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When I walked in to the room to see the man who finally understood me dead on the floor, with Deimos standing over him, telling me to run and never come back.
At times, what I’m doing with Deimos truly hits me, and I have a flash of black self-loathing. Because as good as he makes me feel, and as deeply as he pries into me, pulling out the most secret parts of me and feeding them the darkness they crave…he’s stillhim.
He’s still the man who killed a man I might have grown to love.
It was years ago, and I recognize now it was mostly just teenage infatuation. But still…every time Deimos makes me scream or explode in orgasm, as good as it is, there’s a hint of a shadow in the background.
A slight bitter taste of betrayal, that comes from the knowledge that I’m sleeping with Chase’s killer.
I guess we can add that to the lengthy and growing lengthier list of “reasons I’m fucked in the head.”
24
DEIMOS
I’ve “been with”women before. But I’ve never beenwithone.
Subtle distinction, I know.
Since I was twelve and had the innocence ripped from me, I’ve used sex as a tool. As a prescription drug. The women have always been faceless and mean nothing, and as callous as it may sound, I know the feeling’s mutual.
I may have used them to escape my own demons and vent my fury, but they used me, too. As “an experience”. To explore the fetishization of broken and damaged. To have the thrill of going home with the monster with the terrifying reputation, to give them a story to tell their breathless girlfriends over a bottomless mimosa brunch someday.
Women slept with me, and even occasionally indulged the darker angels of my nature, assuming it was all an act: a persona I projected, like some sort of fashion statement. They all realized quickly that there’s no mask to take off.
This is just my face.
This black hole in which they lose themselves in is just who I am. And they all, without exception, have gone running once they figure that out—if I haven’t already thrown them away anyway, that is.
All of them except Dahlia.
That’s…confusing, and possibly a problem.
Because at times I am beginning to question certain moves I’ve made, in hindsight. Moves like moving Dahlia into my apartment. Moves likecaringabout her and the ghosts I can tell are haunting her past—ghosts worse than mine, even.
But the moves have already been made.
The thing is, Ilikeher living here. And it’s not just the fact that I now have the most willing plaything I’ve ever known living not twenty feet away from my bedroom door, ready and willing at any hour to engage in my supremely fucked up games.
—I mean,a lotof it is that, don’t get me wrong. But it’s moved past that, to the point where I realize that I’m wrapped up in her now—wrapped up in her life, I mean. In her emotions, and her well-being.
And I can’t seem to extricate myself from that.
…I’m not sure if Iwantto extricate myself from that.
She still very much hides certain parts of herself from me—the trauma I sometimes clearly see in her eyes being the biggest one. And it irks me. Not because I’m a psychopath with a God complex—okay, notentirelybecause of that. But because I want to know who and what her demons are.
So I can slay them. Very slowly, and very, very painfully.
That, too, is a curious new mindset for me: the desire to seek retribution on behalf of someone who isn’t part of my immediate family. It’s not that I haven’t typicallygivena shit about people who aren’t my siblings or my grandmother. It’s just that…
Well, no, it really is that I don’t tend to give much of a shit about anyone other than them.
In any case, I’ve got some of my most loyal people looking into her past, under orders of strict secrecy. I’ve got other men looking into the two idiots who were stupid enough to try and break into her mother’s Parisian townhouse, given Adele’s close personal connection to Adrian Cross.
I one hundred percent do not believe in coincidences. Both Dahlia and her mother having brushes with danger in the span of the same week? It rubs me the wrong way.
“The fuck are you doing here?”
