Chapter 10
The fucking air still stunk of iron. It was wet and sticky, and a stubborn stain in the grass. But the smell of Shiloh’s come was overriding my senses.
I didn’t like sex.
I didn’t like to be touched.
So why the fuck did his denials turn me on so much?
I crouched low, my hands working steadily as I dragged the last of the evidence into the pit I’d carved earlier. All the broken twigs, bloodied rags, and the faint trail of mud from where I’d dragged the body had to vanish.
I was many things, but sloppy wasn’t one of them.
Sloppiness got you caught or killed. Neither of those options worked for me.
Every drop of my victims’ blood was always buried.
No footprint left unswept by nature’s hand or my own.
Even the fucking cigarette butt one of the Harding boys had dropped out here when they were fucking had ended up ground into the dirt beneath my boots.
You are the one end I can’t seem to organize, Sunshine.
Shiloh’s ghost of a smirk lingered at the edge of my thoughts, with the sound of his strained breath still making my cock throb painfully in the leather pants. It was so adorable. He thought he’d won tonight, assumed that forcing me to my knees gave him the power.
He didn’t realize I was the one giving it. He was too overcome by his own need to realize that every second, my mouth was wrapped around him, that I was taking pieces of him in return.
I will let him writhe in his shame like a cockroach waiting to be crushed. He can stew in his anger because I know that fevered itch under his skin is me. And it will only grow.
By the time I poured the last shovelful of dirt over the pit, the woods looked untouched enough. At least like nothing had ever happened here besides the fevered fucking and the remnants of come coating the ground.
His come. Not mine. My kind of art.
I stripped off the gloves, shoved them into the burn bag in my pack on the ground, and stood.
That little fucker stole my weapon. I guess it was time to find out whether Shiloh liked playing with knives.
The bonfire was settling down, and the last of the hunters and prey had left the maze for the night. My family’s flashy ass mansion loomed in the distance, like a bruise in the dark sky. Its windows glowed faintly in the dark. This house wasn’t home, not to me.
Not anymore.
Truth be told, I hadn’t felt like those walls were a home for years, way before I moved out on my own, and even more so now, as I looked up at the windows’ dark silhouettes. My mother and father were the exact stereotype of everything wrong with the rich and famous.
My mom used so much shit on her plastic face and body, she was one step away from killing babies and bathing in their blood to stay young and fake.
My father, when he was around, was a money tycoon of absolute whoring heights.
Mom knew of his slutty ways, but the dollar signs on her allowance checks kept her fake tits perky. That alone was enough for her to turn her cheek and keep his thick black office door closed.
I was about six years old when I killed a mouse, strangled the bitch right in my palm. When I brought it to my mother, she ignored me, not bothering to look, and told me to play with my toys.
When I brought it to my father, that was the first time he looked at me with something more equivalent to interest. My dad saw ways to manipulate and train me to be his perfect monster.
We went hunting on weekends while Mom had her spa days.
Xanthy was too stupid to know anything. She just bitched about never being allowed to tag along on the hunts.
But they weren’t just hunts.
They were practicing.
My father would find animals that were just like the mouse I presented to him as a kid. As I got older, it was wild game. Hogs that screamed and tried to gore my sides as I ripped them open, Bobcats that matched my strength and left enough scars as trophies.
The game room had them all.
Every head I’d ripped from their bodies.
The trophies of control my father placed.
Each and every one was a notch in his belt.
When I was a stupid fucking teenager, I thought my father accepted me.
Saw me for what I was and wanted to help me survive.
He told me that the hunts and the trials were to better my mind and to sharpen and hone my natural skills.
But one night I found out the truth. The evidence was as thick as the blood coating my hands.
My father didn’t want me to rip apart animals anymore.
He wanted me to hunt people, to stalk, calculate, and eliminate his enemies. Jovial fat men donating to cancer foundations and pissing off my father were enough to unleash his favorite weapon—me.
I killed so many nameless faces for him.
I never questioned him.
I never asked him what they did.
I simply found and erased them, just as he asked. A lot of the people fought, some even got the upper hand on me.
My scrawny body was no match for a grown man, not as a teen.
It was from watching my mother’s and my father’s whores where I learned that getting to a target wasn’t always about brute strength. People weren’t bears or mountain lions. Sometimes you had to use more than just your hands.
I used my body, thousands of hands and mouths, using me the way I used them. Blissfully unaware and satiated until their necks opened up to me. I used a river of their life’s blood spilling to cleanse my body.
It was a ritual of sorts for so many years and so many kills. It wasn’t until I was eighteen that I finally saw my father for the snake he was. My tattoo was a reminder never to allow myself to be fooled again.
‘You can’t hate a monster for being a monster. You can only hate yourself.’
This house would never be a home. But for the time I was here, keeping the mask my family so proudly wore clean and visible, I would make this my stage.
And Shiloh?
He was already playing his part. Whether he liked it or not.
I started back toward the mansion, silent and steady, with my boots sinking into the earth as if I’d always belonged to it somehow.
The closer I got to my old home, the louder the night grew. Laughter spilled from the back porch, glass clinking, voices sharp with liquor, and confused from whatever drug they were snorting.
They were careless, all of them.
They always had been.
But money definitely made people stupid. It let them think no one was watching.
But I am.
I slipped through the side door, not bothering with the front like a guest would. Guests were noticed, greeted with bullshit hellos. But shadows weren’t.
