Page 31 of The Villain We Tempt

He gives me a huge helping of shit for it the second we get back to campus.

Fucker.

And then twenty minutes afterthat,I find myself standing in a dark, quiet bedroom, watching Galina sleep.

On top of the covers.

In just tank top and panties.

Fuck me, I could take abiteout of that ass she's got going on.

Now, part of me—i.e., my penis—issuperokay with the current view. But the rest of me feels a familiar, dark chill coiling through me like poison.

Like a disease.

Likethatblood inside me is about to stage a hostile takeover and turn me into the monster I worry I’m destined to become.

Because even though I always say I’ve been blessed by genetics, I’ve also been cursed by them.

His name was Seamus O’Conor, and he was my dad’s great-uncle.

During The Troubles back in Belfast, he fought as part of the IRA, until they kicked him out for…wait for it…“cruel and barbaric conduct in the field”.

And as my own great-uncle Cillian likes to say, “If you’re too extreme for the IR fucking A, you’ve lost the plot, boyo.”

Eventually, Seamus made his way to the US, where he used his unique “skills” to become a top contract killer for the Irish mob.

Seamus wasn’t just a killer, though. He was a religious extremist, a bloodthirsty psychopath and a fucking animal. The Irish mob tried to put him back in his cage, but some monsters can’t be chained back up again. When they tried, it only turned him into a killer who didn't see a need for rules of any kind.

Eventually, Seamus met his end. But not before he kidnapped Achilles' parents—my uncle Ares and my aunt Neve—long before I was born, took them to a shack in the woods, and literally tried tocrucifythem.

They carry the scars of that nightmare to this day.

I carry something worse.

I'm part of Seamus’ bloodline.

I mean, Ronan and our sister Demi do, too, same as Achilles and the rest of my cousins on the Irish side of the family. But they've all made a sort of peace with it and don’t let it bother them. As Achilles tells me from time to time, “If you had O’Conor blood in you, Loch, we’d know by now.”

There’s just one flaw to that argument: he’d only know if Iallowed himto.

He doesn’t know about the flashes I get in my vision.

The headaches.

The thirst for control.

The temper.

The black thoughts I keep under lock and key.

Seamus and his fondness for “bleeding the evil” from his victims is the reason I don’t like knives, and why I shy away from using them in my videos for the most part, although I know my fans would eat it up.

It just feels like tempting fate.

Holding out bait to the ravenous monster lurking within me.

I often try to tell myself I’m imagining things. Overreacting. Being dramatic.