Chapter 5
Chapter five
Hayden Herron
I shouldn’t be here, but I’m back again anyway.
That’s what keeps looping in my head, over and over, as I shut her bedroom door behind me with two fingers soundlessly.
It’s after three, and the manor is dead quiet. No one is awake at this hour, not even the staff.
Her room is dark, but it wouldn’t matter anyway. I know my way around. There’s a lamp on the far side of the room, near her bookshelf, emitting a warm yellow light, not enough to hurt your eyes, but enough to see everything. She is afraid of the dark, I’ve noticed.
Her bed is placed in the dead center of the room—expensive wood and bedding, like everything else in this place. The sheets are white, tight, and crisp, like in a hotel.
She’s pulled the blanket down halfway in her sleep. One shoulder’s out, revealing tempting bare skin I’d like to bite down on to hear her yelp.
She doesn’t stir.
There's a coldness to her room, evident in the blatant lack of any personal touch. The house is all portraits, heavy velvet, and money, and you can smell it. Yet her room’s cold in a clinical way.
Stone floors. Everything is white or muted.
The essence of her personality is evident in the built-ins for her books, featuring rows and rows of color-coordinated hardcovers.
It’s spotless.
Not a sock on the floor. Not a single hair in the sink. The staff keeps it like a museum, and she prefers it that way.
I walk past the desk first, skimming the top of it with my hand. There's nothing on it but a lamp, a silver pen, and a leather journal.
I take a step closer to the bed.
She’s on her side, facing the windows. One arm above her head. Her breathing is slow and even. Her lips are parted just a little. There's a slight dent in the pillow where her mouth rests.
I could make a sound right now, and she would wake up, and it’s moments like these that remind me to be patient. That in the end, my silence will all be worth it.
Her vanity’s next. I pick up the only bottle of perfume sitting on the dark wood and take a deep inhale, nearly pressing the bottle to my lips. A fresh green smell of apples and honey. It’s what the room smells like, what she smells like. I can’t wait to smell it on her skin.
I hate how fucking painful it feels to wait. I hate what she does to me. It feels like a punch to the gut every time I’m in the same room as her. How much of me she already absorbs; my time, my thoughts.
I go to her bathroom that also lies nearly untouched: white tile, brass fixtures, a towel perfectly folded on the bar. One toothbrush with a pale pink handle, with her initials carved onto it in neat gold foil. “MLHR”
Does she like her surroundings this clean, or is this how it’s kept for her?
Should I lock her up in my bedroom for a week without visitors just to see how she’d care for it?
I take her toothbrush, slide it into my suit pocket, and start opening her drawers. Creams, makeup, and a hairbrush with a bit of her blonde hair in it. Maybe I’ll take that next time.
I don’t need her noticing the small gifts she’s been giving me.
I close the drawer, forcing myself to be soft with my movements. Fighting the urge to slam it and wake her. I want to see her terrified. Chest heaving with a scream on her lips, knowing with a sickening satisfaction that I was the man who put it there.
Back in the bedroom, she shifts under the covers. Her knee moves, but that’s all.
There’s a chair in the corner where I like to sit and watch her. I go to it soundlessly and take my usual seat.
It’s not the kind of watching that means anything. I’m not looking for a reaction. I’m not waiting for her to wake up. I enjoy watching her stillness or her soft movements in her sleep.
Sometimes I read her diary while I sit and wait. The creature she’s convinced she is in the pages doesn’t compare to the woman I’ve seen. Soon, there will be a time when I can have her. Take her and unravel her into the monster she truly is. Just like me.
She won't believe me at first, but I know it’s in there.
I sit here for an hour. Maybe longer.
Looking at her hands. At her beautifully rounded lips.
Her nails are short and clean, with a light layer of clear polish, and she doesn’t wear makeup to sleep, either.
I try to imagine what her voice sounds like when she wakes up, if it’s scratchy or soft.
I lean forward.
Close enough to see the tiny freckle near her temple. There’s a crease above her brow from whatever she’s dreaming about in her sleep.
For a moment, my breath hitches as she stirs.
I go still, clenching my hand on my knee.
But she doesn’t wake. Just rolls to her side and exhales, chest rising under the sheets.
I don’t know why I’m still here.
But I don’t move.
Martine Lilian Huntington-Russell
Present Day
The leather seat beneath me is cold. My limbs feel foreign, as if they no longer belong to me. I stare ahead, unblinking, barely breathing, as the estate fades into the darkness, swallowed by the night.
