by K. V. Rose
“Sid.” I can’t look at Jeremiah as he speaks. Instead, I stare at Nicolas. He had known. He had fucking known the entire time I was in that cell.
Jeremiah keeps talking. “Sid. I didn’t know you were unconscious. You were…you were blacked out. But I didn’t do it. It didn’t go that far. I saw…who you were…my little sister.”
I punch him again, but this time, he ducks his head and grabs my wrist.
“Sid, I didn’t know…” Blood is everywhere. But I realize, in this moment, that the leverage the Unsaints had is gone. I’m in Jeremiah’s grip now. Any of his men could pull the trigger and kill all of the Unsaints.
I relax. Jeremiah’s grip on my wrist loosens, but he doesn’t let go yet. His pale green eyes bore into my own. He had almost fucked me.
Bile rises up in my throat.
I’m going to be sick.
But I can’t. Not yet. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask instead. Because I have to know that. “Why did you make me think…” I close my eyes against the memory. “Why didn’t you confess?” I meet his gaze again. “And why…why did you want me?”
I remember him staring at me at the party. Remember him following me to the merry-go-round. The same one he uses now to torment me. To make me strong.
He lowers my arm but doesn’t let go. Not yet. “I didn’t want you to hate me,” he whispers. In this moment, I believe him. But what he doesn’t know is that I already hate him. Even before tonight, I’d hated him. Even if I loved him before, even if I love him still, I hate him too.
I nod. He lets go of my wrist. I seize that moment and dart away. Someone’s arms come around me.
Lucifer’s.
I can only think about him having to watch. Of those scars on his stomach. Of what he’d tried to do to save me. Of my brother, ruining both of our lives in one night. Of betraying these boys.
“Leave here,” I spit at the four of them, the Order of Rain, meeting each of their eyes. They are sick. They are wrong. We are all unsainted, but they are the worst of us. “Get the fuck out of here and never come back. I don’t want to see any of your faces, ever again.”
My brother shakes his head, struggling to his feet. He looks like he’s going to lose his goddamn mind. He grabs his hair, growling under his breath, his face caked with blood and bruises. “I’m not leaving without you, Sid. You’re my sister. I waited too long to find you.”
“You weren’t looking for me,” I spit.
“He was.” Nicolas. “He was. He had always been. He didn’t know it was you at first, but he thought you were someone familiar.”
“I don’t want to hear you talk,” I snarl at Nicolas.
“You have to believe that, Sid. Even if you hate him. Hate me. He had been looking for you since he escaped. He’d wanted to find you. To keep you safe—”
“Shut. Up.”
“He didn’t know who you were. Not when he first…first found you. He didn’t know. He told me he didn’t know. He told me you didn’t fight back—”
“Because I was nearly unconscious!” I scream.
“Nearly,” Nicolas repeats. He shakes his head. “And besides, he didn’t do it. He didn’t. He almost did, Sid, but he didn’t.”
“You kept this from me.” I want to bury all of their bodies. “You kept this from me, and now you’re fucking defending him.”
Jeremiah groans. “I don’t want to be defended. What I did was wrong, Sid. I’m so fucking sorry. It was wrong. It was fucked up. But when I realized you were my own goddamn sister, I stopped, immediately…” He breaks off, and then he sinks to his knees.
My brother.
On his knees.
In a room full of his men, and his enemies.
Everyone is staring at him. Behind me, Lucifer’s chest rises and falls against my shoulders, and he keeps both arms around me, gun trained at the floor. He doesn’t speak, letting me fight this out with my brother for now. None of the Unsaints speak.
Jeremiah starts to crawl, on his knees, to me.
He stops a few inches from my feet and sits back on his heels. He’s wearing a suit, unrumpled but caked in blood. I want him to drown in it.
“Please forgive me, Sid. Please. Don’t go with him. You aren’t safe with him. You aren’t safe with anyone but me. I promise you, Sid. Things will change. I’ll be better. I’ll do better. He burned down Brooklin’s house—”
“She wasn’t in it,” Mayhem snarls from beside me. “We were sending you a message. And I’ll get her back, too. Get the fuck out of here. Your sister is telling you she doesn’t want you. Don’t come back here. If you do, I’ll fucking kill you myself.”
