Luxure - The Cardinal Brotherhood Book One

by Sienna Parks

  One of them manages to break free and heads straight for the secluded booth in the corner—to the racing heartbeat I can hear above everything around me. I whisper, knowing that she will be able to hear me. “Run, angel. Now. Run and don’t look back.”

  Her reply is a strangled plea. “Don’t make me leave you. Please.”

  “Now, Sirena.” The finite tone of my voice is enough to get her moving, but she’s barely out of the booth when he grabs her. I see fucking red. I elbow one of the parasites hanging onto me before spinning around and kicking the other over the counter. I leave them behind without a second thought and leap over the tables that are in my way stopping me from getting to her. He has her on the ground, his teeth ready to bite into her shoulder when I make contact. I rip him off of her throwing him through the glass window and out into the parking lot. I watch as he slams into an old blue pick-up truck smashing the windshield. Everyone around us is screaming as the other two get to their feet. When that wretch knocked Sirena down, she must have hit her head and passed out. I lift her into my arms and lay her flat on the table.

  I need to get rid of these demons. Now.

  I grab a knife from the table in front of me waiting… waiting… until I can feel them right behind me. At the very last second, I duck their attempts to take me down dropping to my knees and spinning to face them. In one swift move, I push up with everything I have and thrust the knife deep into one’s stomach. I pull it out, dripping with thick, black blood before discarding it on the floor and grabbing the other one’s head in both hands. I twist him and kick the back of his legs forcing him to kneel and beg for his pathetic excuse of an existence. “Please. I won’t tell anyone where you are. I can help…” I rip his head from his shoulders before he can finish his sentence. Any Vollstrecker who knows where I am and has set eyes on Sirena, can’t be allowed to live, no matter how low down the food chain they are. I let out a roar as I throw his severed head across the room.

  I turn my attention to his ‘friend’ who now has an elderly woman in a chokehold. “Don’t come any closer, or I’ll snap her neck.”

  His stupidity is laughable. “Do you think I give a shit about anyone in this place? Kill the lot of them, but in the end, you won’t be walking out of here alive.” The old woman screams, and I hear Sirena begin to stir in the background. She’d never forgive me for letting an innocent woman die. Maybe she won’t forgive me for murdering this son of a bitch, but he can’t be allowed to live. I quickly grab a fork from a nearby plate and hurl it through the air before he registers my movements spearing him in the arm. It is just enough of a discomfort for him to let go of the old woman and give me the opportunity to push her out of the way, sweeping his legs out from under him. I pin his chest with my knee. “Any last words?” I’m enjoying this now. No one fucks with me and gets away with it. I’d forgotten how much I love the adrenaline of battle.

  “Fuck you, Luxure.” He knows who I am? He sees the flash of surprise in my expression. “Yeah. I know who you are. They’re coming for you. They’ll gut you like a pig… and that pretty little human you seem so interested in.”

  I apply more pressure pushing his rib cage to the brink of snapping under my weight. “What do they know about her?”

  “I ain’t telling you shit.” He spits in my face, and my rage can no longer be contained. I grab both of his arms and rip them from his body listening with satisfaction as he screams in agony.

  “Tell. Me. Now!”

  He can barely speak through the pain, but his instinct to survive pushes the words from his lips in a gurgle of blood. “They don’t know about her.” I sigh in relief. “Please. Don’t kill me. Plea…” He gave me what I wanted. He doesn’t need to suffer any longer. I snap his neck. This won’t kill him, but it will give me enough time to get Sirena to the car and come back to finish the job.

  I stand, drenched in black, venomous Vollstrecker blood, the humans around me screaming in fear—hysterical in their disbelief of what they’ve witnessed here today. I don’t care about them. All I care about is making sure my girl is all right. I turn to see her staring at the body beneath me. Her eyes filled with tears. “Sirena…” She flinches at the sound of my voice. Fear, loathing, or both. It’s then that my eyes catch a glimpse of broken glass glistening in the late afternoon sun. The broken windshield. The now empty windshield. The third Vollstrecker is gone. I don’t have time to make this better right now. Her safety is everything. I push my foot down on the demon’s throat beneath me, lean down, and tear his head from his body. I can’t bring myself to turn to see Sirena’s reaction.

