I swiped a hand over my face as I tried to calm myself, but as I looked down at my palm I found fresh blood coating my fingers from my fucking nose where that bitch had punched me.
The voices were getting loud now, the echoes which haunted me, chased me, infected me.
It’s too late now, you’ve lost the fight today.
Better to let the demons take charge.
Better to just give in…
I cranked Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake up loud enough to drown everything else out, trying to let it calm me, searching for myself in the peace of it but only finding any solace in the darker parts of the composition.
I expelled a harsh breath and ripped my clothes off before stepping straight into the shower in my en-suite and turning it on. I flipped the dial around so that stone cold water crashed down over my body, pressing my palms to the tiles as I stared down at the water swirling around my feet. It was tinged red with blood from my nose which only made my pulse pound harder.
Shivers wracked my flesh, but it wasn’t the cold. It was the demon in me aching to break free. It was the fury in me needing an outlet. It was the combination of every hateful, vengeful, corrupted, tarnished piece of my rotten soul demanding retribution.
I was losing it. I could feel my grip slipping and the break coming. And if I broke, there was no telling what it would take to rein me back in.
The last time, Kyan and Blake had practically had to chain me down to stop me from spilling blood. And I wasn’t talking about the kinds of wounds that could heal.
But this time, Kyan wasn’t with me. He was against me. And all because of a fucking girl. A girl we’d chosen to share so that nothing like this would ever happen to us and yet-
Tchaikovsky died a sudden and brutal death, but I wasn’t gifted silence over the speakers. No. What poured down on me, assaulting my ears and shattering what little control I had left was Eminem – My Name Is blaring through my sound system loud enough to bust a fucking eardrum.
A tremor tumbled through my flesh and I wasn’t even sure how I ended up out of the shower but it continued to run behind me, water racing away down the drain into the abyss with the last fragile pieces of my self control.
I crossed my room, snatched a pair of sweatpants out of my closet and yanked them on, damn near running out of my en-suite and down the stairs.
Kyan was waiting at the foot of them in a pair of shorts which left his tattoos bare to taunt me, the devil on his chest seeming to mirror my own desires perfectly as it bathed in the suffering of others. Kyan’s eyes were alight with that thirst which ruled him as he waited to see what punishment he’d earned with this latest assault on my sanity and I was more than ready to unleash my worst on him.
“Your sweatpants are inside out,” he taunted, his eyes dancing with glee and I glanced down, ready to correct him except somehow, unthinkably he was right.
My vision darkened as he barked a laugh and I felt myself snap as the last shreds of my control shattered.
If he wanted pain then he could have it. I’d give him a fucking feast.
I roared at him as I launched myself off of the stairs and slammed into his hard chest before tackling him to the ground.
I punched and punched him, my mind writhing and tempestuous like a stormy sea as I gave in to my baser nature and acted like the animal he was.
Kyan barked a laugh like this was all some fucking game to him and I bellowed at him before throwing my fist straight into his face.
I caught him in the mouth and he lurched back in surprise, his head knocking back against the floor as he spat a wad of blood right onto the fucking carpet before throwing his head forward in an attempt to break my fucking nose. I avoided the blow by jerking aside, but a moment later his knuckles were slamming into my side with the force of a fucking freight train.
We had a single, cardinal rule which we had always followed to the letter whenever we’d fought before. Never hit the face, no wounds that lasted. But that had gone to shit just as surely as my fragile grip on my control had.
I threw another punch at Kyan’s face, but he somehow managed to get his knees between us and he launched me backwards off of him so that I fell against the coffee table. He was on me in a heartbeat, snarling in my face as his hand wrapped around my throat and he squeezed hard enough to cut off my oxygen supply.
A small part of my brain considered the fact that he’d clearly been pulling his punches whenever we fought before. But this creature leering down at me now wasn’t holding back at all.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Blake bellowed a second before his weight slammed into us too.
He managed to knock Kyan off of me, but I wasn’t ready to be done yet so I swung at him instead, my knuckles splitting as I drove my fist up beneath Blake’s chin, making his mouth snap shut.
Blake had been dancing a thin line with his control recently anyway and that was all it took to snap it.
Blake’s boot swung into my ribs as he kicked me off of the coffee table and pain made my body sing to a new tune. Kyan might have had a point about that. There was a subtle kind of beauty in agony. Something which cut through everything else and connected your body to your soul.
The three of us collided again and for a moment there was nothing between us but fists and pain and rage.
“Enough!” Kyan bellowed finally, throwing his hands against my chest and knocking me back against the stained glass window before shoving Blake back a step too.
We stood there, panting as we glared at each other and every small secret that hung between us seemed to expand to fill the fucking room.
Eminem was still playing, though I didn’t recognise this song. In some fucked up way that seemed right. The lyrics were angry, bitter, accusing.
Blake slowly reached out and touched the control panel on the wall to cut the sound and we were plunged into a silence so thick that I could feel it pressing up against my skin.
“This wasn’t the way this was supposed to go,” I snarled, the iron tang of blood coating my tongue.
“You can’t plan out every little fucking thing in life, Saint,” Kyan growled. “That’s not living.”
