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I suck in a shaky breath, my fingers curling into fists. “I got my freak on at the club where we found Boris and Laredo. The taste she got of the real me was enough to disgust her, and I didn’t even go full psycho. I just didn’t want her to fall in love with a lie. She had to see behind the scars, behind the victim. She had to see the villain, too. The monster.”
Priest places his hand softly on my shoulder. He once told me he always grants his victims one last soft touch before he brutally ends their lives. One last kindness, even to the undeserving.
“If you know where to find her, go,” he says. “I’ll keep an eye on Kelly. I’ll have her installed comfortably at your penthouse, enjoying Mariana’s services, just the way she likes it. That should keep her distracted. Once that’s done, I’ll have those two bastards sign off half their business to Sirenna.”
“Not half.” I hold his stare. “Everything. They’re lucky to get away with their lives.”
Priest nods, and I can already see it–he’ll enjoy forcing them if he has to. I shake my head, slightly amused.
“I still can’t believe you created a ruse to get Kelly out of the way.”
“You’re the closest thing I have to a brother.” His hand drops off my shoulder, and he takes a few steps back. “Go get your girl back. I’ll take care of things here.”
And I trust that he will, but my heart feels heavy in my chest.
I don’t think Sirenna will come back to me of her own volition. If she chose to take the risk and get away from me, it’s because she’d rather eat glass than let me anywhere near her again. I can’t forget how she rubbed her arms, as if my presence felt like an army of cockroaches crawling up her limbs. I might have to start whipping myself the way Priest does whenever he feels dangerously close to doing something atrocious. To break the monster inside before he forces her to return. But with Joseph and The Order after her, she still needs me. So I need to do this one last thing.
CHAPTER IX
Sirenna
My steps echo against the crumbling walls as I walk down the hallway on the ground floor of what used to be St. Augustine’s Home for Orphans. I expected it to be much harder to get in here, but all that stood in my way was the Keep Out sign at the gates. I suppose no one expects to find anything of value in an dilapidated building on the outskirts of a half-dead city, which would make extra security redundant.
“This can’t be it,” I whisper to myself as my eyes trail over a few pictures hanging askew on the walls. Zayne is supposed to conduct experiments on humans at a still-functional facility. Unless his test subjects are ghosts, this can’t be the place.
Maybe he moved the operation to the underground. I keep walking down the hallway toward the dark opening across it, my eyes scanning the few pictures on the walls. There’s nothing familiar about them, yet there’s no shaking the feeling that I’ve been here before.
A clang echoes from the upper floors, stopping me in my tracks. I look up at the lightbulb hanging from a wire in the ceiling. There’s a large stain around its root, as if water had soaked the mortar around it. I hope to God the electric network has been disabled completely, or this place is a death trap. The building is humongous, the skeleton of what could have been anything from a war hospital to a lunatic asylum by the time it became a place of torture for children.
Declan’s men told me I had one hour to “do what I must”, so I run through everything Zayne told me about this place, trying to identify his room.
I shudder as I stare down the hallway on the first floor, which is swallowed by darkness.
Maybe I can’t access Zayne’s exact memories, but I can reach deeper into mine. What started as a tiny sensation in my chest is now expanding into a vortex, calling me towards the black. With every step I take, a new memory comes back to me. I remember a large auditorium, somewhere here on the first floor. A bunch of children, mostly boys, all of them wearing long white robes. Their feet were naked. There was some kind of announcement going on.
We were all wearing white, our feet bare. A boy bent down enough that his face was finally at the level of mine.
