Chapter 8
CHAPTER
EIGHT
ARI
PRESENT DAY
Aiden seems fine. Actually fine. He doesn’t walk around like he is constantly being tortured by his dead brother’s memory.
I don’t understand how he is handling everything.
He goes to practice, tortures his ‘patients’, comes home, eats dinner, absolutely does not study, and lives his life. It is actually starting to piss me off.
Every single day it feels like a struggle just to get out of bed. I barely register going to any of my classes. What’s the point? My finance pathway was to help Brodie, but I highly doubt that Aiden is going to have any interest in my helping him.
The grief is drowning me, and I have no way to release the pressure. I have gotten into a pattern of only leaving my room for things that I absolutely must. Sitting through that dinner cemented it for me.
I am a pawn, not a queen. No matter how many times Brodie promised I would be his.
So I cannot be blamed for the scream that I unleash when I see Bosco lounging on my pillow, another spider sprawled on top of him. Clearly post fuck? Is that a thing for spiders? I didn’t know that they cuddled postcoitus. Fuck him. Fuck Aiden. Fuck everyone.
The rage is burning through me like a fire lit by gasoline. This whole goddamn family can go to hell, including their sexed out spider.
Picking up Bosco and his lover in my hand, I storm to Aiden’s room. Bosco has the nerve to give me a look as if I have interrupted him.
“You were already done, buddy. You’re lucky I took a long shower.”
Great, now I’m talking to Aiden’s godforsaken spider.
Approaching Aiden’s door, I slam it open. Aiden stands there with his gun drawn, ready for a fight.
“What the hell, Ari. What is your problem?” Clearly on his way out, Aiden stands there looking like the true son of Lucifer, dark jeans, black t-shirt, tattoos exposed, hair wet from a shower falling in front of his eyes. His eyebrow piercing adding to his whole spawn of satan vibe.
“Keep your spider on a leash. The horny bastard can fuck anywhere he wants in the house except my room.” I set Bos and his slut on the floor and watch as they scurry over to the bed, clearly not done, parking themselves on Aiden’s pillow.
How can he lay his head on that thing after Bosco violates it?
Aiden eyes me and then does the last thing I expect. He chuckles. Actually chuckles to himself. I don’t think I have ever heard that sound come from him, ever. It’s a husky sound, almost soft from under-use. And it takes everything in me not to crack the smile that threatens.
“You want me to keep Bosco on a leash?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so.” He turns, picking up his leather jacket and throwing it over his shoulder.
“He can go anywhere except my room. I want to be alone.”
He gives me a dark look. “Why? So you can keep crying yourself to sleep every night?”
“How do you know I cry myself to sleep?” Everything in me goes still. The words take hold of the air in my lungs for a heartbeat.
“Ari, everyone in this entire house knows you cry yourself to sleep. It is not quiet.” Stepping around me, he starts to head out of the room, clearly planning to leave.
But I am not done with him. My eyes are tired from crying, my heart still hurts, and Aiden is acting like an ass.
The exhaustion from maintaining this level of grief is slowly killing me.
And I refuse to let him leave this room without taking a swing at his own goddamn black heart.
“How do you do it?” Aiden stops but doesn’t turn around at my words.
“How do you get up every day and move on from your own stepbrother’s death?
What is your secret for pretending he never existed? To living without any answers?"
At that, he turns. “Ari, there is no secret. You have to move on. He’s not coming back. And every tear you cry is just a waste of liquid.” Aiden is cold and cruel most of the time. But with those words, he sticks a knife in my stomach and twists.
Tears form behind my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall in front of him. I am so fucking done crying. I shove him away from me as I walk out the door. But he grabs my arm before I can slam the door behind me. “Do you really want to know how I am coping?”
“Yes,” I sniffle. Completely undignified. I would be mortified if I wasn’t so exhausted.
“Come with me.” He heads out the door and starts dragging me downstairs.
“Aiden, I’m not dressed.” He looks back at me, in my black silk nightgown, wet hair, and lack of shoes.
“You don’t need to be dressed for where we’re going.”
Well, at least I am not naked.
Before we head outside, I grab a pair of my slippers from the hall closet. Silk nightgown and Scream mask slippers. If I get these dirty, I am going to rip Aiden’s throat out.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
He opens the door to his car and shuffles me inside. “Buckle up, venom.”
The morgue. I should’ve known it would be something to do with Aiden’s bloody little kink. Given how we grew up, where blood, mayhem, and a secret society ruled our lives, it was normal. Well, not normal. But it was Aiden.
Even before he became the Reaper, he was hell-bent on revenge.
An eye for an eye. Or more like a limb for a limb kind of thing.
Only he would double down, make sure whoever was on the other side had it worse than he did.
You could never let your enemies think you were soft.
When he stabbed Uncle Vin at the age of twelve for calling him a waste of sperm, we knew he was vicious with a mean streak you didn’t want to provoke.
Stabbing anyone, sure, but Uncle Vin at the time was a drug lord working for The Order.
That’s how he got his reputation.
The Reaper.
From then on, people would avoid him. Giving him at least a five-foot buffer. It didn’t help that he spent most of his time lurking in the dark, watching nightmares unfold, with a fucking spider on his shoulder. Aiden probably knew more secrets surrounding The Order than the current heads.
