19. Celia
Chapter 19
Celia
There’s a certain kind of power that’s addicting. I used to think that having social status, being the name on everyone’s lips, and having the power to influence others’ opinions was the height of my existence. Hosting dinner parties, attending lavish private events, and catering to my ex-husband’s every whim were my arena, and I was at the top of my game.
But this —this is another level of satisfaction that I never knew existed.
I whip around a sharp corner with a shriek of pure joy, the tires hugging the road in a perfect balance of control and power. We zip down the road faster than anything I’ve ever experienced before, the wind roaring in our ears as I punch the gas. Rebel pumps his fist against the roof of the car with a whoop , holding onto the two front seats to keep himself steady. I insisted that he wore a seatbelt, but the man wouldn’t be deterred. If he isn’t in the front seat with me, he’ll still get as close as possible—which, for now, means hugging the middle console. Most sports cars only have two seats, but somehow Rebel found a four-seater and had it delivered in record time.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d suspect he wants to have an orgy in the backseat.
Laughing at the mental image of the gymnastics required for that feat, I can’t believe any of this is real. I just jerked off two men! At once! Past Celia would have been mortified, but the new me wonders what’s next. The Eiffel Tower, isn’t that a sex position with the woman framed between two men? Could we try that?
After seeing both Rebel and Ruin drop their pants beside each other, I’m willing to bet that they’re open to more than they ever imagined, too.
The thrill of endless possibilities is a high of its own, but that thrill being partnered with Rebel’s glowing grin in the rearview mirror and the peaceful tap of Ruin’s fingertips on the dashboard heightens the feeling. Today feels like a perfect day, and I don’t want to waste a single second of it.
“Oh, Than wanted us to stop by your house.” Rebel points to a street a few lights down the road. “Take a right, and we should hit North Side again. Then we can cut across the river and be there in no time.”
“What for?” I follow the directions, eager to head home no matter the reason. Despite how nice it’s been sleeping in Rebel’s bed, I miss my own. Maybe I can convince the boys to let me stay the night at home—and if they agree to join me, they might actually say yes.
Rage won’t like it, but Rage isn’t here to tell me no.
“Supplies pick up,” is Rebel’s reply. “He dropped off a package for us.”
“At my house?”
He nods. “At your house.”
As we drive over the largest bridge in the city, the river sparkles like a bed of diamonds. I glance down the waterway to the ocean glittering in the distance, marveling at how beautiful the city is. Waterfront on one side, mountains on the other, with a sprawling metropolis in between. Harlin Heights really is beautiful—it’s the perfect place to raise a family. I’ve always believed that a robust childhood filled with beachy weekends and movie nights and camping under the stars would enrich my future children’s lives in a way that mine was lacking.
I won’t enroll my children in finishing school or force them into ballet if they don’t want to point their toes or wear tutus. We’ll go camping or fishing or hunting—assuming their father knows how to do those things—and spend hours at the park on the swings, or attend the annual fair in the fall to pet the cows and ride the ferris wheel.
We’ll ensure that our children have a better childhood than we did.
Rebel hums a tune for the rest of the drive to my house, and to my surprise, Ruin picks up the tune in a gravely, low pitch. I listen intently but can’t pick up the melody. It’s only when we’ve pulled up the driveway that I recognize a Russian word on Ruin’s lips, but by then, they’re both already stepping out of the car. Rebel opens my door for me and greets me with a smile that ignites sparks in my heart.
Things might be turning around for the two of us. My first night back when we visited the diner feels like a lifetime ago, but I still remember the salt on his lips and the cool night air clinging to our skin. It’s the first time he asked me to trust him—to let ourselves figure things out between us—and I think I’m ready to know what that means.
I’m grateful that the idea of having a child doesn’t scare Rebel off. He might not vocally talk about becoming a father like Rage does, but if he weren’t at least open to the idea, I think he’d be running for the hills instead of holding my hand as we walk up the path to my front porch. “How old are you, Rebel?” I ask, watching as he grabs my spare house key from its hiding spot behind one of the porch columns. He really has made himself at home here.
He licks a stripe across his teeth as he unlocks the door and lets us all inside. “Twenty-eight, but my birthday’s in a few months.” He jabs his thumb in Ruin’s direction. “Ruin’s twenty… five, right?”
Ruin grunts, which apparently means yes.
“Yeah, twenty-five. And Rage is the oldest until you bring Thanatos into the picture. He’s got us all beat by about five or ten years, give or take. He was already in school when our parents got together and had Rage.”
I do the math in my head to piece together their family tree. “Thanatos is in his forties?” He sure doesn’t look it. I guess the grays streaking through his hair or his bleak outlook on life could give it away.