It’s the most words I’ve ever heard Mayhem say.
Jeremiah looks like he wants to jump to his feet. Like he wants to retaliate. But he clenches his jaw together and doesn’t. He looks to me again, but some of the anger is back in his eyes. This is really what Jeremiah is, at the core of him.
Angry.
He’s full of so much anger, he’d burned my entire world down to the ground. In one single night, he had ruined me.
“Sid. I can’t lose you again,” he tries again. “I can’t. Remember, they killed one of our runners—”
“You fucking idiot. We don’t bother with petty cash, motherfucker. Fuck would we want with your druggies?” Ezra growls.
“You don’t want me. You want to own me, Jamie.” I snarl his real name. The one he’d been born with. “And I’m not yours to own.” I hate that a small piece of my shattered heart wants to go with him. A small piece of me remembers him tending to my foot in the bathroom. Telling me things will be better. That he loves me. I want to fold him into my arms. Because he had fucked me over. But he’d been fucked too. Our pain ran too deep between us, because of our mother. Our absent father.
A father we never knew.
Love we never knew.
His sick, rich foster parents and siblings.
But I can’t go back with him. I can never go back with him. I don’t even know if I’ll ever be able to look at him again after tonight.
I have so many questions. I don’t know what Lucifer does. What the Unsaints do. If they work in the same business as my brother, or something different. I don’t know what I’m choosing by staying here, on their side, but I cannot go with my brother.
And it hurts.
Because I know, too, that when I black out, it’s hard for other people to tell. I act as if I’m awake. As if I’m conscious. Part of me knows Jeremiah is telling the truth when he says I had let him. When I didn’t resist, and I seemed awake. I know that’s true.
But it doesn’t change anything between us. Because whatever stage of consciousness I was in, he knew I was drunk. He wanted to punish the Unsaints. To scare them. To humiliate them by taking me.
I choke back on the bile coming up my throat.
“Sid…”
“If you don’t get up and walk out of here, I’ll shoot you myself.”
Jeremiah shakes his head. “You wouldn’t. Not your own brother.”
I hold out my hand, palm up. Without hesitating, Lucifer reaches around me and places the gun there, wrapping my fingers around the grip. I aim it at Jeremiah. His men tense and point their guns, however reluctantly, at me. He twists his head around to stare at them. They lower their weapons.
He meets my gaze again. “You wouldn’t, Sid. Because you know that I love you. That we’re both dark and broken, and I’m the only that can love you. You’ll always run back to me, because I’m your brother. I’m who you belong to, Sid.”
Lucifer tugs me closer to his body, and his breathing grows faster. Shallower. He’s going to kill Jeremiah if my brother doesn’t get the fuck out of here.
“Get out,” I say again. “If you ever loved me, if you still do, get the fuck out of here.” I gesture with the gun, my eyes narrowed. “Now.”
Jeremiah hangs his head. But slowly, he gets to his feet. Then he looks at Lucifer, at my back.
“I’ll come back f
or her. And she will come with me. She’ll never choose you over me. I’m her blood. You are nothing.”
With a last glance at me, he turns around. Kristof is the first to follow him. Trey and Nicolas both hold my gaze.
“Come with us,” Nicolas whispers.
I shake my head. “I never want to see either of you again.”
Nicolas bites his tongue. Trey looks like he might try to dash and grab me, haul me out the door. But Nicolas turns first and puts a firm hand on Trey’s shoulder. Together, they leave. I watch them walk down the stairs, and then Mayhem moves first, slamming the door closed and locking it behind them.
I step away from Lucifer, and reluctantly, he lets me go.
I spin to face him, the gun still in my hand. Mayhem is at my back. Ezra is still leaned against Atlas, and Cain is watching me carefully with his arms folded. These are the Unsaints. And I am not one of them.
I don’t know who I am.
