Chapter 11
Orange blossom fills my nose. Such a soft feminine scent, something that doesn’t feel familiar to me at all. I breathe in deep, inhaling the sleeping girl’s scent and hold it in my lungs until I can taste it on my tongue. Deciding very quickly, as I exhale slowly, that I like it.
I lick my lips, shifting my body just the tiniest of inches closer, wrinkling the cotton sheets beneath me. I’m atop the bed clothes, she, the girl, with hair like mine, but eyes not at all similar, is beneath them.
Her slim wrists are bandaged, blood seeping through the white gauze, metal handcuffs overtop shackling them. Chain looped around the headboard of Blaze’s bed. Her thick, blonde curls are strewn across the black pillowcase, hands folded like a prayer beneath her bruised cheek, a position I currently mimic.
There is a small, curved scar beneath her left eye, just atop her cheekbone, almost like a crescent moon in shape, minuscule, really. Not something anyone would likely notice. But those are the things I look for. The unusual features, marks, of somebody.
Especially if they’re sad.
This girl is sad, and even though she sleeps, it seeps into me like black sludge. Heavy and cloying, infecting. I shudder at it, the feeling overwhelmingly familiar.
It is why I left my family. Everything that I knew. The life. All of it designed, even as a small boy, for something that I am not. Could never be. I was too small, too timid, with pretty features and delicate hands.
‘Hands not built for Butchers.’
‘Runt.’
‘Run, little piggy, run!’
I shut my eyes against the echoing screams, exhale through my nose, nostrils flaring as I draw in a fresh breath, leaving the past where it belongs. Inhaling more of that orange scent and pushing out the phantom smell of pigs and mud and blood. Blinking just once, I reopen my eyes, finding bright blue orbs staring back.
Our faces are so close now, closer than before, but it’s me that’s unconsciously moved. My face resting on the very edge of her pillow, our lips so close they could brush if I angled my head just right, I could taste her. The thought is terrifying… and tempting.
I blink again, flicking my gaze down to the plumpness of her mouth. A small cut in her lower lip, bruising in her top, I trace the pale colouring up and over her top lip, along the side of her nose. Probably injured from where she ran into Cole back at the farmhouse. The big guy is just that, big.
Six-foot-four, an inch shorter than my Flint, but Cole is bigger in every other way. Solid muscles, thick neck, broad shoulders and thigh muscles that could strangle. I’m surprised this girl’s nose is still attached to her petty face after essentially running into a brick wall of a man.
“Hello,” I say quietly, not much more than a whisper as I lift my eyes to hers.
She doesn’t move back, even though she could, the handcuffs’ chain is inches longer than regular ones. It makes me pause as I realise Blaze chose these specifically.
So she could sleep.
I blink again, a slow shuttering over my dark eyes to help me refocus.
“Who are you?” she whispers back, a thread of nervousness in her tone, her breath on my lips.
The room is light because the bedside lamp at my back is switched on, casting a soft, orange glow across the room, but beyond the blackout blinds, the world is still dark. It’s early winter and the mornings are dull, dreary. Plus, it is still barely day, not even six yet.
Flint is still slumbering in our bed, but I was awake long before Blaze flung open the door to our bedroom, a room that officially is just Flint’s, but one which we both share together. Blaze stared at me silently through the gloom with a single raised brow and I untangled myself from his adopted brother’s embrace.
To come here.
“Phoenix,” I reply politely.
My great aunt always taught me to be a gentleman, much to my Nan’s, her sister’s, dismay.
“Phoenix,” Ember repeats softly, a little thrill rushing up my spine with the way she says it.
And despite already knowing her name, I request her to give it anyway. The only thing Blaze told me before he left me here with her. ‘Make sure Ember does as she’s fucking told,’ he had said with a grit of his teeth and a pissy shake of his head, before storming out of the flat with Cole. Who, as per usual, also had a facial expression made up of thunder and nightmares.
“Ember,” she answers softly, this breathy, frightened little voice.
It makes my heart clench inside my chest.
The fear.
None of my victims ever fear me before I make them smile.
I don’t like that it’s so obvious I can hear it in just that one word.
“I won’t hurt you,” I tell her, slowly bringing my right hand out from beneath my cheek.
Reaching out towards her, I brush a lock of curly, blonde hair back behind her pierced ear. Run the tips of my fingers down to the back corner of her jaw, along the length of bone to the soft curve of her chin.
“I don’t hurt people,” I reassure her with the truth, it’s not in my nature to injure or upset, only to make smiles. “Blaze would never leave you in danger.”
I feel that like a promise deep in my bones. Blaze doesn’t keep girls. Blaze doesn’t keep anyone. Blaze doesn’t even like anyone. Except for us. And even as his family he’s mostly cold with his affections.
Ember breathes a little too fast, too quick, and I can hear her heart thundering. It makes me want to feel it, press the open palm of my hand to her chest, feel the way in which it beats.
I think of the night before last. Bonfire night. The blood, her hands red and cut, a glass shard held tight in her fist. It carved into her soft palm in the same way she cut it into her thighs.
Blaze wouldn’t disclose what had happened between the two of them, but we all know he fucked her. Cole probably knows more, and he watched them together in the house. Flint came to find me, and I was too busy to pay attention to what anyone else was doing. Bonfire Night is the one night a year we can let ourselves be true. Although, this year, Blaze asked us to mask up, to chase, to laugh, to torment, we were all truly our authentic selves.
It’s dark. The lives we live. The Ashes crew is a big deal now, something that Blaze created when he was just nineteen, ten years ago now, a gang that even I had heard of.
A boy closed off from the world for being too soft.
My head is full of darkness, my heart, too, but my soul, I think, is something else.
“What”s the darkest thing you”ve ever thought about doing, Ember?” I ask suddenly, lowly, soft and gravelly, coaxing with a timidness most would find haunting.
I don’t think she will confess to me her truth. But suddenly, I want to know it. Need to.
“Dying,” she states automatically, an answer I”m sure most anyone would give.
Normal people.
Flicking her gaze up onto mine, waiting for me to say something in response. I stare down at the dark sheets between us, my head on the same pillow as hers, it smells like them both, tobacco, caramel, smoke, oranges.
Both hands reclasped like a prayer beneath my cheek, “That”s a lie,” I whisper thickly, her eyes sparking with lustful knowing. I lick my lips, my tongue catching my cupid”s bow, “You”re a liar.”
My chocolate brown eyes bore into her bright blues, in the same way the metal cuffs around her hands slice into her wrists.
“Tell me the truth,” I tempt, almost angelic in my looks, cherub-like with my tight, blonde curls, white skin, dark eyes, I know I can be convincing when I want to be. “Confess your darkest thought.”
Ember stares into my eyes, wide and open, pupils blown, but all of her attention is on me. I”ve never been religious, but this feels somewhat like a confessional, a cleansing of dark and depraved secrets.
“Living,” she divulges, and it’s clear, the thought of that is terrifying.
Endless years of existing in fear, slicing away at her flesh just to get, even a tiny moment of reprieve.
Silence.
Relief.
I hum, my lips curving up into a small, real smile. I lift a hand from beneath my cheek, grazing the back of my knuckles down the curve of her own.
“You”ll make such a beautiful corpse, Darling,” I breathe against her lips, silently summoning her closer with the barest brush of my mouth. “You”ll wear the prettiest smile I ever carved.”