Chapter Thirty-Five
Raven.
The door to the Monroe Mansion opens for me even at this hour without having to knock as though the house itself were expecting me. But once I step through the threshold, there’s no one behind the door.
It only thuds softly behind me.
A game.
Gone are the tinsel and twinkling lights, the ornaments, and the warmth that usually fills this place during the holidays.
It’s just a vast, dead silence occupying the large home except for a crackling fire in the fireplace.
It’s nothing and everything like I remember.
I let my jacket drop to the ground behind me, uncaring if I leave a mess behind.
Let them find me.
A floorboard above me creaks and I already know to whom it belongs to and without another thought, I grab the oak banister and slowly make my way up the stairs, one foot in front of the other.
Memories of sliding down these banisters as a child to annoy Axel haunt me. How many pranks did I play? How many times did I force him to grab his mattress and join me in ‘sledding’ down these same stairs?
Too many to count .
The closer I reach the landing, the more I can see the soft orange glow of another fire emanating from the bottom of the door, calling to me like a moth to a flame… the fucking music that’s coming from inside those walls is nothing like the one being created inside my mind with each step.
A closer step to vindication.
My retribution.
My wrath.
My… sanity.
Whatever’s left of it.
The walls begin to pulsate, screaming to me here! Here! He’s. In. Here!
A low incessant hum of his murmurs. Whatever he’s saying, doesn’t matter. Will never matter. Has never mattered.
I enter the room with only one thing in mind – blood .
I can see the top of his head bobbing along as he speaks but the music… fuck it’s so… it’s so quiet now. His eyes widen as he takes me in. “Raven. What are you doing here?” He glances down at my free hand, the one holding the knife I’ve had up my sleeve and let it slip free into my grasp.
“Why?”
His eyes narrow, almost in a dissociative understanding of what I’m asking. “It was just business,” he shrugs.
Shrugs .
The simmering anger in my belly boils into fury but I won’t go silent into the night.
Not this time.
I take a step closer.
“Why?”
A spark of surprise flashes in his jade eyes at the sound of my now raspy voice but they’re the wrong kind of jade. So unlike my darling professor’s. No, this devil’s eyes are devoid of love, or warmth. They’re unkind, as if the light behind them went out a long time ago.
That’s okay. He’ll be back home in hell soon.
“You were simply an asset,” he says.
I was simply an asset .
A thing. A joke. A mere object.
A pretty little doll to be given away for the price of a soul.
My soul.
I take one more step closer and lift my hand, tipping the blade to his throat. That answer is just not good enough.
“Why?” I press the tip when he swallows, watching blood pour slowly out of the small cut onto the blade and chills spread throughout my body as it sings to me.
“I only negotiated for you to marry Tyler. The rest… you’ll have to ask him about.
We covered up as much as we could. His involvement.
Kept you under lock and key in that facility, Prescott making sure you still didn’t remember, still couldn’t speak.
I kept him safe. Did what I could to keep you safe.
And him, well, he was reprimanded by the Elders.
Couldn’t even negotiate for him anymore.
He’s stuck now. Nothing more than a Watcher.
A henchman. All because you. Didn’t. Die.
” He says that last word like a whisper, but it reverberates, bouncing off my eardrums, twisting and swimming back into my brain, sticking like cancerous tar in the crevices.
I let my hand fall to my side as John stares up at me. For years I thought this man wasn’t great, but I didn’t think he was… this .
“It may as well have been him that night. Our legacy… he still completed his initiation and that wasn’t enough.
Stephen still wanted more. After he found out it was you murdering them all, he still wanted you – now more than ever.
” He chuckles harshly. “I should’ve known you’d try to come for me. But I did nothing wrong.”
I snap. Without hesitation, I plunge the knife into stomach causing him to lunge forward, just like Thaddeus but this time, I go until I feel his stomach rupture and then drag the hilt as much as I can before withdrawing and then… keep fucking going even when he’s slumped on the ground, I turn him.
Anywhere I can reach. Anywhere that’s vulnerable I stab, and I slice until I’m drenched and I’ve hit every spot available to me. Drenched in blood and pieces of viscera but it’s… it’s so fucking warm and this melody…
Ohhhh God…
It's delicious .
Inhale.
Exhale.
Real .
My fingers are drenched in John’s blood that’s seeping out onto the floorboards. I’ve seen red before but not like this. Not as deep, not as beautiful, not as –
Every hair on my body stands on end, the air in the room zeroing in on me like a pressure so dense that it makes my ears aware of every inhale and exhale of my lungs and every slow beat of my heart.
There .
I tilt my head, looking straight ahead at the last Monroe family portrait painted… without me .
It’s a soft click, the kind you’d never even hear over your own breathing, but I’ve become so hyper-aware of this entity for the last twelve years of my life.
“Come out…. Come out… wherever you are…” I sing in a hoarse whisper.
Three heartbeats pass… four…
One soft thud of a boot.
The other.
I’m sure I look unhinged, blood on my hands and parts of my face, but as I turn, rising to my feet.
I make sure to take him in, dragging my eyes from the same dirty boots he wore while in the corner of that fucking basement Prescott had me in, watching over me while I was drugged, his denim jeans, black thermal long-sleeve shirt covering arms that held me while I slept, up his pouty lips that spewed comforting words, roman nose and landing on those chameleon eyes.
Eyes that watched over me during some of my darkest times.
Even in the shadows.
My breath hitches in my throat as I stare Axel down.
He shoves his hands in his pockets, as he keeps slowly striding toward me. “You found me.”
The hilt of the blade in my hand, while already warm from his father’s blood grows hotter in my hand.
I only have one word.
One question.
“Why?”