Chapter One
I pull through the gates at Liber, one hand on the wheel, other on the burnt orange center console of the 720S.
There are cars already parked around back of the stone mansion, a guard pacing the length of the building, pulling on a cigarette as he does his rounds. I see Lucifer’s black M5 and I’m surprised he hasn’t left yet to come find us. Ezra must be doing his part to keep him here, just like I asked him.
Not for the first time tonight, I wish I was high. But Sid exhales loudly from my passenger seat and I remember why I’m not.
I park the car, turn to face her in the glow of the dash lights. It’s nearly midnight. A new year is almost here. I have a feeling it’s going to be bloodier than this last one.
Sid’s silver eyes lock on mine. “You’ve got some blood,” she says in that low voice of hers, “there.” She touches her cheekbone.
I reach up to grab the skeleton bandana around my neck to wipe it off, but Sid shakes her head, leans across the console. She sticks her thumb in her mouth, then plops it out and swipes her wet thumb over my cheek, right under my eye. I don’t miss the X carved into her palm, now a pale white scar.
I try to feel nothing at her touch. I try not to see that the silver of her eyes is the same color as the circle around my blue ones. I would know; I’ve stared at myself in the mirror more lately than I have in my entire twenty-four years, trying to find the similarities. Trying to convince myself that Sid really is my sister.
But right now, I want to feel nothing. Know nothing. Especially as Sid’s touch lingers, even though I’m pretty damn sure she’s got the blood off of my face. She just stares at me, still touching my skin, her eyes searching mine.
I wish I could know what she’s thinking. I wish she could know that I’m happy we did this together.
I hope she knows Lucifer is going to lose his shit when he finds out. I hope she doesn’t care, because I sure as fuck don’t.
I wonder if she sees the change in herself. Before tonight, she had dark circles under her eyes. Her olive skin was pale, her cheeks hollow. She’s thinner than she was when I first met her, and that’s saying something, because she’s always been on the small side. That hasn’t changed, and she still does have circles under her eyes, but she looks...alive.
She’s made for this life.
I hope she knows that, too. I hope she can read all of it on my face.
She pulls back, dropping her hand. I exhale a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. She rubs her hands down her thighs, over her black jeans, blowing out a breath. She stares out the windshield at Liber, towering over us.
“What do we tell him?” she asks in the silence of my car.
I grip the steering wheel for something to do with my hands. I’m feeling restless, which is just another reminder that something is seriously fucking wrong with me. All this chaotic energy, it should be out for the night.
I’ve got blood on my hands—and my face, apparently—after all. But I’m still unsettled.
“You tell him what you want, Angel.” I glance at her out of the corner of my eye, but she’s still staring straight ahead. “And if he gives you any shit about it, put his dick in your mouth and make him shut the fuck up.”
She tips her head back and laughs, and despite myself, I do too.
She hits me with the back of her hand, pretty hard, on the shoulder. If she’d been just a few inches back, it would have really hurt. But I force myself not to think about the state of my back.
Instead, I catch her fingers in my hand.
She stills, her smile faltering as she stares at me, her lips parted. I wonder what she’s feeling right now.
I wish she wasn’t who she was, just for a few minutes. I wish she wasn’t Lucifer’s wife. My sister. A girl still putting herself back together.
For a little while, I just wish she was mine. Because she’s the type of girl who would let me do what I wanted with her, and she’d fucking like it.
Then it occurs to me that Lucifer probably does exactly what he wants with her every damn day, and I drop her hand.
She’s not mine. Not mine.
“Let’s go, Angel.”
But neither of us move.
“Mayhem?” she whispers my name in the dark, even though she doesn’t need to get my attention. She already has it.
I just look at her, waiting for whatever it is she really wants to say.
“Thank you.”
I swallow down the lump in my throat, keeping my gaze on her even though I have the strange urge to look away. “Thank you, too, Angel.”
And then she fumbles with the button to open up the doors of the McLaren, muttering something about excess, and the cold late December air of Alexandria sends chills down my spine.
Or maybe those chills are from the way her small hips move as she walks to the rear entrance of Liber, a guard hurrying over to get the door for her. The way the bitter wind blows her shoulder-length brown hair away from her neck, and I catch a glimpse of her own black bandana. Think of the way she wrapped it around Pammie’s throat, choked her while I used the hammer.
My back aches with that memory. Swinging a hammer nearly a hundred times isn’t good for someone with a good back. And someone with open wounds down their spine? Pretty fucking miserable.
I hang my head, consider going home. But I don’t want to leave Sid, just in case Lucifer becomes...too much. I wish we had talked about him more. Them. I wish I had asked her about her life, instead of just giving her a pep talk for Murder 101.
Too late for that now.
Too late for so much now.
I blow out a breath, wonder why in God’s name I left my weed at home. I guess I should cut myself some slack. Murder requires a little prep, even if I do have the resources for someone else to clean up after me.
I decide to fuck it all and go inside. I could really use a distraction. The anger crawling under my skin makes me want to kill someone…again.
It hasn’t always been this way. For a while, it was dulled. And then with Sacrificium, and Sid, and Lazar and my fucking father…
Some things never really go away. They just live inside of us, like a dormant virus, waiting to fucking strike again when the time is right.
Guess learning your father sold your own sister to a pedophile ring is just the thing to feed life into the virus.
The guard gives me a nod as I head in through the back door and I stand in the empty corridor a second, eyes closed, blowing out a breath. It’s loud, and I didn’t expect anything less. New Year’s Eve is big anywhere, and for the Unsaints, it’s a time to get lost: we don’t celebrate Christmas, and this is the only holiday break we have in between Sacrificium (which went to hell this year) and Noctem (eight weeks away and already too close).
I don’t want to think about Noctem.
I want to get high as fuck and let a girl I don’t know and don’t give a damn about suck my dick.
But first I guess I should make sure I don’t have any more of fucking Pammie’s blood on me.
The third floor is quiet, the music nothing more than a dull thud. I head toward my room at the end of the dark hall, but halfway there, I freeze, my blood running cold as I hear a familiar voice ask, “You think you can make me cheat on my wife, huh?”
My hands clench into fists as I stand outside of the only door that’s slightly ajar on this hallway.