But it isn’t this.
“I need to get away from here,” I say quietly.
Lucifer frowns. “What? No. Sid. No.”
I snatch the keys to the BMW from the table. “I need to get out of here, and if you want to see me again, you won’t follow me.”
“Sid.” That’s Ezra. He steps out of Atlas’s arm and comes to stand directly in front of me. I see Lucifer tense at his back.
Ezra takes another step toward me, and I don’t back down. He pulls me into his arms, and I let him crush me to his chest. He smells like sweat and blood and I don’t hug him back. He holds me out at arm’s length and presses a kiss to my brow. I’m too stunned to react.
Lucifer looks as if he might pounce on him.
But Ezra says, in that deep voice, “Come back, Lilith. We’ve got hell to repay.”
“No,” Mayhem says from behind me. He steps around me, crosses his arms. I see the tattoo of an inverted cross on the side of his face. His baby blue eyes are trained on me. He’s tall and lean like Lucifer, but with blonde hair. He looks angry. And a little scared. “No,” he says again.
Ezra looks to him. “She’ll come back.”
No one says a word. Not even Lucifer.
And after giving the Order of Rain a head start, I leave.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Present
It’s been far too long since I’ve driven a vehicle. My foster parents hadn’t bought me a car, and I’d never bothered with saving enough money to get one myself. The bus worked fine in Alexandria. I don’t even have a license.
I had, at one time. One of my foster families had at least given me that much, letting me practice with their SUVs. But still, behind the wheel of Lucifer’s BMW, my hands are shaking on the wheel.
Rationally, I know part of that has to do with what just happened.
Irrationally, I don’t want to think about what just happened.
I drive down the lonely road, thankful I see no other cars. I look for them, too. In the bushes. The forest. Down gravel drives. Even at the lone gas station that Nicolas and I had passed before we got to Julie’s.
Julie.
I wonder if she ever woke up, during that entire encounter. I wonder if Nicolas and Jeremiah will go back and finish the job. I wonder if they would hurt the boy, too.
Jeremiah. Jamie.
My brother.
My broken, disgusting, awful brother.
I can’t think of him without my skin crawling. I want to tear it all off. I want to throw up. I’m going to throw up.
I swerve onto the side of the road, nothing but grassy hills beneath the stars on either side. I jump out of the BMW, leaving it running, and run around to the ditch, heaving. Everything comes up, which isn’t much to speak of. My stomach had growled at Julie’s house; I can’t remember the last time I’d ate.
But now, I’m grateful for that fact. Even after I’ve puked what was in there up, I still dry heave, and spit hangs from my lips. I’m thankful no one is here. Thankful I’m alone.
Thankful, and scared.
Because who will stop me now? I have no weapons, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Lucifer has something in the car. He’s as dirty as my brother.
But not quite.
My brother…
I heave again, my hands on my knees as I lean over the ditch.
My fucking brother.
He was so blinded by hatred, by whatever ways the Unsaints didn’t make him feel welcome, that he hadn’t spared a thought for who he was using to fuck them over. And it wasn’t just that. It wasn’t just the wrongness of what had happened between us. The sin. The disgusting thing we had almost done together.
Because he had stopped.
I have to give him that.
But it’s the lies. The bullshit.
Oh God.
I vomit again, bile coming up, my stomach convulsing as my mind refuses to think about what he must have felt when he figured it out.
And then he lied, to cover his tracks He had convinced me Lucifer hadn’t given a fuck about me. But I wasn’t the only victim that night. Lucifer had been forced to watch. He had the scars to prove he’d tried to help me. Tried to stop it.
But Jeremiah had used me. He had had no intention to save me that night, he just wanted to get to the Unsaints
What kind of monster was my brother?
I sink to my knees in the ditch, inches away from my own sickness.
I cradle my head in my hands, silent sobs wracking my body. No sounds come from my lips, no tears from my eyes. Just silent grief, engulfing me.
I throw my head back, tilt my chin up, my eyes squeezed closed.
And I scream.