Rebel shrugs. “Something like that, yeah. He’s pretty old.”
I nearly choke. “Forty isn’t old!” I’m rounding the corner to thirty in a few weeks—I don’t need my boyfriend thinking that I’m old next!
“How old are you?” Rebel asks.
Ruin answers for me. “She is twenty-nine.”
“Damn, crossing the bridge into your thirties, huh?” Rebel whistles long and low, laughing when I smack his arm. “I’m just kidding! Hey, stop it! I’m kidding! ” He grabs my wrists and pins me to the wall in the entryway, grinning as he presses his body against mine. “Easy, baby, easy. I promise, I’m into older women.” To prove his point, he licks into my mouth and teases my tongue with his, groaning as he tilts my head back and deepens the kiss. Cupping my face, he sighs against my lips. “Your age doesn’t matter, Celia. Older, younger, I don’t care. Because this is real.”
His kiss lingers in my system long after he’s stepped back to give me space. My body thrums with the intensity of it—of this feeling growing between us. I find myself smiling as I reacquaint myself with my house. Throwing out old food from the fridge, sifting through the mail piling up on the kitchen counter, tidying up the rooms. “Have you been getting my mail from outside?” I toss the junk mail into the trash and flick through the bills with disinterest. “Rebel?”
Voices float down the stairs, meaning that he’s rummaging through my things again, likely through the panty drawer, knowing him. Rolling my eyes, I follow the sound and walk up the flight of stairs to the second floor. A shiver rolls down my spine at a smear of blood on the wall—is that mine? Or my attacker’s? I haven’t forgotten about the break-in, but I’ve been able to avoid thinking about it with everything that’s been going on. Swallowing the lump in my throat, I push open my bedroom door to find both men standing in front of my dresser, the top drawer pulled open in front of them.
“I’m telling you, this one has to be her favorite.”
Something vibrates, and panic makes me yelp. “ Rebel! ” Storming over to them, I yank the vibrator from his hand and hold the button to turn it off. “Stop playing with my things!” A blush breaks out across my face. “I thought we were here for supplies!”
“Oh, we are. I’m packing your stuff for you. The most important things go first, and that is very important.”
“It is not!” My face burns with embarrassment. “ Please stop stealing my things.”
Rebel smirks, not sorry in the slightest. “Alright, krosotka , I’ll play nice. You can pack your vibrators yourself. I’ll grab the package Than left downstairs.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”
While he disappears downstairs, I throw random things into my suitcase, too frazzled to pack anything with intent. It feels like I’m saying goodbye, and that’s not at all what I want. This place is my home. It has been for half a decade, at least.
“What do you think about staying here for a while?” I ask Ruin, glancing up at him. He’s been silently watching me pack for the last few minutes, not nearly as interested in my belongings as his brother. He doesn’t respond, which isn’t helpful. Sighing, I sit on the edge of my bed and press the heels of my palms to the backs of my eyes. Merging worlds with them is easier when I can pretend my old life doesn’t exist.
I glance around the master bedroom and see all of the memories I’d hoped to build here. A baby’s cradle in the corner by the window. A spring breeze fluttering past the curtains while the baby laughs in my arms. My husband—who no longer looks like my ex-husband Ted, but a dark-haired, tattooed figure—bouncing a toddler on his knee from the bench seat at the foot of the bed. This house was meant to be a home full of life and vibrancy, with children’s laughter bouncing off the walls and silly little crayon drawings hidden on the closet walls.
Instead, the house has become a memorial to the life I thought I’d have. The one I always wanted to build. And that thought is very sobering… and downright depressing.
“What is wrong?”
I blink tears from my eyes and look up at Ruin. His fingertips ghost across my cheek, brushing a stray tear away. If it weren’t for the mask obscuring his features, I could almost picture the frown on his lips.
Lips that I’ve kissed.
Sighing, I shake my head. “It’s nothing. Just reminiscing, I guess.” There’s no sense crying over what could have been. My life was never meant to turn out how I imagined, and I need to come to terms with what’s real and right in front of me. Taking Ruin’s hand, I lace our fingers together. Tattoos peek around his knuckles, symbols and numbers that seem random to the untrained eye. “What do these mean?”
He spreads his fingers for me to see his tattoos. Pointing to each of them, he rattles off various things. “My first kill. My second. The weapon that made this scar—” he lifts his shirt and points to a jagged cut along his abdomen—“and the one I used to kill a difficult target.” He doesn’t expand on any of these stories in detail, but I don’t push him for answers. It’s not like he pushed me to divulge what I’m sad about. I need to respect his boundaries, too.
