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Chapter thirty-five
The first thing I noticed about the next room was that it wasn’t really aroomat all. It was more like a sanctuary—a circular space with white walls and marble floors. The red flames had been replaced with classic chandeliers like the ones in the church above. Men in red robes gathered along the walls, forming a circle.Closing us in.
On a raised platform on one side of the room, there were five throne-like chairs, but only three men in black robes occupied them. Five chairs. Five bloodlines. Two missing—Kipton and Malcolm. Obviously, one of those men was my father. That meant the other two were Grey and the king. They’d been watching this whole time.
Anger blacked my vision.
Grey stood there in the first room. He stood there and did nothing while they made me play Russian Roulette with Leo’s face.
“He’s playing the game, just like you,”the voice of reason whispered in my ear, keeping me from jumping on the platform and strangling him with my bare hands.
I blew out a slow exhale.Almost done.Thank God. I needed a fucking smoke.
Below them, directly in front of the platform, there were five altars made of shiny black stone with a solid white linen across the top.
One at a time, other doors around the room began to open and men in robes hurried out.
Red robes.
Not black like mine.
I studied them all as they took their place in a line next to me, trying to see if I recognized any of them. One… two… three… I counted as they emerged through different doors around the room. Until I stopped at eight. Only eight of them had made it out. I wondered what happened to the other seven, including the mayor. Did he even show up? Maybe he declined the invitation the way I wished I had. Too late now. Like Leo said, I was in balls deep.
The black-robed man in the middle stood up, and the room grew eerily silent.
“Congratulations. You made it to the final stage. We’d like to now deliver your reward.”
Deliverance.It wasn’t aboutourdeliverance. It was them delivering somethingtous.
The doors we’d just come out of opened again, and I counted sixteen girls wearing nothing but their underwear and a white silk robe as the red-robed men dragged them into the room. A white animal mask—sheep or lamb, maybe—covered their faces. It was eerie as fuck, like something straight out ofYou’re Next.
They called this a reward?
One of the assholes in red approached the man I assumed to be my father and whispered something in his ear. His posture stiffened as his gaze trained in on one of the girls.
Fuck.
She struggled to yank her arm out of the man’s grip, her verbal protests muffled by the mask she wore. She was the only one fighting. Yeah. That was definitely Anniston. She had no idea who she was up against. If she didn’t shut the fuck up, these men would have her ass in the middle of The Grove for their next game of Hide and Seek.
“My apologies, gentlemen. There’s been a slight mix-up. It seems one of my men wandered outside and unintentionally grabbed someone they weren’t supposed to.” He chuckled a non-apologetic laugh, and everyone laughed with him. “It happens.”
It happens?They just grabbed women off the street then laughed it off? I knew they were insane, but… Jesus.
“The only problem is that the final ritual requires a blood sacrifice, and this one wasn’t supposed to be here, there is no guarantee she’s a virgin.”
Blood sacrifice.
What. The. Fuck.
That explained the altars.
He continued, “Understand that if you choose her as your reward, exceptions will need to be made.”
His words all ran together.Virgin. Ritual. Blood. Choose her as your reward.The white robes and near-naked bodies.
They expected us to fuck all of these women, or at least one of them. Right here, on these altars, beneath a holy place, in this sanctuary full of masked men. That was the final test, to see how dark our souls really were.
Apparently, mine was pretty fucking depraved because I’d been waiting for this moment since I found out the queen of Ayelswick had a daughter. My mom was right. Anniston did look just like her mother. I would never forget the face of the woman who stole my virginity. From the time I was sixteen years old, I’d been fantasizing about destroying her innocence the way her mother had destroyed mine. Thinking about it made my dick hard as fuck. I wanted her humiliation. I wanted her tears and her surrender, her screams and her pain. Me and me alone. No one else had earned that right.
