Chapter 41
Chapter Forty-One
luna
Blood sprays across my face, raining murder.
Blow after blow, the boy loses his life at the hands of another. When the other finally has him on the floor, blacked out, or dead, a woman appears at the door, naked with her hair tied back.
“What do you think, lover?” Corbin asks excitedly, leaning in close to brush his lips over my ear. Peppermint and cigarettes, the smell is like a memory that won’t stop replaying.
“I think at least she’s older.”
He laughs, leaning back against his chair as the naked girl stares into the distance with a blank look on her face. Fueled by drugs, her movements are slow. She stops when her feet collide with the unconscious man on the floor before she turns downward, licking the palm of her hand and swiping it over her unshaven pussy. She slowly lowers herself to his cock, tugging on it a few times. He grows stiff in her hand. Maybe not dead. As soon as she can, she arches her back and directs the head of his cock into the mouth of her pussy. Her hips roll as she swallows him whole, her long hair grazing her tailbone as she rides her body over him.
Still, the man doesn’t move.
The girl rubs her tits, grabbing him by the throat and picking up her pace until her clit hits his pelvic bone every two seconds. Her body quivers before a scream erupts from between her lips.
“So fucking hot,” Corbin answers, watching the girl rape the unconscious man.
We need a favor. You’re not going to like it, but you’re not going to say no. I’m really sorry, Luna, you don’t deserve this.
I knew it was going to be bad, but Jesus.
“Oh, that’s going to be good ass, baby.”
My brows drop inward, and I instantly fix it when I feel myself slip. Before I can ask, someone comes in from behind him as the clapping around us continues, congratulating the girl as if she’d done something great.
“We have a problem.”
When I tune in to listen, Corbin shuffles him away and I’m left alone on a throne I don’t want to be seated on.
The glass in my hand has long since turned warm, and the chatter around me dies. The hairs on the back of my neck stand when I feel eyes moving over me.
Corbin falls to the chair, his hand back on my thigh. “Seems we have an issue coming from the New York tunnels.”
I don’t blink, rolling my eyes and staring back at him with a depth only she could pull. How could I have shared a womb with someone who was so detached from her emotions she didn’t know how to survive. To exist. To be a decent human being. Regardless, shouldn’t I feel something for her loss? For the fact that Priest took her life?
I didn’t and I won’t. That much I knew.
“And?” I turn back to the show in front of me, watching as they drag the deceased man off the stage with a round of applause. The girl stares back at me with a blank look, the kind that makes me pause. The room closes in around me.
As if she can see right through my lies. The lies that keep me seated on this throne.
Bending down, she collects the discarded piece of clothing and doesn’t pull from me until she reaches the door.
“What do you think?” Corbin asks.
I turn back to him, the smile on my face wide. Manic. “I think we should go.”
His blue eyes search mine. Hungry and needy, much like I remembered them that day in Aspen. I’d let go of that day a long time ago. He held nothing on me now.
“When we get there…” Corbin leans forward, licking his lip and smirking. “Will you dance for me?”
“Always.” I bat my lashes at him as he takes my hand and presses a gentle kiss to the base.
“Very good. Very good.”
I should have asked what the problem in New York is, but what if I was to know what is happening. That’ll blow everything. The stupid fuck had figured out that we were twins, yet still believed she lived within me.
The smell of the underground tunnels was the constant reminder of everything that shouldn’t exist in this world. I didn’t know much about how they came about, not until that one night when the Fathers asked me into the office for that favor…
Past
Bishop pushes up from his chair, making his way to the flickering fireplace tucked in the darkest corner of the room. He shoves his hand in his pocket, watching the flames lick the walls closely while taking a long sip of his whiskey.
“We need a favor. But this one is going to be tricky, Luna.”
“I’m prepared,” I say, nodding. “You’ve all done so much for me over the years, especially after Priest.” I cross one leg over the other, staring at the burning ember of my cigarette as time slowly ticks in the background. I know that whatever it is that they’re about to ask me, that it doesn’t matter, because I’ll do it. I’ll do anything that they want me to do.
“You have a twin sister.”
I keep the whiskey beneath my tongue to stop it from coming out. “What?” I swipe the residue from my bottom lip.
“Do you remember much of what happened in Aspen? Before Priest found you?”
No one liked to revisit demons they burned. The memories of that night ran over my spine like ice, as cold as the night he found me.
“Yes. I remember being found, I remember what Corbin did to me at the order of the man in charge who they call the Minister, and I remember being lost. So lost.” I blink when my eyes burn. “I guess I thought that my memories must have suppressed the time that I knew you all. When he found me, I—” The words stop for a moment, and I push up from the couch I’m sitting on, making my way toward the bookshelf behind his desk. The photo is a printed reminder of that day when I swipe to pick it up. I run my thumb over the glass as if it just happened yesterday.
“Priest didn’t tell us about what happened to you when he found you. For whatever reason, he decided to keep that secret.”
It’s no wonder.
I place the photo back onto the shelf, pressing my dress down over my thighs and feeling the bump over the holster of my thigh. I turn back to them all staring back at me. “This twin…” I say the words out loud, though I don’t like them much. “Is she, was she, like me? What happened?”
