K is lying in the middle of my bed. Her nightgown is dumped on the floor. Because she doesn’t have enough meat on her bones to cover up the shadows I could see long before she removed her grubby sleepwear, she’s fully exposed.
Her tits, although smaller than I guess they’d be if she weren’t starved, are perky and sit high on her chest, her lips are naturally plump, and her seductive-smelling cunt is barely concealed by a thin layer of blonde hair.
For how bruised, nicked, and malnourished she is, she shouldn’t look enticing, but she does. She looks ravishing enough to eat, and my cock isn’t ashamed to admit it. He sits heavy against the zipper in my jeans, throbbing with both need and desire.
As I close the distance between the bathroom and my bed, I tell my cock to calm the fuck down. It’s twitching like K is a whore waiting to be consumed. Even if I wanted to pretend that’s the case, I can’t. The whores are too scared to come into my room without permission, so no amount of pleading from my cock could have me pretending I don’t know what this is really about.
Although her eyes are open and her chest is rising and falling as she sucks in shallow breaths, K isn’t here. She’s completely fucking gone, swallowed by the blackness of her miserably bleak existence.
I know better than anyone that sometimes the only way you can escape the torment is by fully emerging yourself in it. More times than not, the darkness in your head is worse than anything you’ll face in the real world, but when you’re beyond broken, you’ve got no choice but to let it overwhelm you occasionally.
While tugging the bedding out from beneath K’s immobile frame, the reason I was so desperate for her to shower smacks back into me. It isn’t her smell. For someone who lived in the equivalent of a dungeon, her scent is intoxicating. It’s the dry blood on her back and the marks that look like she was whipped.
“What the fuck did he do to you, K?” I murmur to myself while carefully rolling her over.
An itch to kill steamrolls into me when I see the full extent of her injuries. She wasn’t whipped once. She was struck multiple times. The slashes across her back are so red and blistering, I’m confident they’re brand new, like they were done mere minutes before she was freed from hell.
The torment tearing me up inside grows so perverse, within seconds, I’m trapped in the darkness in my head right along with K…
The breaths I suck in to cool the fire roaring through me does little to reduce the shakes wreaking havoc with my body. My hand holding a gun is shuddering so much, even with my target selected, I may end up killing the wrong person. I spun the wheel, her fate has been chosen, but no matter how hard I fight, I can’t inch back the trigger.
It was one fuck,I remind myself again.It meant nothing. A hessian bag is pulled over her head. She won’t even know it was you.
But I will know it was me. I’ll remember how our night in the butler’s pantry was the only time my pulse has fluttered in my ears. How her heat wrapped around my cock was the best it had felt. And her scent, my fucking God, her scent when she came undone will never leave me. It wasn’t pure, it wasn’t even sweet, but it was the most addictive scent I’ve ever sucked in.
If I kill her and live off the memories, my father won’t pay for my crimes. If I don’t, they’ll both die. Those are the terms Achim spelled out when he caught me off-guard. I was still relishing her scent, still caught up on how her skin heated under my touch, I didn’t realize I was walking into a trap until my leg was already snared by the prongs of an invisible bear trap.
My father shouldn’t be here. I had not yet sent for him or his men, so not only was I surprised when I saw him bound and gagged at the round table Sahib makes all his decisions at, I was angry—really fucking angry. My father is stronger than Sahib and Achim combined. He has killed men by the thousands and is feared by millions, yet he sits in a chair, defenseless and weak.
And now I stand before him just as spinelessly.
I should take a risk. I have a gun in my hand, and the killer instincts to take down Achim long before the man with his pistol butted to my temple will yank back his trigger. It will most likely see us all go down in a fiery gun battle, but it has to be better than dying like a coward, right?
Ugh, it shouldn’t be this fucking hard. Hate was born inside of me. It was nurtured by every man I took down and grew to a point I shouldn’t give a shit about anyone, not the man who raised me or the woman who made my heart thud in my ears. I just need to get her smell out of my head, her taste from my mouth. If I can free myself from the memories debilitating me, I’ll be able to inch back the trigger without a single worry. Killing is who I am. It’s all I know.
So pull back the trigger!Roars the evilness inside of me.Kill her as you had planned to do only weeks ago. Begin the war you crave more than the heat of her cunt wrapped around your cock.
With a roar, I inch back the trigger as I was trained to do. The gun clicks, but the barrel fails to bang. The chamber is as empty as the now-gaping hole in my chest. I chose my family over her, yet the torment still won’t end. Not just because India heard the empty coil of the chamber when I chose her fate, but because of the man entering the room from my left, clapping like he just watched the performance of his life.
“Bravo, Trey, Bravo. Blood is clearly thicker than water…” He angles his head to the side to fully free his smile before he adds, “… for you. I wasn’t so lucky, was I? He didn’t pick me over her. He left me to die.”
“She was our mother,” I argue even though I’m not truly sure if the ghost of my brother is standing across from me or if I’m overdosing on the adrenaline surging through my veins. “She should have always been his first choice.”
“I was his son!” Cole’s roar shudders the dishware lining the far wall. They’re china plates for each year the Dvorák’s have been in power. I should have paid attention to how many there were before I agreed with my father that this takeover bid would be easy. “I was his blood, but that still wasn’t enough to save me. I was still taken by his enemies, maimed, tortured, and beaten without him feeling a single ounce of remorse.”
“That’s not true, Cole. We searched for you for months. We killed men across the globe in the hopes of finding you. We’ve never stopped looking.”
My older brother steps closer to me. His chest is flaring as hard as his nostrils. Although we’re only a year apart, his face is wearier than mine, aged by the hardness of the war we were born in. “Yet, this is the first time I’ve seen you in the flesh in years.” After straying his eyes to our father over my shoulder, he snarls. “We were never important to him. We were not his sons. We were soldiers used for war. Pawns in a game we never signed up for. He used us as much as Achim used his whore to get to you.” He returns his eyes to mine. They’re not wet with the tears they had when the enemies of our family made my father pick between his wife and his almost-grown son. They’re dark and evil, an equal match to mine. “Was she worth it, Trey? Will the memories from your fuck in the pitch-black room keep you alive long after your soul leaves you?”
The tactical side of my head tells me not to fall for his tricks, the man standing across from me isn’t my brother, so he shouldn’t be treated as if he is, but I’ve always been more emotionally responsive than impersonal.
Cole’s lips curl at one end when I dip my chin. “Yet, you still chose our father over her. I wonder how she’ll handle the news?”
Confusion twists through me when he clicks his fingers together two times. I assume one of the many men surrounding me will yank the bag off India’s head so I can see her disappointment as readily as I feel it, so you can imagine my surprise when they draw back the curtain separating the royal-size dining room from the crystal ballroom on our right. India is standing on the other side, uninjured and wide-eyed.
How can that be? She can’t be in the ballroom and seated in front of me. She must be a doppelgänger. I can smell her heated skin lingering in the air. The bulletproof glass separating us wouldn’t allow that. Cole must be playing tricks on me. He’s fucking with my head as well as the years he was missing screwed our father’s mind. He couldn’t forgive himself for giving in, even when he would have lost everything if he didn’t, so he drove himself mad to fix the injustice.
He destroyed anyone who played a part in Cole’s demise, yet it still wasn’t enough. He wantseveryman responsible to be held accountable for their crimes—himself included.