I scream as loud and as long as I can. I don’t give a damn that someone might hear. I don’t even give a damn that Jeremiah might hear me. That Nicolas might. Kristof. Trey. I hope they do. I hope they think I’m being torn apart by a wild animal. I hope they think I’m dying.
I feel like I am.
The scream echoes in the vast, wild fields around me, and I scream until my throat is sore and all that comes out is another choked sob.
Slowly, I start to come to my senses. If Jeremiah does find me out here, he won’t leave without me. We might both die at one another’s hands, but he won’t leave without me. Not again.
I get to my feet. My legs tremble, but I make it back to the driver’s side of the car, crawl into the seat, shut and lock the doors.
I rest. For one minute. I count to sixty, my head back against the seat. My eyes closed. I give myself one more minute to pull my shit together. When I snap my eyes open, do up my seatbelt, and put the BMW in drive, it’s done.
The scars Jeremiah left behind, those emotional, gut-wrenching wounds…I know they won’t ever leave. But the self-pity has to go. Because Jeremiah needs to learn a fucking lesson.
As much as I hate Nicolas, I was glad we had that little game between us. ‘Yes/No’ had been useful, not in learning anything about Lucifer or Julie or the kid. But in learning about my brother. His feelings for Brooklin. Mayhem’s sister. He had put his heart on his sleeve in front of Nicolas. He’d done it in front of other people, too, for Lucifer to know that burning down Brooklin’s house would get to my brother.
Now I know, too.
Now I’m going to get to my brother.
I’m going to pay him back for what he had done to me and make him feel like I did. Like I wished I’d never fucking been born. Like I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin.
He had wanted me to kill Lucifer on Halloween night. He wanted Lucifer and the Unsaints to suffer, and he wanted me to end him so he couldn’t tell me the truth about that night. But Lucifer had been looking for me all along.
Now he’d found me.
And now, he was going to help me fuck Jeremiah and the Order of Rain up.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Present
The next morning, I wake up feeling as if I have a hangover, even though I hadn’t touched a drink the night before. The thought of consuming alcohol again, of gettin
g to where I had been that night Jeremiah found me in Raven Park…it makes me feel sick.
But everything makes me feel sick.
Looking at the ceiling above my head in the old house at the edge of Raven Park makes me feel sick. Rolling over in the twin bed to glance out the window, a crack of light coming from the edge of the curtains, makes me feel sick.
I’ll need a drink soon. What does it matter if I feel sick sober or drunk? At least drunk, maybe I can forget. Maybe I won’t dream about Jeremiah on top of me. About Lucifer screaming my name while he watched.
For several minutes, I try not to think. About anything at all. Nothing. Blackness. What I might experience when I’m dead. What I might feel. Weightless. Unburdened. This is exactly why I’d planned to kill myself the night I met Lucifer. Because being in infinite nothingness is much better than feeling.
There’s a soft knock on the door to my borrowed room.
I sit up, pulling the pale cream sheets up to my chest. I’m in my bra and shorts, the same clothes I’d worn the night before, minus the hoodie, which is on the floor of this ancient room. The hardwoods are scuffed and rickety, the wallpaper some atrocious floral print. But it feels good being here, hiding in plain sight. My brother knows about this house. He knows Lucifer has been staying here. But he won’t come. He wants to give me space right now. He thinks this might be over soon. That I’ll come crawling back to him, demand his forgiveness, and then the Rain siblings will move on together.
He always underestimates me.
“Come in,” I call out, even as the door is opening without my words.
Lucifer stands in the doorway, shirtless.
My eyes find his sculpted muscles, the veins in his forearms, his impressive six-pack. And the scars around his torso, from the rope my brother had tied around him. His sweatpants hang low on his hips, but I force my gaze up to his, ignoring the deep V cut just above the waistband of his pants.
His eyes are hooded, midnight blue and full of exhaustion. He has circles beneath them, shadows that probably match my own. I didn’t sleep well. He probably hasn’t slept well. His hands are in his pockets as he watches me, as if he’s uncertain how I might behave. As if I’m a wild animal.