I startled awake in the silence, my fingers flexing then clenching into a fist as my heart pounded in alarm. Something was wrong. Seriously fucking wrong.
My eyes snapped open and I found myself staring at the fireplace which lay cold and empty, so clean that it was hard to believe we ever burned anything in it.
Where the fuck am I?
I pushed myself upright and frowned around at the open living space in the centre of The Temple as the memories flooded back in on me and my heart leapt right up into my throat.
This couldn’t be happening. I refused to believe it.
Panic welled up in me and my ears began to ring as I clawed my hands into my hair and tried to force myself to breathe.
My muscles were trembling, violent energy dancing beneath my skin with a desperate cry for an outlet as I tried to focus on anything other than the terrifying truth of what had happened.
I bowed my head and gripped my hair so tightly that my scalp screamed in pain as I tried to deal with the reality of having my routine so thoroughly sabotaged.
I focused on the memories of how I’d scrubbed every fucking thing in The Temple from the grey brick walls to the flagstones, to the stained glass windows and the font. There had been beauty in that work. So pure and real that just remembering the way I’d traced the lines of the mortar with the scrubbing brush helped my heart rate to settle. The Temple had never been so clean. So pure. It had been tainted beyond recognition by those fucking looters who ransacked it, but now it was free of sin. Innocent. Virginal.
A shaky breath escaped me as the voices clawed at the back of my skull. They whispered dark threats in my ears and promised failure on all sides.
My mind was drawn to the walk I’d taken down into the catacombs to deal with the body. How the cold of that place had crept over my skin. How silent it had been when the wind dropped and how loud when it howled through the cavernous system.
My memories zeroed in on the look on that fucking rapist’s face as it was frozen in pain and death. His glassy eyes had stared at me with the accusation that I was the devil incarnate. And there, in the memory of that look in his dead eyes, I found an inch of peace to settle me.
The cold hilt of the blade in my hand and the surge of power that had charged through my muscles as I’d driven it into him. That was true control. The power over life and death. Real, honest, justice which made my soul sing with purity. And so, the sinners shall be punished.
And better than that. I hadn’t been alone in my moment of salvation. I’d been surrounded by my brothers. United in the purest of acts to protect the girl who we’d taken for our own.
I wondered if she knew she owned me now too? If she understood how that act had bound me to her even more thoroughly. That death had been a sacrifice we’d lain at her altar as we professed our unending devotion to our idol.
Tatum Rivers. My temptation, my sweet torture, my endless agony and now maybe she would be my salvation too. Not that she knew it yet. But she’d bought herself a band of demons and paid for them in blood. Until last night I’d believed there were only two people I’d kill for in this world, but I hadn’t hesitated for a moment when the time had come for me to prove my devotion to her. Our Night Bound beauty.
I focused on the work it had taken to dispose of the body. To clean up the blood. The purity left in its wake. And I slowly began to relax. I could get through this. I could survive the disruption to my ritual if I just focused on that. I could face the fact that I’d been awake all night and slept during the day-
My muscles began to tremble again as I let myself wonder what time it was. I didn’t even know how I was to going to survive this day with everything off schedule. I’d just woken up and now what? Was I going to eat dinner like a fucking animal? Maybe I should just forgo food rather than eat it out of sequence…
A sound like a pure drop of heaven reached me as the first note of Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy spilled from the speakers and I fell still as the music reached out and brushed its fingers along my aching soul.
A warm body came to sit beside me, a muscular arm pressing against mine and I exhaled slowly as the music built around us and the tension in my posture slowly slackened.
I released my grip on my hair, my scalp tingling from the rough treatment as I tried to keep my mind on the beauty of what we’d done last night and away from the chaos of today. Of my ritual burning down and falling apart and the demon in me taking the excuse to have free rein and-
I leaned against my brother as he stayed beside me and the music surrounded me in its sweet embrace. I didn’t know which brother it was. Only that he was here. That both of them were always here.
I cracked my eyes open and found myself looking at Kyan’s tattooed forearm, my gaze catching on one particular piece of ink as the stalking wolf seemed to look me dead in the eye. At its back, two more wolves lingered in the shadows beneath a full moon and my fractured soul knitted over a little as I fought to hold the worst of me