Lifting his knuckles to my lips, I kiss each one in order from his thumb to his pinky. A sound catches in his throat, and he pinches my chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Why?”
I meet his eyes, unsure of what to say at first. “I know that you’ve done bad things in the past. I want you to know that it’s okay. We don’t always have a choice. Sometimes, the choice is made for us, and we can’t control what happens next.”
He presses the pad of his thumb to my lips and pulls them apart, feeling for my teeth. “Pretty words,” he muses, “but not true. I have done bad things, krosotka , because I am good at them. Every kill I’ve made, I chose to follow through. I could say that I was following orders, that the choice was made for me, but that is not true. I’ve looked Death in the face and smiled as his friend.” Slipping his thumb over my tongue, he pinches my chin harder, digging his fingers into the soft flesh beneath my jaw and making me flinch. “You may think you understand, but you don’t. There are things stronger than flesh, things I have seen, that I have felt, that no one else has, and no one else will.” He releases my mouth, and I fall back onto the bed, cupping my throbbing jaw.
Ruin towers over me, his hand hovering over my thigh. “There are things stronger than flesh,” he repeats, grabbing my leg and lifting it higher on the mattress, “but the body is the gateway to finding them.”
My heart pounds as he spreads my thighs wide and exhales harshly against his mask. He stands there staring at me for a long moment, like he’s unsure how to proceed. I guess in the past when he visited me at night and touched me, I was in a nightgown, not jeans. He had easier access to my pussy.
“Is that what you’ve been doing? Searching for something?” It sounds a little insane, but I’m trying to understand. I need to understand if he’s going to be a permanent fixture in my life.
He grunts, which I think means yes, and pulls the hunting knife from his belt. The same one he pushed inside of me before, in the bathroom back at his apartment.
I scrabble up the bed away from him. “Oh, no. Not again. Put the knife away, Ruin.” I keep my eyes on him while I shout for his brother. “Rebel! Ruin has a knife!” I’m not opposed to a little kink in the bedroom, but a knife in the hands of an unrepentant killer might be pushing my boundaries a little too far.
Something shatters downstairs and thundering footsteps storm up the stairwell. “Ruin! I already told you, no knives!” The moment he spots his brother from the doorway, Rebel flies across the room and tackles him. “Drop it!” He grunts as he tries to force the knife from Ruin’s grasp, but he’s got a death grip on the handle. There’s no prying it free.
I jump up from the bed to put more distance between us. I like Ruin, I’ve always been intrigued by him, but I think he’s got a lot of trauma to unpack, and when he pulls out a knife…
Ice chills the blood in my veins.
I’m scared of him.
Rebel gives up on forcing Ruin to drop the knife. “Fine, just put it away! You’re scaring her!”
“I need to see,” Ruin murmurs, “I need to see it.”
“Not today, buddy, not yet.”
I scoff. “Not yet? Don’t I have any say in this?”
Rebel ignores me. “Here, look into my eyes. Can you see it? You know it’s there.”
Ruin shuts his eyes and shakes his head. “I want to see hers. ”
I look between the two of them, unsure what to do. “What is he looking for?”
“That’s a hard question to answer,” Rebel huffs, “but it has something to do with our?—”
“ Shut up! ” Ruin snarls, pushing his brother off of him. “I won’t find it if it knows I’m looking for it!”
Holding his hands up, Rebel sighs. “Okay, okay. I won’t tell her. But promise me that when we do this—because we will, just not right now—that you won’t do it alone. I have to be with you when you look for it. Okay?”
Ruin clenches the knife handle tightly. “We can look right now.”
“ No, man, we can’t.” Rebel glances over at me, and in another first for the day, he looks defeated. This isn’t a battle he’s going to win in the long run. Whatever it is that Ruin wants to do with me, he’s going to do it. All Rebel is doing now is stalling for time. “She’s not ready yet. If you look now, you won’t find it.”
I flinch as Ruin looks in my direction. But he doesn’t step any closer; he slips the knife back into the holster on his hip and rumbles deep in his chest. “She’s not ready,” he agrees, clenching his fists. “But when she is, I’ll find it.”
The look Rebel gives me next is solemn, but it’s clear whose side he’s really on. It won’t be long before he lets Ruin do whatever it is he’s trying to do to me. If a knife in the pussy is considered foreplay, I can’t imagine what comes next.
I wrap my arms around my stomach and try to calm my racing heart. No matter what it is that Ruin ultimately does to me, Rage and Rebel won’t let Ruin hurt me.
If they’re around when it happens.
And when they’re not, I need to be ready for Ruin.
Whether that means defending myself… or surrendering.