"What the fuck are you doing?" I yelled at him as I stood there, balls out and dripping with moisture from my shower.
"I could ask you the same thing," he replied in a calm tone, his gaze straying from my book to my body and skimming down until he was looking my dick right in the eye. And that was fucking disconcerting.
"I'm not the one lounging on your bed, so I think my question is more relevant," I snarled.
"Perhaps you should cover your cock before we get into this?" Saint suggested, "It’s a little inappropriate for a teacher to be waving their genitalia around at a student while they're lying in their bed. Imagine what the school board might think."
I cursed him colourfully as I stalked over to my closet and grabbed a pair of black sweatpants, pulling them on. When I twisted back around to glare at him with my arms folded over the tigress tattoo on my chest, I spotted something hanging from his neck.
"What are you doing with that?" I demanded, taking a step towards him as I pointed at the necklace which Tatum had asked me to look after for her.
"Again, I could ask you the same thing," Saint said in a deadly calm tone which made my skin prickle. This wasn't just a social call from the devil. There was something more going on here. He was up to something or after something and if he'd found that necklace then that meant he'd been snooping through my things too. That had been inside the box on my mantelpiece. He didn’t just happen to see it.
"Give that back," I said, giving him a hard stare which normally had students shitting themselves in my classes, but Saint Memphis was no ordinary teenager, he didn't bow to social pressure. Hell, I doubted he'd even bow to Satan if he showed up here this very moment casting the whole world to ruin.
"I intend to," he purred. "Just not to you. Unless you have a valid reason for having it? I'd say our girl would be quite surprised to find her stoic defender had stolen from her like this, wouldn't you?"
"I didn't steal shit," I snarled. "And you know it. So quit acting like a little bitch and dancing in circles. If you've got something you want to say to me then spit it the fuck out."
Saint shifted forward suddenly on the bed, tossing my book back on the nightstand and getting to his feet right in front of me, standing so close that our chests were brushing. But if he thought I was going to back down, he had another thing coming.
"How did it come into your possession then?" he asked in a low voice. "Because the last time I saw Tatum wearing it was right after she believed I burned her precious letters and she ran off to cry about it. When she came back, you were trotting along at her heels playing the good teacher and telling us all to get to class as if you had no idea what had taken place amongst us. And yet now I find this."
"What's your point, Memphis? I've got shit I want to do today."
"My point is that I can only assume she gave this to you then. That she asked you to look after it for her because she was afraid of what we...or I might do to it. But you weren't a Night Keeper then. You had no ties to her at all. So why would you leap forward like a knight in shining armour to defend our little Night Bound but then pretend not to know anything about what had taken place? You could have punished us for her then. You could have been the brave defender she needed. But you didn't. You gave us detention for being late to class. You gave her detention. But you didn’t make a single comment about the letters or the girl you’d no doubt been consoling. And now that's got me wondering, why?"
"Maybe I knew she was strong enough to fight her own battles," I snarled, reaching out to grab the necklace in a tight fist so that the chain cut into his neck as I tightened my hold on it. "Now give this back."
"No," Saint replied, not moving a damn inch as I went nose to nose with him. "If you want it, you'll have to rip it clean off of me and then you can explain to Tatum why you broke it. I'm assuming it has some kind of real significance for her. Probably a gift from her sister or father? Or some token she wears in memory of losing her? Whatever way, I'm certain she wanted it to be protected from harm when she entrusted you with it, so I'm sure she would be less than pleased to discover you'd broken it."
"Maybe I should test the strength of the chain," I warned, turning it in my fist so that it tightened around his neck. "If I use it to strangle you then I can just unclasp it from your corpse once you're dead and hand it back to her."
The motherfucker actually grinned at my threat, his eyes dark on mine with a dare clearly dancing in them alongside something which looked horribly like triumph.
"Tell me, Monroe, did your family leave you wanting when it came to love?" he asked.
"What?" I asked, unable to hide the flinch as this spawn of hell spoke about my family and hating the way his eyes flashed with victory at my reaction.
"It's just a fairly common cause for men like us to come into existence through neglect or violence, so it seems like a simple enough question."
I released my hold on Tatum's necklace and shoved away from him as I turned and stalked out into the front room. "My family weren't monsters like yours."
"I'm sure they weren't," he agreed as he followed me. "There are no monsters like my father."
I cut him a look at those words because for a moment there it had sounded suspiciously like hatred lacing his tone when he mentioned the man who took my family from me.
"But they did die and leave you all alone?" he pushed and panic flared through me as I turned an icy glare on him again.
"Who told you that?" I demanded, my mind flitting to Tatum for a moment before I could help it. But I instantly dismissed that idea. She might have been going a little soft on Saint ever since he'd almost given his life for her, but I knew she wouldn't betray my trust like that.
"You just said they weren't monsters. Talking about them in the past tense is something of a giveaway,” he said with a shrug as he moved to pick up my discarded shirt and place it in the laundry hamper like the sight of it on the floor was causing him physical pain.
I ground my jaw as he cocked his head, eyeing me like I was a fucking puzzle he was trying to piece together and I didn't like that one fucking bit. He was better at this mind game bullshit than me and I didn't want him trying to pry my head open to hunt down my secrets.