  “Everyone listen up. You’re not going to remember what happened here today. You’re going to leave this diner and go about the rest of your day as normal. You will remember enjoying your food, the same as any other day. Now go.” They filter out of the swinging doors like sheep blindly doing as they’re told. The horror they witnessed just moments ago already forgotten.

  Without a word, I rush past Sirena and out to the parking lot to see if I can track the third demon. There is no trace of him. He must have jumped as soon as he was able to move. Shit. He could already be back in the Underworld telling anyone who wants to know where I am and who I’m with. How could I have let him get away? I hurry back inside and grab hold of Sirena’s hand. She hasn’t moved a muscle staring at the armless and headless corpse of a demon. “We need to go. Now!”

  She tries to put up some resistance, but deep down she knows it’s futile. “Don’t touch me.” Her voice is cold. Void of all emotion. And yet I can sense the war that is being waged inside of her. It calls to me. I feel her pain and her conflict. She doesn’t understand why she’s not disgusted by me. She should be. But she’s not. I don’t have time for an asinine fight, so I simply pick her up and throw her over my shoulder. I need to get her as far away from here as possible and fast. I swipe a lighter from behind the counter, and as I stride out of this once ordinary little roadside diner, I flick it open and throw it back toward the kitchen. I can’t leave any trace of the Vollstrecker.

  I bundle Sirena into the SUV and peel out of the parking lot just as the place goes up in flames. We watch as the windows shatter and the fire licks up the white and yellow walls engulfing everything in its path. She doesn’t speak, she doesn’t scream, she doesn’t move. I listen uneasily to the slow and steady beat of her heart in an almost catatonic state. I’d rather she was freaking out or hitting me—anything but this.

  I rummage in the glovebox for the phone Kade gave me before we left. It has all of my brothers’ phone numbers in it for emergencies, but I know I can’t call most of them. They still don’t know I’m alive. I speed dial Cole.

  “Lux?”

  “Yeah, it’s me. We have a problem.” I explain everything that just happened, the one that got away, all of it.

  “Fucking hell, Lux. You’ve only been gone eight hours.”

  “Fuck that. I need to jump her the hell out of here so they can’t track us from the diner, but if I do that I’m putting a target on our backs. One of them knows. They fucking know.”

  “I’ll track him down and deal with it before he tells anyone.” I describe him and his injuries, knowing that it will take at least a few hours for him to recover no matter where he jumped. Most likely, he went back to the Underworld with his tail between his legs begging for a deal to spare his sorry ass. “First, I’m coming to get Sirena.”

  ‘What the fuck? Over my dead body.”

  “Think for a moment, brother. They are looking for you, waiting for you to jump. I can take her somewhere safe. You can cover your tracks quicker without her and meet us later.”

  “Not happening.”

  “You’re really going to put her at risk? Why? Don’t you trust me to keep her safe?”

  “I don’t trust anyone with her.”

  I slam on the brakes. There’s someone standing in the road ahead of us. Sirena remains silent staring into the abyss, her body limp as the seatbelt restrains her. I onl
y take my eyes off of the road for one second to check on her, but when I look back, the road is clear.

  In an instant, I feel his presence. He’s in the backseat of the car. “You bastard.”

  “I’m doing this for you.” He puts his hand on Sirena’s shoulder and in an instant, they’re gone.

  He took her, and if I follow them, I’m signing her death warrant. Motherfucking bastard! I punch a hole through the center of the steering wheel in a fit of rage. Every fiber of my being fighting not to sense her, not to draw attention to her, but without it, I have no idea where he’s taken her.

  I get out of the car, adrenaline coursing through my body. Blind fury. I lift the car and flip it off the road.

  “Colère!”

  12

  LUXURE

  “Kade. It’s me.” I’m fucking livid, pacing the highway, staring at the point I saw that traitor standing in the road. “Where the fuck is Cole?”

