Taint My Soul (Sinful Kings #1)

PROLOGUE

Elio. Ten years old.

Little Elio sat in the dining room, watching as strangers gathered in mourning.

He didn’t understand what had happened, but he knew something was wrong.

He also hadn’t seen his parents in a week and was starting to wonder where they were. They traveled a lot of times, but when they were home, they kept close and took care of him, showing him all the love in the world.

Elio missed them.

Since he didn’t want people to worry, he hid his fidgeting hands between his legs and watched as the voluptuous, dark-skinned woman sauntered up to him with a plate of cookies.

“Would you like to have some Elio?” She smiled and pushed a strand of her long braid behind her ear.

Elio nodded with a smile. His fingers curled around the edge of the cookie, and he lifted it from the ceramic plate, bringing it to his lips.

A faint crunch split the silence, crumbs clinging to the corners of his mouth.

A low, pleased hum escaped him. His lips stretched into a full-blown grin, excitement overcoming him.

Under the table, his heels knocked lightly against the chair legs. Back and forth.

Still, a part of Elio knew something was wrong.

Before they returned home, they were at the cemetery.

All Elio could think of was the uneven green grass.

His little mind thought about why the air was cooler here, why they were slabs of stone anchored into the earth.

Most of all, he wondered why they were putting two coffins into graves next to each other.

When he looked up at everyone, they looked sad, and it made an icy feeling settle on his chest.

A feeling he couldn’t name.

Then everyone left the cemetery and returned home, while so many strangers came to their house. Some whispered apologies to him. Others patted him on the back with huge, worrisome smiles.

But Elio couldn’t tell what had happened to warrant such a visit from people he didn’t know.

He got up from the chair in the dining room and walked down the hall, taking the staircase to his room, where he saw his father’s brother folding his clothes into his backpack.

“Are we going somewhere, Uncle?” He asks whilst holding the door. “Are Dad and Mum coming back? Why are they taking so long?”

Uncle David saw the panic that shimmered in his brown eyes. He stalked toward Elio and went to his knees, putting his hands on his shoulders.

“Elio…” the man sighed. “Your parents went on a really long trip, and they won’t return soon.” He smiles widely, but something in Elio did not trust him.

He only came over to their house a few times, and he caught him and his mother yelling at each other one time.

“I want you to return to the living room. I’ll be there in a second.”

“There are so many people in the living room. I don’t want to stay there.”

“Just do what you’re told, little boy,” Uncle David gritted his teeth and spun him around so that he faced the door. “Go on.” He said and shoved him outside the threshold. Then he slammed the door, placing a bridge between them.

Behind the closed door, Elio heard him mutter inaudible words under his breath, something he couldn’t understand.

He didn’t bother to stay there long, so he just shrugged and went downstairs.

Maybe whatever was happening made his uncle sad, so he didn’t want to see anyone.

Uncle David joined them almost an hour later and exchanged words with the strangers, and when night fell, they all spilled through the dimly lit porch and headed off to their various homes. Then his uncle took him in his car and drove to their new house.

As the years passed, he forgot his parents. He accepted his fate in the brown craftsman bungalow that sat across the street in the small mountain town, and an irresponsible uncle who beat down the house door in the middle of the night.

At first, David never laid his hands on Elio. Not until he turned sixteen. That night, Elio saw the rageful part of his uncle, and his heart split open and gave birth to something rebellious, something he couldn’t understand.

The man forced him into his car trunk and drove him to the family cabin, then he abandoned him in his basement for almost a week.

The quiet horror settled somewhere deep inside him.

It left a scar.

It festered.

It grew into something vicious.

Before he escaped his prison, it became something he couldn’t completely control. Some days, he wished for his uncle’s death. Other days, he wanted to do it himself.

Even when he had been free, it lingered.

But Elio never did it.

He was terrified of that part of himself. The part that wanted revenge for the hurt. The part that wanted to burn the world down for taking his parents away from him.

Even with the years of freedom he had, Elio walked back into the cage of the monster, not as the ten-year-old boy who lost his parents, but as the twenty-seven-year-old young man who was a university graduate and had a degree in Finance.

As Mason Cole.

A different name earned him a new identity, but that identity was stripped down to nothing when the monster found him again and buried its claws into his heart to rip it out.

He survived.

Mason was alive, but he was very different now. Different from the boy who wanted a quiet life. From the boy who had dreams and aspirations.

He was now the pawn of the monster who had trapped him, used to save himself.