"What did your father do to you that was so terrible then?" I asked, trying to deflect the attention back away from me. "Did he knock you about a bit? Call you names? Make you feel undeserving of his love?" I could easily imagine that son of a bitch doing all of that and more to his own kid and for a moment I almost felt bad about goading Saint over it. And then I remembered that he'd been raised in his father's image to be just the same as him and I shouldn't be giving a single fuck about anything he'd been through.
"No," Saint replied easily, picking a piece of lint from his sleeve and dropping it to the ground. "Nothing like that."
"Then what?" I demanded, my voice raising in pitch and possibly giving away the fact that I was more interested in his answer than I had any real right to be.
I had assumed that he wouldn't answer me, so when he gave me an appraising look instead of just shutting me down, I was more than a little surprised.
"When I was six, we spent a few weeks in Barcelona," he said slowly, his gaze darkening as he lost himself in the memory. "Have you ever travelled to Europe?"
"I've only ever been to three states," I deadpanned, offering him a flat look.
"Of course. I forget you come from nothing," he said as if that wasn't offensive as shit. "Well, anyway, Barcelona is an old city. Far older than anything we have here and there are countless old buildings and churches and things of the like. Our family were staying in a building that had originally been used as a monastery and dated back to somewhere in the Middle Ages."
"What has this got to do with-"
"If you wish to have an answer to your question then you will allow me to answer how I see fit," Saint said coolly and I huffed out a breath as I indicated for him to go on.
"Anyway, as you can imagine, there wasn't any modern
plumbing in the place originally so to the rear of the property in the shadow of the old abbey there was a stone well. Not anything particularly interesting, just a hole in the ground with an old wooden structure over it to hang a bucket from and a circular piece of wood tossed over the top of it to stop anyone from unintentionally falling in."
"I get the picture, you and your family were off staying in some massive estate in Spain with a fucking well on the grounds. Get to the point, Memphis,” I said, still feeling pissy about him breaking in here like he thought he owned the entire goddamn world.
Saint's jaw ticked, but that was the only outward sign I got that he was irritated with my impatience.
"At this point in my upbringing I had already been forced to come to terms with the fact that I would never get any warning of us moving from place to place. Trips were always sprung on me suddenly and instantly. I would quite literally be hauled out of bed, stopped mid meal or even wrenched off of the toilet if I'd chosen the wrong moment to take a shit and then I would be bundled into a car or onto a plane or a boat and taken wherever the fuck my father wanted for an undetermined amount of time. It was rather unsettling, which was of course the point and I was never allowed to bring a single thing with me aside from whatever clothes I'd been wearing at the moment selected. But this time, I happened to overhear my father speaking on the phone with the pilot a few minutes before he came to grab me, so I ran back to my room, lifted the floorboard where I hid the toys my grandmother bought me in secret and took a small, red car from beneath it. I placed the car in my pocket and miraculously, it went unnoticed throughout the flight and for almost an entire week once we had arrived in Spain."
"He wouldn't let you have toys?" I asked with a frown. I'd assumed Saint Memphis had been the kid who had every fucking toy ever created. “Why the fuck not?”
"He didn't allow me to form attachments to anything. Toys, furniture, people. It made me strong."
"I am going to seriously disagree with that logic, but fine, I'll bite. What happened when he found you with the toy car? Did he yell at you? Make you cry?" I could hear the dickish tone to my voice, but I wasn’t capable of reining it in.
Saint scoffed and shook his head slightly. "He didn't say a word. That's really not his style. He just clicked his fingers to make me follow him and led me through the property to the well. When we got there, he lifted the cover and pointed at it, telling me to throw the car away.” Saint paused for half a beat before he went on, but it was enough of a detraction from his monotone that I noticed it. “I made the foolish mistake of crying and begging him to let me keep it."
"Well, you were six, I imagine that would be a pretty standard reaction to losing a toy at that age. I used to have this Power Ranger action figure which I took literally everywhere with me, so I feel the pain of him making you dump it," I said with a shrug.
Saint sighed like I was seriously testing his patience and I had to admit he really had my curiosity piqued now. Hadn't I wanted dirt on Troy Memphis anyway? Maybe if I got Saint to trust me, I could get enough information from him to use in my vendetta. Though I doubted tales of him not letting his kid play with a toy car would get me very far.
"He waited until I finished my tantrum in silence and eventually, when I realised I had no choice in the matter, I threw the car into the well… I can still remember the sound of it hitting the water at the bottom like it just happened," he mused and though his tone was flat, something about his story made me feel a tug of pity for him. He'd just been a kid with a toy car. Was it really the worst thing in the world for him to want to keep something like that?
"That was pretty shitty of him," I said, hating myself for the fact that some of my anger at Saint was fizzling away, but it was kinda hard to stay mad at a kid who had never been allowed to have his toys.
"It wasn't quite as traumatising as the Action Man incident," he mused. "Or at least it wouldn't have been if he hadn't made me go down after it."
"He threw you down the well?" I balked and he rolled his eyes at me.