My father. My brothers. Their blood is still warm on the marble. Yet here I am, breathing shaky breaths with sweaty hands.
I don’t move. I don’t cry because I can’t seem to. I just sit, spine stiff, hands curled into my lap, my skin damp, bloody, and trembling.
Hayden is silent beside me. His long legs stretched out, one hand resting on the leather beside him, the other toying with the signet ring on his pinky.
The ring catches the passing streetlights, the intricate engravings on its face glinting as it catches the light.
I lean forward to see the skull and bones crest on it, the ring the Bonesmen wear.
The same ring my brothers wear.
Wore.
I steal a glance at him through my eyelashes out of the sides of my eyes. He’s calm and somehow unbothered by the scene back at the estate. Like he wasn’t just standing over my family’s bloodied bodies. Like he hadn’t just dragged me away from the only world I’ve ever known.
My pulse slams against my throat. “Where are you taking me?”
Hayden doesn’t answer, and I can’t stop the anger that coils in my gut, but there's barely any room for it. I’m so full of grief I’m nearly brimming over with it.
I swallow. “I need to go back,” my voice is thin, barely above a whisper, “I need…”
“You need,” he cuts in, smooth and unhurried, “to be quiet.”
The words are soft. But the command in them is sharp enough to slice skin. I can tell it’s not personal, it’s just an instruction I’m expected to follow.
A chill prickles up my spine. I rub my sweaty and bloody palms on the side of my thighs, then raise my hand and wipe my nose with the back of it, not caring for social graces.
“I didn’t ask for this, and I have no idea who you are. You have no right to take me!” I snap, my voice breaking.
“No.” He finally turns to me, his gaze unreadable. “But that doesn’t matter, does it?”
I hate the way he’s looking at me like he knows something I don’t. Like I’m already his.
The tires hum against the road. The driver says nothing, only a shadow behind the wheel.
I clench my jaw. “You had something to do with this.”
His lips twitch, but the amusement doesn’t reach his eyes. “Did I?”
“Don’t play games with me,” I hear the edge in my voice, sharp with the weight of my grief, my rage, my fear. “You knew something was going to happen to my family. You knew it, and you did nothing to stop it, didn’t you?”
I’m aware of the gravity of the accusation I’m making. I don’t know anything about this man, and suddenly I’m here, drowning in his aura of ownership and possessiveness, terrified at his odd assumption that I somehow belong to him now, as though I’m just an item picked up at an estate sale.
Like he can hear me thinking, he pauses. Leaning his head back against the seat, studying me, fingers still idly toying with that ring. He only hums in amusement.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
Frustration coils inside me, but there’s a weight beneath it, a heaviness dark and suffocating.
“You can’t simply take a person with no explanation. Tell me now why I’m here,” I demand.
He only cuts me a glance that could shatter glass.
Suddenly, like whiplash, the overwhelming truth of the day settles in my bones.
I have lost everyone. In one single day, my entire family has been slaughtered. Once the most powerful family in our Society, cut down to only bloodied flesh and useless bones.
I gulp at the fact that my mother and father are dead. But I break with the knowledge that Ford and Dex are gone.
And, for some reason, Hayden Herron is the only thing remaining. Now all that’s left to find out is why he’s all I have now. Did the Brotherhood assign us together? Did he make some pact with my brothers before their death considering my fate?
I suck in a sharp breath, suddenly unable to bite back my anger. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
A small, cruel smile ghosts across his lips. “Hayden Herron.”
“Obviously,” I snap.
I know his name. I know his face. I know the way my body reacted to him before I knew who he was.
Back at school, between dormitories, with vodka burning my throat, I felt a pull.
But I don’t know him. I didn’t know he was the devil then, or what sick and twisted involvement he’d end up having in my family's demise.
If he even was involved.
My gaze flickers to the ring on his hand again. The markings. “What is this ownership you seem to think you have over me?” I accuse.
For the first time, a flicker of something crosses his face. Amusement? Annoyance? It’s gone before I can catch it.
He twists the ring slowly. “I don’t answer to you.”
A sharp pulse of something hot and electric courses through me. I hate him. I hate him.
“Well you’re going to answer my questions,” I sneer, but I can’t look away.
“Why take me?” My voice is quieter now.
This time, he doesn’t hesitate, “Because you belong to me now.”
A shiver slides down my spine.
I shake my head, lips parting, breath stuttering. “That’s not—”