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PROLOGUE
There are no heroes to be found here, only monsters.
I am not an exception.
I am the devil's confidante.
I am guilty of unimaginable sins.
I was better off without him, and he was better off alone, but the red string of fate tied us together. No matter how much it tangled or stretched, it would never break.
In him, I found my absolution.
He saved me from the light by showing me the beautiful depravity that could be found in the dark.
My beloved devil made every withering parcel of my being bloom and thrive by nurturing it with his sinister mind. He tattooed himself across my heart and took up permanent residence inside my head.
Ours is not a story full of sickly sweet nothings, nor is it a fairytale built on illusions. The world we lived in had long ago turned cold, and our hearts turned with it. Love was a four-letter word neither of us had ever learned, and trust was a foreign concept we didn’t know the meaning of. The odds were stacked against us on all sides of the spectrum.
Our dark paradise could only be reached by paving the way with blood and corpses.
Some might find it hard to understand how mere human beings could do all that we did: kill without mercy. Lie through our teeth. Take what we wanted just because we could.
It came to down to nothing other than DNA, the genes that made us who we were. The blood pumping through our veins carried a beautiful madness only we understood.
He was born sick.
I was fucked in the head.
Together, we were Savages.
CHAPTER ONE
Past-Four years ago
He set her on fire, but it was me he watched burn.
Within seconds, her body was drowning in an inferno. The blaze glowed red, bathing the night sky in blood. A sheet of flames danced across her naked skin, shrinking and splitting open flesh, leaving body fluid to expel. They reached for her dark strands of hair and singed them to the scalp.
Her mouth had been sewn shut after she was forced to repent for her sins, silencing her shrills of agony and fear. The familiar aroma of charred flesh permeated the air, filling my aching lungs with every ragged breath I took.
The Order stood by, watching with bored expressions on their faces as the faux nuns held hands and whispered their synthetic prayers.
I wished it were a dream, but I was wide-awake. I wished nothing more than to take her place. I wished someone would have saved us from the hate, but not one person stepped forward.
I had tried so hard to warn her away.I’d begged her not to come back for me. Why didn’t she listen?
My body shook with silent sobs, constricting my heart in my chest. I couldn’t move. It hurt to breathe. I felt like I were burning with her.
I was forced to watch on as the life vacated her body, leaving her limbs dangling limply above the flames. The bones that had been exposed were slick with the greasy residue of melted flesh.
As two men moved forward to begin extinguishing the fire, still no one said a word.
I tried not to picture what would happen to what remained of her blackened body, knowing she was to be discarded for crows and wild animals to feast on.
“It’s unfortunate it had to come to this,” my father sighed, removing his heavy foot from my spine. “You let me down, Calista.”
He stepped over my body and knelt down, lifting my battered face from the dirt. His skewed logic made him believe that if my pain wasn’t visible, then I wasn’t hurting—when he was the one who’d taught me to handle abuse.
I looked into his cold, grey eyes and hoped he saw the hatred I no longer bothered to mask. If I had the strength, I would have torn out his jugular with my teeth.
I had done everything he’d asked of me, even when I didn’t want to, when the aftermath always killed me a little more each time.
I suppressed parts of me to appease him, but no matter how hard I tried, it was never good enough.
Once upon a time, all I wanted was for him to remember I was his baby girl. No
w, I wanted him dead. I wanted to feel his blood between my fingers and keep his head as a trophy.
“Feel better…now?” I wheezed out, choking on phlegm.
“You’ve learned nothing from any of this; you are truly hopeless.” He squeezed my cheeks and then shoved my face back in the dirt, a look of disgust twisting his features. “Your sins will eat you alive.” With one last shake of his head, he chuckled and regarded me with unfeeling eyes before standing up and strolling away.
“Take her past the border and leave her,” he demanded over his shoulder to my brothers, who had been standing by watching the events unfold.
“If you don’t kill me…I will kill you,” I called out to him.
He continued walking away, not bothering to give me so much as a backward glance. My hope that he would turn around and end it all was gone just as quickly as it had arrived.
My brothers rushed to obey his command. They each grabbed an upper arm and began dragging me face down across the ground. I gritted my teeth as my hands were secured behind my back with strips of twine.
“Let’s get this over with; I haven’t eaten supper yet,” my eldest brother grumbled, lifting me up and tossing me in the bed of his truck with an irritated sigh. I let out a soft grunt as my side impacted with the plastic floor.
A second later, the engine revved, and I was flying forward as the truck sped off into the night.
Much quicker than I expected, signs warning that we were about to leave a safe zone began to appear on the trees.
