Page 25 of His Last Will

“Yes.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so.” He turns, picking up his leather jacket and throwing it over his shoulder.

“He can go anywhere except my room. I want to be alone.”

He gives me a dark look. “Why? So you can keep crying yourself to sleep every night?”

“How do you know I cry myself to sleep?” Everything in me goes still. The words take hold of the air in my lungs for a heartbeat.

“Ari, everyone in this entire house knows you cry yourself to sleep. It is not quiet.” Stepping around me, he starts to head out of the room, clearly planning to leave.

But I am not done with him. My eyes are tired from crying, my heart still hurts, and Aiden is acting like an ass. The exhaustion from maintaining this level of grief is slowly killing me. And I refuse to let him leave this room without taking a swing at his own goddamn black heart. “How do you do it?” Aiden stops but doesn’t turn around at my words. “How do you get up every day and move on from your own stepbrother’s death? What is your secret for pretending he never existed? To living without any answers?"

At that, he turns. “Ari, there is no secret. You have to move on. He’s not coming back. And every tear you cry is just a waste of liquid.” Aiden is cold and cruel most of the time. But with those words, he sticks a knife in my stomach and twists.

Tears form behind my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall in front of him. I am so fucking done crying. I shove him away from me as I walk out the door. But he grabs my arm before I can slam the door behind me. “Do you really want to know how I am coping?”

“Yes,” I sniffle. Completely undignified. I would be mortified if I wasn’t so exhausted.

“Come with me.” He heads out the door and starts dragging me downstairs.

“Aiden, I’m not dressed.” He looks back at me, in my black silk nightgown, wet hair, and lack of shoes.

“You don’t need to be dressed for where we’re going.”

Well, at least I am not naked.

Before we head outside, I grab a pair of my slippers from the hall closet. Silk nightgown and Scream mask slippers. If I get these dirty, I am going to rip Aiden’s throat out.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

He opens the door to his car and shuffles me inside. “Buckle up, venom.”

The morgue. I should’ve known it would be something to do with Aiden’s bloody little kink. Given how we grew up, where blood, mayhem, and a secret society ruled our lives, it was normal. Well, not normal. But it was Aiden.

Even before he became the Reaper, he was hell-bent on revenge. An eye for an eye. Or more like a limb for a limb kind of thing. Only he would double down, make sure whoever was on the other side had it worse than he did. You could never let your enemies think you were soft. When he stabbed Uncle Vin at the age of twelve for calling him a waste of sperm, we knew he was vicious with a mean streak you didn’t want to provoke. Stabbing anyone, sure, but Uncle Vin at the time was a drug lord working for The Order.

That’s how he got his reputation.

The Reaper.

From then on, people would avoid him. Giving him at least a five-foot buffer. It didn’t help that he spent most of his time lurking in the dark, watching nightmares unfold, with a fucking spider on his shoulder. Aiden probably knew more secrets surrounding The Order than the current heads.

I had never been to his morgue. His private sanctuary, as Brodie dubbed it. The only two people who really came down here were Brodie and Ash. Ashton had enlisted Aiden to help him with his experiments shortly after the stabbing incident with Uncle Vin.

But walking into the inner sanctum brings goosebumps to my skin for a reason that I don’t want to examine too closely. Here, Aiden was in charge. Completely. He was in charge of someone’s pain, their screams, their breath, and the number of heartbeats that they had left. He was the devil come to life. And I was a little in awe of his power.

“So, why is he in here?” I ask as Aiden deposits a body onto the table.

Aiden pats the round gag over the man’s mouth, who is now shaking uncontrollably. “This here is Ian. Ian thought he could snort his supply of coke instead of selling it, then skim profits off the top of his sales to the tune of $600,000. Plus, Gage heard a story that he was getting rough with some of the girls on our block, which we have a zero-tolerance policy for. To top off his list of crimes, when Gage went to retrieve him, he held a gun to him and tried to shoot his way out of his fate.”

Aiden laughs to himself as he ties the man down and contains his movements. “Lucky for me.”

Aiden takes Ian’s right hand and stabs it with a knife, leaving it there as Ian writhes in pain; as much as he can, anyway, being held immobile by several straps around his body.

Ash walks in as the man tries to scream through the gag, spit beginning to pool around his mouth. With his clipboard in hand and syringe already poised, Ash walks straight up to the patient and plunges the syringe into his neck. “Patient 0078, wonderful. Aiden, have you noticed any dulling of pain reaction from this one?”