"No. He suggested that if I cared for the car so much that I wouldn't wish to be parted from it again and instructed me to climb into the bucket. Once I did, he lowered me down into the dark, all the way until the base of the bucket was just touching the surface of the water. He then gave me a choice. I could either dive in and find my toy and he would return me and it to the surface assuming I could climb back into the bucket. Or I could remain in the bucket until I had learned my lesson."
"How deep was the water?" I asked, unable to hide the horror in my voice at all with that question.
"I have no idea. I was too afraid to find out. Perhaps it was just a few inches deep and all I needed to have done was wade around in it until I found the car. Or perhaps it was several meters and I had no chance of ever finding it, let alone getting back into the bucket to be drawn back up to the surface."
"So you chose to stay in the bucket?" I asked, my muscles bunching as I thought about that, this little six year old kid all alone down in the dark. Troy Memphis really was a monster.
"I did. I believe I was in there for around thirty-one hours before he brought me up. Not that he ever let me see a clock to be sure of the time, but it had been around lunch time when I'd been sent down there and it was almost time for dinner the next day once I was brought up." He delivered it with no emotion at all and I couldn't even tell if it was because he didn't feel anything about it or if it was that he was so practiced in repressing the things he felt that he didn't even know how to show it.
"That’s fucked up," I muttered, half wanting to hug the asshole for a minute before I remembered I hated him.
"So I've been told. Are you going to tell me what fucked you up then? If your family loved you before you lost them was it the losing them that did it? Or the foster care? Maybe a bit of both?"
"The losing them," I ground out, quickly finding my anger with him again at the reminder of exactly why I hated this son of a bitch and his entire family. The things his father had done to him might have been all kinds of fucked up but they'd been done with the purpose of moulding him into his image and from what I'd seen of the way he treated Tatum, I was willing to bet that was a pretty solid success.
"How did they die?" he asked like we were discussing the weather.
"House fire," I lied quickly, hoping he hadn't noticed the moment of hesitation it took for me to come up with that lie. But the way he raised his chin an inch said he'd noticed it alright.
"I see."
If I'd thought Saint was a guarded bastard before all of that then I was wrong, because I swear I saw the shutters slam down behind his eyes as he looked at me. And for a moment I actually felt shitty about it. He'd just shared a whole lot of truth with me. The kind of truth I was sure he didn’t share easily or with many people and I'd straight up lied to his face in return.
The worst thing was that I actually felt like an asshole about it. But that was insane because there was no fucking way I could give him any of my truth. But I guessed he really did take this Night Keeper bond between us seriously. I just had to remember that that was a good thing because it made him vulnerable to me. The tattoo on the back of my neck made him believe that he could trust me and I had to use that to my advantage. I needed to reel him in, not go up against him, so I decided to try and offer him something to distract him from my lies and earn me back an ounce of his trust.
"I offered to take the necklace from Tatum because she swore she wasn't going to let you beat her and she didn't want there to be anything left in her possession that you could use against her. I was protecting her. Even before I made a vow to do so. It just felt like the right thing to do,” I said.
Saint's expression loosened marginally at that admission and he nodded thoughtfully. "She does have a knack for getting under our skin, doesn't she?"
"Something like that," I agreed, feeling uncomfortable about discussing my feelings for her too much with him. His obsession with her was obvious enough an
d with my feelings thrown into the mix, it was just another thing for us to butt heads over.
"Well, far be it from me to upset our girl for no reason." Saint reached behind his neck and unclasped the necklace before handing it over to me.
The warm metal pooled in my palm and I looked at it with a frown as I tried to figure out his angle.
"So, you just changed your mind about stealing it because you don't want to upset her?" I asked, the scepticism clear in my tone.
"Believe it or not, I don't gain pleasure from hurting her," Saint said with a shrug as he walked towards the door.
"Why are you so good at it then?" I called after him.
"Because I’m not a nice person. But that doesn't make it intentional. It’s just the way it is. Besides, the only reason I ever craved her pain was because I wanted to use it to gain her compliance. For the most part, she bends to my rules these days. She understands my need for control in ways that no one else I've ever met has. And we have an understanding about each other’s limits...or at least we used to. As it stands, I have enough on my plate with her marrying that neanderthal and fucking up the power balance in our little quartet. I don't need to have her angry at me for taking this too. When she's ready to trust me fully, she will wear it again herself."
"If you want her to trust you then maybe you should give her letters back to her," I growled, my protectiveness making it easy for me to find my anger with him again.
"Well, the problem with that is that I don't trust her either," he said smoothly, like that whole situation wasn't totally fucked up. "Those letters give me control over her and I need that control in a way you couldn't possibly comprehend. But feel free to let her know we had this chat, I'm sure she will be interested to know I allowed you to keep the necklace."
He didn't give me the chance to reply before heading outside and closing the door behind him, leaving me there wondering what the fuck it must be like to live inside his screwed up head. I had no idea why the hell he thought it was okay to force control over Tatum, but that was an issue for another day. Once we were done with this place, I was more than ready to grab that girl and run as far away from him and the other Night Keepers as I could get. Just so long as we left Troy Memphis bleeding in the gutter when we went.
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