“So you think sauntering through life with no plan beyond seeing what assholes you can beat up next is better?” I demanded incredulously.
“At least I found a cure for the emptiness in me,” he growled.
“That’s not a cure,” Blake cut in. “It’s a fucking distraction. You crave the fight because you don’t want to look at who you are without it. You don’t want to risk feeling anything real so you crush it all with violence.”
“So who am I without it then?” Kyan demanded, the sweat on his skin making his tattoos glisten. He’d always claimed that the images on his flesh were meaningless, but I wasn’t convinced. Either he just didn’t want to tell us the meaning behind them or his subconscious was pushing him to choose tattoos which reflected the darkness in him. The pain. The things we all knew about his past but never discussed.
“You could be anything you want to be,” Blake snarled. “But you’re just taking the easy path all the damn time. You think being the toughest asshole in the room makes you the shit, but you’re still a fucking coward. You don’t make a single fucking choice that isn’t selfish.”
“I can’t help it if Tatum would pick me over you assholes,” Kyan bit back, ignoring most of what Blake had said to him. “And I’m not going to apologise for taking her out last night.”
“She could have escaped,” I snarled. “And then what would we have done?”
“She didn’t,” he replied flippantly.
“She’s our girl,” Blake said, driving his fingers through his hair as he tried to stay calm. “Which means we need to make decisions about the things she does as a unit, not just do whatever the fuck we want with her and cause this kind of friction!”
“That’s impossible and you know it,” Kyan snapped. “We might have a lot of things in common but we want different things from her. I k
now I don’t give a fuck about seeing her dressed up like a fucking business woman for a start.”
“No,” I agreed. “You’d rather dress her up like a street whore and fuck her like one too. Don’t try to pretend this is about anything more than that.”
“And yet you don’t hear me complaining when you make her kneel on the fucking floor for an hour and a half every morning. Or how you’ve got her following your fucking routine to the letter to make sure you get all of your fucking meals the minute you want them,” he bit back.
“What difference does it make if she follows Saint’s routine in the mornings?” Blake demanded, weighing in with me.
Kyan’s face darkened at the signs of us uniting against him. “None,” he snapped. “But that’s not what I want from her. It’s what Saint wants. How is she our girl if she’s only following his orders and not ours?”
“You never had a problem with me being in charge before,” I growled.
“I never had a problem with you setting me on your enemies and asking me to beat the fuck out of them because I wanted to do it. When have I ever bowed to a command I didn’t agree with?” Kyan demanded.
And fuck him, but it was the truth and we all knew it. Maybe that meant I wasn’t in charge at all. But the mere suggestion of that had my heart pounding and my palms growing slick.
“So what do you want from her?” I snarled.
Our fight had stolen the restless energy which had been dancing beneath my skin, but it couldn’t banish the feeling of powerlessness which came with having my ritual sabotaged. My mind was a whirling storm of emotion and so much of it was dark that I was sure it would corrupt me to my core.
“Everything she gave me last night,” he replied, his eyes flashing with a warning.
What the fuck did that mean? What did she give him last night? What had been so fucking special about their little night out that he’d thought it was worth doing this to me and Blake?
“Did you fuck her?” Blake demanded suddenly and I ground my teeth as I waited to hear the answer to that.
“What if I did?” he growled. “We never said we wouldn’t fuck her.”
“She said it,” I snarled. “That was her one and only term. Do we break our fucking word now, Kyan? Who the fuck are we if we do that?”
Kyan snorted derisively, his gaze scraping over me slowly. “I didn’t fuck her,” he said and I exhaled slowly, wondering if I was relieved about that because I was jealous of him having her or of her taking his attention from me. “But I never agreed not to. I agreed not to force her to. Which wasn’t exactly difficult because I’ve never had any desire to force a girl into sex in my life. But we never agreed not to if she wants it.”
I pushed my tongue into my cheek as I read between the lines of what he was saying. He clearly thought she wanted it. I just didn’t know what to do with that information.
“Then why don’t we just decide it now?” Blake asked. “We just agree not to fuck her.”
“No,” Kyan growled immediately and my fucking dick didn’t want to make that deal either. Though it seemed like a pretty tall order to believe she’d ever want in my bed after the shit I’d just pulled. And if she wasn’t riding my cock, I definitely didn’t want her riding his.
“What if I command it?” I asked in a deadly tone.
“You can command a broomstick to climb right up your ass, but I doubt the thing will leap on up there for you,” Kyan replied, fixing me in his gaze. “Besides, are you saying you want your word to mean shit? Because I’ve seen the way you look at her, it’s pretty obvious you want her too.”
My heart leapt at the accusation and not just because it was true, but because he was calling me out on my own bullshit and I didn’t like that one fucking bit.
“We need rules,” Blake insisted. “Rules about what we can do with her and when.”
“I’m not agreeing to you caging me,” Kyan spat.
“Not rules for what we can’t do,” Blake growled. “Just a way to make this even. So that this shit doesn’t happen again. She’s not a fucking chew toy for us to fight over like mutts.”