  “Calm down.”

  “Tell me right now, or I will unleash Hell on fucking Earth to find him.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Where the fuck is Colère?”

  “I’m in the dark here, brother. Tell me what’s going on so I can help you.” I explain to him about the Vollstrecker in the diner, but I barely manage to tell him about Cole showing up without throwing my phone to the ground in a fit of rage. “Okay, calm down.”

  “Calm-fucking-down? Did you not hear me? He took Sirena.”

  “He won’t let her come to any harm.”

  “He better not, or I’ll gut him like a pig.”

  “Fucking hell, Lux. You’re in love with this girl.”

  “Of course I am! Now stop wasting my time and find out where the hell that idiot took her.”

  “Okay. First things first, I’ll get a location on them for you. Then I’m going to find out who the little bastard was that got away from you and deal with him. I’ll be in touch.”

  The line goes dead, and I’m left waiting and helpless. I quickly get back in the car and head for the next available parking lot. I need to ditch this car, so I’m ready to go and get Sirena as soon as I hear from Kade. It’s not difficult to procure a new set of wheels. I find a strip mall five miles up the road and sweet talk the first woman I see. She hands over the keys willingly, and I assure her that there is no need for alarm or any reason to call the police. She walks happily back into the store she just came from with no idea of what just happened. Luckily for me, she has a nice new X5.

  I’m speeding down the highway when my phone beeps. It’s Kade. He sends me the address of some shitty motel a few hours from here followed by a message saying he knows where to find our other problem. I don’t bother wasting time texting him back but instead immediately punch the address into the GPS system. I’m two hours away… two fucking hours away from her. It takes all of my self-control not to jump and all of my strength to stop myself from sensing her. It’s like a natural state—I want to sense her every movement. I feel lost when she’s not with me. I’ve never felt like a part of me was missing—until now. When I was with Abiteth, I thought we were soulmates, but from the moment I met Sirena, I’ve started to see things differently. Abi and I never shared such an intense connection. We had passion, but what I have with Sirena goes so far beyond that… it scares me. When I’m with her, I feel like she’s… my destiny. It’s corny shit like that that’s going to get me killed.

  The drive seems ten times longer than it is giving me far too much time to imagine what Cole is up to. Remembering all of the vile and disgusting ventures we embarked on together over the centuries, as we delighted in other people’s pain. We took pleasure in their downfall, enjoying the inevitable spiral to rock bottom, robbing humans of their dignity, stripping them of any shred of morality they had left until they were nothing but an empty debauched husk. I torture myself with possible scenarios of what I might find when I track them down scared that Cole has had a hidden agenda from the moment he appeared on the Golden Gate Bridge. After all this time, maybe I should be questioning his loyalty to me. For all I know, he’s reporting back to Luc. I can’t stand the thought of him being alone with her or touching her.

  Sure, when I was younger, I enjoyed sharing with him. But when it came to Abi, I didn’t like it. I did it for her because it’s what she wanted. It made her happy. Even contemplating sharing Sirena with him makes me see red. I want to tear his hand off for grabbing her shoulder and taking her away from me. I want to reach down his throat and rip out his tongue so that I don’t have to listen to his lies. I am so consumed with hatred that I can’t even see straight. It’s a miracle I haven’t crashed the car oblivious of my surroundings.

  When I think of Sirena alone with him, I have a sense of calm that I never had with Abiteth. I knew Abi loved me—we were together for three thousand years. She was the love of my life, or so I thought, but there was always a part of me that felt she wasn’t mine, not one hundred percent. When it was just us, it was amazing. She was amazing. When she was with Colère, when the three of us were together, there was a side of her that never belonged to me—a side she kept for him. At times, I hated him for it, but in the end, I hated myself more. I am Luxure-fucking-Zonder. I am the embodiment of lust, and yet when it came down to it, I couldn’t fully satisfy Abiteth.