Inside, the air smelled of cigar smoke and expensive perfume, both heavy and cloying. Music thudded faintly from a record player somewhere down the hall, my mother’s old gramophone playing her classical soundtracks.
It contrasted with the chaos outside. Even with the noise having died down, there were still stragglers clinging to some form of fun. I hummed the melody, trying to drown out the chatter.
People moved in clumps.
The masked boys were too loud for their own good, clunky and foolish, while the girls were now draped in silk and pearls like flashy ornaments.
None of them mattered. I kept moving. Mother and father could have their cheap, ball-style mockery. I wasn’t interested in entertaining these people any longer.
All but one.
My boots were barely a whisper against the polished floor as I cut through the small crowd, catching glances, but never holding them.
A few of the prey nodded like they recognized me, though they didn’t know why. That was the trick. I always let them think they knew me when they didn’t know a fucking thing. They knew my title, my name, but far from who I truly was.
I grabbed a vodka bottle from the tray, not because I wanted it, but because empty hands drew questions. The liquor burned as I swallowed, but I didn’t flinch.
Where had my sister dragged her sad little boyfriend to?
Upstairs, a door shut faintly, and my eyes flicked toward the staircase.
Shiloh.
He was wrapped in a soft towel, heading toward my sister’s old room, likely holing up with her to use her for sex and comfort.
I could almost feel him beside me from here.
Coiled and tight. That restless ache, how he tried to scrub me off his skin with her willing pussy.
It made me smile into the neck of the bottle.
He thought a bed and a body could cleanse him. He’d learn.
You can’t wash away a sin that defines you.
“Carrington.” One of the hunters clapped me on the shoulder as he passed by, grinning widely with the too white teeth that everyone had.
“Glad you showed. We all have a challenge to beat your title. I saw your dad’s trophy man.
That’s sick. I wish my dad were that cool.
Making a fucking maze for me to chase and fuck girls every year. ”
I forced a smile and tilted my vodka toward him.
No words.
Words gave too much away.
When he wandered off, the silence becoming too unsettling for him, I started for the stairs, slow and unhurried. I wanted everyone to think I had all the time in the world to walk around this house again, to play their game once more and leave with the prize I wanted.
Because I will.
“Boy.”
The voice cracked like a whip across the hall, stopping me mid-step as I got to the top of the stairs. I didn’t have to turn to know who it was. That sharp, grating baritone had been carved into my bones since childhood.
I kept my back to him. Slowly letting the glass bottle dangle from my fingertips, until a sharp clap on my shoulder had me hissing and turning away from his touch.
My father leaned against the doorway to one of the rooms. His thick, woodsy-smelling cigar was clamped between his teeth, smoke curling up around his face, hiding the lines of age, but not the cruelty set deep in the grooves.
His suit was sharp, and his shoes were polished to a mirror shine, hardening power dressed in the flesh.
Fuck you.
“You skulking around again?” he drawled, narrowing his eyes at my disheveled appearance.
“Always slithering in the dark corners like a fucking rat. Makes people nervous, Carey. You should know better. Have you forgotten how to act normal, for God’s sake?
Your mother says you did not even do the hunt tonight. We were all counting on your scores.”
I took a slow sip from the liquor, letting the burn smooth out my voice when I finally spoke. “Maybe they should be nervous, Pops.”
His laugh was low, ugly, and filling in the spaces between us until I was dizzy. “Still got that smart mouth, I see. One day it’s gonna write checks that your hands can’t cash.”
I said nothing, watching the way his eyes flicked over me, searching for cracks he could exploit. We both had enough dirt on each other, but neither of us would make a move without becoming a detonator for everything and everyone.
He’d never find my scars, never see any weaknesses in me to dig his grubby fingers into…I learned long ago to show him only what I wanted him to see. But the truth of the matter was, I was not weak. I did not have any weak spots.
He tapped his cigar, ash dropping onto the expensive floor he paid too much to own.
“Don’t forget whose name you carry. You embarrass me, you embarrass this family, and I’ll cut the strings I have allowed you to control.
Understood? You think you have bested me, but don't forget who taught you all you know. You won’t even see the blade coming. ”
I tilted my head, letting a small smile curl on my lips. “Cut me loose? That a promise? If I remember correctly. I was the one doing all your dirty work while you cowered in the bushes waiting to claim the heads.”
His jaw tightened, just for a second. Then he laughed, that rich asshole laugh you instinctively hate.
“A true leader doesn’t need to sully his hands.
Their slaves do that for them. But the control you think you have is an illusion, and if you don’t behave yourself, Carrington, that illusion will pop. ”
I thought he would hit me right there in front of his guests, showing the pathetic drones what a man he really was. But he just sneered, pushing off the doorway.
“Stay upstairs. Stay out of sight. Remember, son, you’re only here because I allow it. When you have no use left to me, you will cease to exist.”
He brushed past me, the scent of his cigar singeing my nose. He disappeared into the crowd, but the lingering discomfort he left on my skin stayed like a poison.
I stood there for a moment, my vodka bottle still dangling in my hand, the taste of ash and bitterness sticking to the back of my throat.
Then I smiled.
Because one day, I’d carve his words back into him, letter by letter.
And I would show him all the blood he had accumulated on my hands, right before I spilled every single drop of his own.