No she wasn’t. Tatum Rivers was something much more important than that, but none of us were going to even attempt to put a name on exactly what that was.
“What rules then?” Kyan snapped.
There was too much animal in him for this kind of discussion. He was a beast governed by instinct; he did what he wanted when he wanted and didn’t like following rules. But I was the fucking king of rules so if that was what we needed, then I could certainly manage that much.
“Like where she sleeps,” I said darkly. Because out of all the fucking photos he’d sent me of the two of them last night, that had bothered me the most. Not the fact that he’d put her in danger on his motorbike or even the fact that he’d allowed her to brawl like an alley cat in that godforsaken illegal fighting pit he loved so much, not the way he’d dressed her like a fucking porno biker chick or how he’d coated her in his scent by wrapping her in his jacket and then putting her to bed in his shirt with a fucking hicky. No. All of those things had incited me, but the fact that he’d put her in his bed at the end of it was what had blinded me.
“She’s not going back in that bathroom,” Kyan said instantly. “I’m all for fucking with her, but that shit is just spiteful. If something belongs to me, I look after it. Which means she needs a bed.”
“Well there’s only three bedrooms here, asshole, and I’m not bunking in with you to give her one,” Blake snorted.
“There’s an easier solution than that,” I interrupted. “She rotates.”
“You mean she takes turns sleeping in with each of us?” Blake asked and I was surprised to see he didn’t look as repulsed by that as I’d expected.
“Yes.”
“In that case, on the days she’s in with me, she doesn’t have to go and kneel outside the fucking crypt at six am,” Kyan said instantly and my lip curled back at that. “If she’s warming my bed for me, I want her there when I wake up.”
“That makes sense,” Blake added infuriatingly and I ground my jaw.
“She still has to be up to make breakfast,” I said, refusing to budge on that.
“Obviously,” Blake added and some of the tension left my shoulders.
“If I wanna take her for a night out, I can do it without having to answer to anyone,” Kyan added coolly.
I didn’t like that one fucking bit, but what was I supposed to say?
“We’re on lockdown here because of that bastard virus,” I said. “Going out last night was really fucking stupid for more reasons than the chance of her escaping.”
“The police shut the place down anyway,” Kyan said with a shrug. “So I won’t be going back there any time soon and I can agree to stay on campus until lockdown is over.”
“Fine. We can take her out individually,” I conceded.
“But we have to let each other know,” Blake added.
“Are we good then?” I asked. “No more shit anyone needs to air?”
I looked between my two best friends, the space dividing us feeling like a chasm filled with things we still hadn’t said.
Kyan met my gaze and he sighed, clenching and unclenching his fist as the last of the tension slipped from his muscles and the fight went out of him.
“I took Tatum out into the woods the other night with the intention of putting a bullet through her skull,” Blake growled.
I stopped glaring at Kyan and we both turned to stare at him instead. It took a lot to shock me. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time that emotion had entered my body. But holy fuck, a murder had nearly gone unnoticed in our circle. Right under my nose. I knew Blake was close to breaking point, I’d even had vague concerns that he might be tempted to snap her pretty neck. But evidently I hadn’t taken that threat seriously enough.
“Clearly I changed my mind,” he added, but the shadows in his gaze said it had been a close won thing.
Kyan blew out a
breath and pushed his long hair out of his face. His knuckles were lined with blood, but most of it was his where his skin had split again during our brawl.
“This whole situation is getting really fucked up,” Kyan muttered.
“Did you get it out of your system then?” I demanded, my gaze fixed on Blake. “Because if you can’t be trusted alone with her then tell us now. I’m not having your life destroyed because you murdered some girl out of grief.” My gut twisted in a strange way as I dismissed Tatum as just some girl, but I refused to acknowledge it. There had only been two people in my life who were truly worth a damn for a really long time and they were standing right in front of me now. I wasn’t going to waste my time considering anyone else in this equation.
“Yeah, it’s out of my system,” Blake said firmly, his gaze hollowing out as that fucking grief came for him again, but there was enough conviction in his words to convince me that wasn’t a lie. “I put the gun back in the safe and I have no desire to use it again.”
“Good. Then it’s not a problem,” I announced.
“So we’re all good now?” Kyan asked, his tone suggesting he was getting sick of this heart to heart and he was right. We weren’t the touchy feely kind, and if we kept this shit up one of us was likely to puke sooner or later.
“Yeah.” I walked towards them and they silently moved forward too, closing the triangle until we were standing shoulder to shoulder.
I met Kyan’s brown eyes and the corner of his mouth twitched in amusement as he reached up and caught the back of my neck, pulling me forward so that our foreheads were pressed together. He gave Blake the same treatment and the three of us stood there for a long moment, our heads pressed to each others’ and our souls twisting into one.
I inhaled deeply, relishing the moment as it passed between us and all of our rage just vanished like it had never existed at all. Or maybe it was because we had so much of it that we just cancelled each other out.
We might have been a trio of fucked up monsters with more demons than the ninth circle of hell, but we were a family too. And nothing would ever tear that apart. Certainly not a fucking girl.
Kings of Quarantine: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep Book 1) Page 44