. Here, there’s a forest beyond the backyard, an endless landscape of trees that goes God knows where. The back porch is smaller than the front, just a few steps leading up to a screen door. There’s an aboveground pool with a tarp over it, and a few toys scattered across the lawn.
Together, looking around, guns drawn, Nicolas and I walk silently up the steps. He pulls on the screen door. It’s unlocked. I see a smile flicker on his lips. Less mess.
The back door itself, of course, is locked tight.
Nicolas hands me his gun, pulls out a lockpick from his pocket and goes to work. I don’t know shit about breaking into houses. I don’t know shit about murder, except the bodies my brother leaves behind. I am wholly unprepared for this. But it’s a little too late to back out now.
The lock clicks, and Nicolas pushes the door open, pocketing the tools. He takes his gun back, and we wait, there on the threshold of the door. Wait for an alarm, a dog, a cat. Anything. W
e wait thirty seconds. Then we go inside, and I guide the door gently closed.
We stand inside the kitchen, shrouded in darkness.
It smells like someone has baked something recently, cookies or something like it. It smells good, and my stomach growls. Nicolas shoots me a look, but there isn’t much I can do about it. I shrug in the darkness.
As my eyes adjust, I see bottles in the sink, a highchair around a gleaming wooden table off of the kitchen, in the dining room. And just past the kitchen are stairs leading upward. Nicolas had told me bedrooms are almost always upstairs.
I jerk my head in that direction, nearly holding my breath. There’s some noise upstairs, like a sound machine or a fan, but otherwise, it’s silent. I can hear my heart thudding in my ears.
Nicolas takes small steps through the kitchen, testing the floor out. It’s creaky, so he distributes his weight almost comically, creeping like a cartoon burglar across the dark wooden floors.
This place is a home. There’s no marble here. No shine like at the hotel. It actually feels…cozy. But I shove that thought aside.
I follow in Nicolas’s wake, glancing behind me as I do, looking around the hallway once we get to the bottom of the stairs. I can see the front door, and a living room just before it. Darkness. Silence.
Yet that feeling hasn’t left. The weird one. I thought it was because there’s a baby in this house. But I get a prick on the back of my neck, like I’m being watched. As Nicolas tests out the stairs, thankfully not very creaky, I look behind me, at the door we had come in from.
Nothing.
I’m paranoid.
I am, truth be told, always paranoid. But that’s not going to help me now.
I take a breath in through my nose, out through my mouth, trying to calm my racing heart. We’re in. That’s half the battle. Now we just have to do the other half, and then we can get out.
Nicolas is halfway up the stairs when I realize he’s glaring at me. I haven’t moved. I clench my teeth together to keep the apology on my tongue from bubbling out through my lips. I follow him up, glancing at the walls ahead of him, on the landing. No photographs that I can see. I’m hopeful I won’t have to see any pictures of Lucifer’s smiling face with Julie and this child.