I had never been to his morgue. His private sanctuary, as Brodie dubbed it. The only two people who really came down here were Brodie and Ash. Ashton had enlisted Aiden to help him with his experiments shortly after the stabbing incident with Uncle Vin.
But walking into the inner sanctum brings goosebumps to my skin for a reason that I don’t want to examine too closely.
Here, Aiden was in charge. Completely. He was in charge of someone’s pain, their screams, their breath, and the number of heartbeats that they had left.
He was the devil come to life. And I was a little in awe of his power.
“So, why is he in here?” I ask as Aiden deposits a body onto the table.
Aiden pats the round gag over the man’s mouth, who is now shaking uncontrollably.
“This here is Ian. Ian thought he could snort his supply of coke instead of selling it, then skim profits off the top of his sales to the tune of $600,000. Plus, Gage heard a story that he was getting rough with some of the girls on our block, which we have a zero-tolerance policy for. To top off his list of crimes, when Gage went to retrieve him, he held a gun to him and tried to shoot his way out of his fate.”
Aiden laughs to himself as he ties the man down and contains his movements. “Lucky for me.”
Aiden takes Ian’s right hand and stabs it with a knife, leaving it there as Ian writhes in pain; as much as he can, anyway, being held immobile by several straps around his body.
Ash walks in as the man tries to scream through the gag, spit beginning to pool around his mouth.
With his clipboard in hand and syringe already poised, Ash walks straight up to the patient and plunges the syringe into his neck.
“Patient 0078, wonderful. Aiden, have you noticed any dulling of pain reaction from this one?”
Aiden shakes his head, “No, if anything he seems pretty normal. Little boring if you ask me.”
Ash frowns at that assessment. “Okay, well, I just administered another dose. Maybe fucking try to remember this time to take it easy, yeah? The last few have been a little… bloodier than normal. It would be nice to obtain static results.”
Winking at me, he turns to leave just as suddenly as he came.
“So this is what you do every night?”
He looks over at me. “Arianna, have you ever had the pleasure of feeling a knife slice right through someone’s skin?”
“No.”
“Well, now is your chance.” I blanch at that. Aiden nods toward a wall of instruments like it’s a buffet of food to choose from.
I hesitate before he gives me a push, and walking over to the wall, I look at the array of tools.
Knives, saws, scissors, box cutters, branding irons.
There’s even a goddamn pitchfork. Who does he have working for him, Goody Proctor?
Needless to say, if it could do any bodily harm, it was on this wall.
I pick up a knife from the bottom and grip it in my hand.
I never really thought of knifing someone before.
I just watched people do it over the years, like Anthony and Brodie.
Usually from afar. Never up close and personal like this.
Eventually, you become a little immune to it.
And hell, maybe I won’t like it, but if I could feel anything in my body other than grief, I would take it at this point.
Aiden eyes the knife I chose as I approach Ian—the body, probably shouldn’t really think of him as human at this point—and smirks, like he approves. “Nice choice, Ari. Do you know what that is?”
“No, should I?”
His gray eyes twinkle with laughter, but he doesn’t explain it to me, just prompts me over to the body, “Why don’t you try it and see what happens?”
I am a little confused, having used knives before.
How different could one really be? You just point and slice as far as I am aware.
Coming up to the body, I look into his cold eyes.
They are really almost black-looking, and his hair is wet with sweat; plus, there is a stench about him.
It’s all really gross work if you ask me.
I remember Ashton saying something about keeping this one cleaner, so when I pick up the knife, I hover it over his stomach.
Aiden steps up behind me and places his hand on top of mine, “There you go, little venom.” He kisses my cheek and urges my hand down until the knife breaks skin. The knife slides through his skin like butter. A lot smoother and easier than I thought.
Hmmm, that was a little anticlimactic. Aiden made it seem like the knife would do a little more. Aiden removes his hand from mine and, as he steps back, he whispers, “Enjoy the show.”
The body beneath me seems to struggle for air momentarily.
Interesting. I didn’t think we punctured a lung this low in his body.
Pulling, I release the knife from his stomach, and then there’s a loud pop, almost like a small explosion.
Blood and what I am assuming are guts rain out of him and onto me.
The thick liquid lands all over my black silk nightie and chest. A few splatters land on my face.
“What was that?” I gasp when the blood stops exploding and turns to a light bubbling.
Taking the knife from me, Aiden examines it closely. “That, my dear Ari, is a wasp knife. It emits CO2 into the bloodstream and then expands and explodes when it’s released.”
I should feel disgust. I know this. That would be any other rational person’s reaction. Harming another human being has never really been my modus operandi.
But shit.
Watching this man beneath me, this scum of a human—if I am to believe Aiden, which I do—bleed out beneath me doesn’t make me feel grief. It doesn’t make me feel weak or sick or helpless.
In fact, feeling the knife in my hand makes me feel fucking powerful. It’s like I can finally see the woman I was before death destroyed me. Almost like getting a small piece of the old me back.
So, without thinking, I snatch the knife right back from Aiden and start stabbing.