  As I drive toward Sirena, I realize I don’t have that same fear. I don’t worry that I’m not enough for her. When we’re together, I can feel that she gives herself to me completely. She is mine and mine alone—meant for me. No amount of time with Cole or any other man will ever change that. What I don’t understand, is why? Why would an angel like Sirena—a bona fide, supernatural, celestial angel—be meant for me? I’ve done nothing to deserve her, but I’m selfish enough to know that I won’t let her go. I will protect her with everything I have, and everything I am, because she makes me want to be better.

  It’s been so long since I’ve had to answer to or think about anyone but Selma. With Sirena, it’s easy. I want to be accountable to her—to make decisions with her and for her. I trust her implicitly after so little time together. It’s effortless. I know I should give my brother the benefit of the doubt—we’ve spent thousands of years looking out for each other, trusting each other with our lives—but I just can’t. Too much has happened, too many years apart, and too great a deception for me to expect loyalty from Cole or any of my brothers. I have cost them so heavily over the past millennium, and in ways I probably can’t even imagine.

  By the time I reach the town where Kade told me I’d find them, I’m more certain than ever that Sirena’s the one, and more confused than ever about where I stand with my brother and once best friend. As I take a left pulling into the parking lot of the motel, I see a man standing before me. It’s an annoying sense of déjà vu for me today. But this time it’s not Cole—it’s Gabriel.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Gabe?”

  “The same thing you are, rescuing my daughter from your sorry excuse of a brother.”

  “How did you find us?”

  “I’ve been walking this Earth for a thousand years and spent thousands of years before that in the Heavens. You don’t think I’ve made a few friends along the way?”

  “I didn’t think Archs were allowed friends. Aren’t you supposed to be the badass angels? And yet you don’t seem particularly threatening to me.”

  His eyes narrow. “Don’t play games with me, little boy. I could snap you in two before you even blink.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “Maybe back in the day, but you’re a Fallen now. You couldn’t take me down on your best day. I do, however, admire your dedication to your daughter. How does that happen anyway? An Arch conceiving a child with a human. I mean surely it flies in the face of all of the Almighty’s rules. Why weren’t you banished to the Underworld?”

  “You dare to question the decisions of the Almighty?”

  His indignant tone is quite amusing. He broke the number one rule of supernatural b
eings, and God still welcomes him with open arms. I had no choice but to be the demon he created, and yet I am not fit to be in his presence. I have fulfilled my destiny, my role in this universe, for thousands of years. I am what he wanted me to be. Surely with that in mind, I am the obedient one? I am the one who served without question. “I wouldn’t dare. I just find it all rather… hypocritical.”

  Righteous anger emanates from him in waves. “You have no concept of what you speak. You couldn’t possibly imagine the decisions that have been made in the Heavens forced by your actions. Don’t you dare call me a hypocrite.”

  “My actions?” Something passes across his features. A realization that he’s said more than he should. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I’ve already said too much. I need to speak with Sirena. She needs to know the truth.”

  “The truth? You’ve spent her whole life lying to her. What do you know of truth?”

  “A damn sight more than you. Everything you are is based on a lie. You have no concept of the havoc you wreak.”

  “Fuck you, Gabe.”

  His jaw tightens, his body tense with rage, his hands balling into fists. “You did this to me, Luxure.” He practically spits my name, each syllable dripping with vitriol. “If you had done as you were supposed to, if you had adhered to Luc’s wishes, then none of this would have happened. It’s your fault I am no longer a part of the heavenly realm.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? How can anything I’ve done possibly affect your decision to fall in love with a human and conceive a hybrid child? Because you couldn’t control your desires? Your lust.” He swings for me, but I’m too fast. I duck to the side and quickly correct my stance putting him in a headlock. He squirms, fighting to break free but to no avail. I lean in, my voice barely a whisper. “Don’t blame me for your shortcomings, dear Gabriel. I had no hand in your fate. You were never important enough for me to waste time on.” I crush his throat a little tighter. “And apparently, I was right. You didn’t need any help, you are the master of your demise. Your sins are your own.” When his fight fades, I loosen my grip and shove him to the ground.