I moan and swipe blindly at my forehead. My eyes are refusing to open. I could almost fool myself that I was stuck in a dream if it wasn’t for the dull agony sweeping from temple to temple.
The restaurant.
He drugged me.
“Luca,” I mutter thickly. The chemicals he used on me are still numbing my tongue. “Luca, what have you done?”
“Only what needed to be done.”
“My head—”
“Will ease in time. Everything will ease in time.” A thin, woolen blanket is placed over my bare legs and another memory bursts free from the vault I keep locked away.
It can’t be.
But an earthy smell is permeating my senses. The same damp heat that I endured for two years on the edge of this existence is perspiring my skin again.
I force my eyes open to confirm my fate. I’m back in the cabin. The bare walls speak of long-forgotten fears and hunger. I’m lying on the same bed in which we loved and lost.
He’s leaning against the far wall in blue jeans and dirty white Tee. Where a confused boy once stood, there’s a man with the strength to embrace both our demons.
“Why, Luca?”
“Is that your favorite word?” That wicked note of amusement is creeping into his voice again. “You ask it a lot, but I’m thinking, deep down, you know the answers already.”
“I know nothing.”
“Oh, but you do...”
“You left me after the trial!”
His eyes harden. Jet-black switches to deadly nightshade. “Because I had to. I made you a promise, and I had more justice to...deliver.”
I jerk my head up. Did I read this wrong? Has he been guilty all along?
“Did you kill the Disciples?”
He shakes his head slowly. “No, cara mia. Another beat me to that beautiful savage crime.”
His words send a jolt of desire coursing through me. Yes, it was beautiful. So very beautiful... I glance down to see my hands dripping in red again. I tuck them under my arms quickly, in case he sees. He doesn’t see, though, Madi, because it isn’t real.
He pushes off from the wall and walks toward the bed, as if he can sense I’m slipping away from him. I draw my knees up to my chest and brace myself, a single tear rolling down my cheek in my last defense.
“We were wrong from the beginning, Luca, so why does this feel so right being back in this cabin again? Being alone with you again?”
“Because of our souls,” he says patiently, his huge body towering over me with all its darkness and familiarity. “We fucked in the dirt that day and we created magic.”
I let out a moan of lust at his filthy words. “We fucked and we fucked and we fucked.”
“I defiled your innocence.” He grabs my chin between his fingers. “I took you until you bled, until the ground ran crimson beneath us. I took your pussy. I took your face, your breasts, your mouth, your ass. I broke all your chains.”
“I broke yours back.”
“Would you like to fuck some more, Madi?”
His erection is straining against the front of his jeans. It’s waiting to be unleashed like the animal we created. Wild breaths and the scent of my arousal coats the air between us.
“Yes,” I say, stumbling further into his depravity. His pain is the only pain I crave now: the only one that matters. He starved me of it for ten years, when I needed it more than air.
“What are you?” he demands with a growl, his grip on my chin tightening.
“I’m your temptress whore.”
With a groan, he smashes his mouth onto mine. “And lead us not into temptation—”
“—but deliver us from evil,” I cry out as he covers me, grinding his erection into me; feeling a ragged, corrupted kind of peace in the one thing the Bible warns me about. If Luca is evil, what does that make me?
Our clothes end up tangled together on the floor. The thin blanket follows. He’s rough and feral, like I knew he would be—taking me with far more force than all the others. Tearing through the scars of their abuse and soothing their unkind sting with a sting of his own.
We chase down that red ribbon and we find each other at the end of it—needing, believing—as we shed the last of my decency together like a useless skin. This is our new bed of dirt, and we’ll fuck and fuck until we have our fill.
Afterward, when my body is bruised and sore, bloody and screaming, I lift my head from his chest, allowing my gaze to wander around the tiny cabin and sparse furniture.
“I visit this place every night in my sleep, Luca... This is where I began. For sixteen years I lived a half-life, until I was completed here. I thought they were nightmares, but really they were clues leading me back to you.”
He pulls me back down to him again, making me a new prison with his arms.
“Do you recall what we agreed to do that final night?” he murmurs, nuzzling into my hair.
I nod reluctantly. “We agreed to kill so we could live. We killed those who stood in our way, except for the Twelve. The Disciples. After they dragged me to the stone tablet and raped me, they slithered back into the night like filthy snakes. They traveled far. They took on new identities. For my own survival, I vowed to bury their crimes the same day I buried you...” My voice trails off.
Only I didn’t.
“Where else do you visit in your sleep?” He pulls me on top of him, taking my chin between his fingers again, forcing my frightened gaze to meet his. “Do you remember all the sin you’ve committed recently? Tell me, Madi. I need to know.”
His interrogation confuses me. “I-I worked hard... Too hard. I nearly lost my mind. I-I had you acquitted, Luca.”
“Of eleven crimes that you committed,” he says softly, almost tenderly—ripping up the pretty professional lies of Madigan Bailey to reveal the bitter, vengeful woman underneath. “I lay claim to the last, but you found them, cara mia.” His voice is all admiration now. “You tracked them down, you stole them from the sidewalks like they made me steal you... And then you made them pay.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Luca
MADI STARES DOWN AT me, her eyes rounded in a distorted reality. “That’s not true. I couldn’t... I wouldn’t...”
Oh, but you did. My beautiful, wilted rose has spent so long shrouded in shadow and dying of thirst that she doesn’t realize it was never for water.
It was for blood.
It’s always been for blood.
“Cara mia...”
Splaying her hands across my chest, she pushes herself up and locks her arms. As tempting as it is, I don’t offer to drag her back down. She knows keeping me away won’t change who she is—what she is. “You’re lying,” she shouts. “Stop lying!”
She can force her lips to speak the lie, but she can’t force it into her eyes. She never could. They bleed truth, a fault that those work colleague bastards discovered and used to their advantage.
I watch patiently as the broken pieces of Madeline Benning wage war against the iron shield of Madigan Bailey. The battle plays out in her dark green glassy stare, and I watch as all the familiar emotions fall like unstoppable dominoes across her face.
I watch as reality sets fire to fantasy, consuming Madigan Bailey in a cloud of thick, dark smoke.