“You were taken at birth, spent all the years with them until Aspen. You were raised in their tunnels.” The smell hits me first, and I fall backward, reaching for the counter to steady myself.
“I’m—I thought I could smell—hear things sometimes. I’d ask my parents, and they’d look at me as if I was crazy.”
“Well, that’s the other thing,” Nate says, leaning forward on the sofa. “They all assume you split every time you’re triggered and that there’s a dark side to you that hasn’t popped up since you were seven. They’re all waiting for it to happen, some more than others, I’d imagine.” Nate rolls his eyes, huffing back into his chair.
“What was that?” I ask, brow raised as I make my way back to my spot. When I lower myself down, his eyes come to me.
“Just that Priest has been in love with that version of you since he was a toddler, so he’s spent all this time since finding you when you were seven years old to see if she’ll come back to him.” Nate doesn’t move and my face falls.
I don’t know why it stings more than it should but finding out that everything I thought I had with someone was only one-sided feels a lot like a lie.
“I can’t imagine what he put you through during those years to pull her out. Attempting to trigger a version of you that doesn’t exist must have been hell.”
It was.
But it wasn’t.
But it was all a lie.
My stomach falls and my throat dries. I drink more. The burn of whiskey does nothing to stop the insistent pulsing of my heart. I swear I can hear it thrashing behind my rib cage.
I drink. More.
“Sorry.” Nate smiles at me but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “And for this reason, we can’t risk him finding out the truth about you. Not until the very end, even after she’s gone.”
“You don’t need to tell me why.” I mimic Nate’s smile as spiderwebs form over my heart.
“My son is ruthless, Luna. There has only ever been one girl that could ever move him, and she was as crazy as him. Everyone else doesn’t exist. If he finds out that she’s a whole different entity, he’ll snap your neck on the spot and travel to hell and back to find her.”
“I don’t believe that.”
Brantley doesn’t move his eyes from the ceiling.
“I don’t believe he loved her. I know the love that kid craves.”
He finally shifts his head and when his eyes find mine, I’m reminded of why Brantley is who he is for the second time tonight. “And it’s not that. It’s not her. The one he’ll love, the one that will change it all for him, is the girl who shows him that he doesn’t need to hide himself in the dark to be with her, because she’s the light that paves the way.”
He shifts forward. “I’ve seen you both. You challenge him where she wouldn’t. She would have fallen to her knees and given him what he wanted. Hell, she did when she was a child. She pushed Halen off the Riverside bridge twice, and the third time, managed to link weights around her ankles to drown her. She wanted Halen dead. She’s pure and undiluted evil. She’d even kill Priest if she couldn’t have him. There is nothing to her. Not a single speck of good in that girl.”
I clear my throat. Well. That explains Halen’s hatred toward me. “One would argue that Priest is just the same. That they’re perfect.”
“One wouldn’t know what they were talking about,” Bishop answers, and it shocks me. I thought he shared the same view as Nate. “I know my son.” He holds my stare. “And what Brantley is saying is true. Has that bond he had with her helped keep you alive up to this point? Maybe. But something is changing there. I just don’t know what, and until we do know, we need to keep this a secret, or we run the risk of him killing you to find her.”
I drink more. This time, my teeth sink into my lip. “Noted.” He has a point. “And this favor?”
The hairs on the back of my neck prickle.
“Right. The favor.” Nate’s leg starts bouncing. “We need you to make a promise that when you find yourself back with them, that you’ll be as her. They’ve had her since you were swapped in Aspen. We’re still not sure if it was intentional, we’re guessing so.”
“But why—why was I important to them to do that? Her?”
“We don’t know.” Bishop blinks as he stares off into the flames. “We don’t know much about this organization, only that I’m partially to blame for the rise of it.”
“How so?”
He blinks as if remembering something painful. “Let’s just say I declined an old family tradition, and now it’s come back to bite my son in the face.”
I shuffle farther back in my chair. “And what happens when Priest takes the gavel? Will you fill him in? In all of this?”
Bishop’s finger traces his lip. “No. Because we can’t tell him that without exposing you. It will require timing.” His eyes fly up to mine. “And therapy. We need to find out who it is that hides beneath, and unfortunately, you’re the only one who can answer that.”
“Is that why Killian Cornelii has been seeing me, and all the in this house, there was a business ?”
Nate nods. “Yes. It’s not to help heal your trauma of what happened that day, because I’m sure nothing can ever come close—” His jaw tenses. “But to see if you remember who exactly was in that house.”
I sip my drink.
His eyes darken. Bishop leans forward.
“Well damn.” Brantley whistles. “She already knows.”
“I do, and we have a problem.” I lower my glass. “Three I can get to, and when you find out who they are, it could risk you reconsidering, but the final one, I can’t get my hands on. I don’t know who he is. He hid his face beneath a hat, even when we were small. He’s around four years older than me, I’d say, but I never saw his face.”
“Well take out the first three, and the last one?” Nate leans back. “You need to fall.”