Lyla didn’t know what it was, or why she even felt something was changed. But the moment she woke up and started to leave the bed, iron bands wrapped around her middle tightened, holding her close.
“Dainn?” Her voice was soft, raspy from the sleep and his arms flexed against her stomach. She put her hands on them, scoring the muscular forearm with her nails, gently soothing whatever it was that was bothering him.
“I was nine the first time they came for me.”
Her breath hitched. His past. He was thinking about his past, sharing it with her. Finally.
She began to turn but he held her in place, her back to his chest, his words moving over her head.
“By then,” he continued quietly, “I already knew I wasn’t like the other boys in the home. The Morning Star Home had so many of them, and I was like none of them.”
The words penetrated her sleepy mind, clearing the fog. She looked at the open window, early morning light peeking from under the drapes, still leaving the room majorly in the darkness, right where he found comfort.
“What were you like?” she asked, her voice equally as low so as to not break the moment.
“Off.” One word, a long pause. “I was off. I didn’t feel what they felt, I didn’t see things as they saw them, I didn’t perceive the world as others did. My worldview even at a young age was skewed. I was selfish and easily angered, and if someone provoked me, I didn’t feel any remorse in making them pay.”
God, the way he spoke about himself as a child sent a tremor through her body. She tried to remember what she’d been like at that age—scared, lost, confused. She used to cry all the time, so much that the handlers had stopped punishing her for it because it only made her cry more. She’d felt too much, and it was such a contrast to who he had been.
Who he still was.
They were just both better at hiding it from the world.
She waited in silence, letting him continue at his own pace, not pushing him beyond whatever he was comfortable sharing.
“They came for me, when I was nine,” he picked up from the previous thought. “Except they didn’t know the kind of child I was. My eyes were always like this, and they called me ‘demon child’, thinking it would hurt me. I just smiled.”
Damn. That made her hands falter for a second before they resumed stroking his forearms.
“I smiled as I ripped them away,” he went on. Raising his hands slightly so see could see the burn scars on the back. “I didn’t know how to play with fire back then and got these.”
She traced the scars, not too prominent but present enough, and he turned his wrist, capturing her fingers, interlinking theirs together. “What happened then?”
He gave her hands a possessive squeeze before letting her hands go free, letting her stroke and soothe him again.
“I became a demon child in the true sense of the word,” he proceeded, his words falling on her head. “I killed anyone who got near me without any remorse. The adults didn’t know how to handle me. So, they brought in someone who wasn’t like them.”
Her breathing got heavier as she waited him out.
“A girl, a year younger than I was.”
Fuck. Monsters. Every fucking one of them.
Her fingers tightened on his forearms but she remained silent, letting the rage infuse her body. She had lived enough in this world to know where this was going.
“She was a small thing, so helpless,” he recalled. “I couldn’t kill her. So they began using her as leverage to make me… do things.”
She squeezed his arms, her body shaking, imagining the powerful boy he had been even as a child being controlled by those monsters, doing things he didn’t want to because he didn’t want to kill a helpless girl.
“What happened then?” Her voice broke, the tremor in her body audible in her tone.
“They used me for two years,” he told her matter-of-factly, and she closed her eyes. Not him. Not him too. Yet, knowing he’d been through some of the same thing she had made her feel more seen, more connected to him. And knowing that, seeing how powerful he had become, it gave her hope for herself, that maybe she could break the shackles of her past and find power for herself too.
“She was the only girl living in the boys home, and only because they kept using her to control me. And she saw that. She knew I was a killer, and she kept begging me to kill her when the pain got too much. But I don’t kill kids, not now, not back then.”
She waited, her heart getting heavier with each word.
“So, one night when no one was watching, she killed herself.”
Her breath hitched, her eyes squeezing shut, the pain for a soul lost heavy in the air. “What was her name?”
She felt his shrug. “I don’t know. They called her 5057. I’m guessing wherever she’d been before didn’t give the girls names like they did us.”
That was sad, so fucking sad.
Engrossed in the tale, she moved, trying to turn around, and this time, he let her. She settled, fully facing him, seeing those mismatched eyes of his that had made him a demon child to the monsters. He was more. He was the devil and he was hers.
She placed her hand on his jaw, rubbing his scruff with her thumb, their eyes locked. “Then?”
“Then,” he said, his voice a low rumble that rolled over her, his arms around her waist. “They let me go.”
She blinked, surprised. “What?”
“They let me go,” he repeated. “They knew with her gone they couldn’t control me again, and I was already twelve, getting older, more dangerous. So they decided it was better to let me go than to keep me and risk everything.”
She drew in a sharp breath. “Where did you go?”
“Nowhere, everywhere.” His fingers traced her naked back under his t-shirt. “They left me on the streets, and I stayed there for some time, stealing what I had to. I squatted in a school for a while, pretending to be one of their students, using their resources. The school was some kind of specialized one, and they had a martial arts class they gave to kids after hours. That interested me, so I got in there too. Then I squatted in one of the empty houses in the rich neighborhood when the owners had been away somewhere.”
That sounded wild to her, and absolutely terrifying. To be that young and be out in the world. “And nobody suspected anything?” she asked, both awed and scared at the thought that he’d lived through all that.
She saw his lips twitch, one of his hands coming to her jaw, thumb over her lips. “Just because I’m real with you doesn’t mean I’m like this everyone, little flamma,” he told her almost affectionately. “I fool people. It’s second nature to me. Even back then, I knew exactly what to fake into charming everyone into believing me, and they ate out of my hands. Boys wanted to befriend me, and I used them. Girls wanted to fuck me, and I used them.”
Oh, the danger of him.
She wondered what it would have been like, in another reality, if she had been in that school with him. Would he even have taken a second look at her? Would he have manipulated her into believing he liked her when he just wanted something else all along? Was he manipulating her now?
The longer she looked at him, the more his lips curved in a smile, the tighter his grip got on her jaw. “Second thoughts?”
“If I had been a girl there,” she worded her question but then left it, not wanting to know.
He rolled her under his body, his mouth inches from hers. “If you had been there, I would have fucked you. Then, I would have stalked you, and I would have made you mine. There is no reality where you and I exist that we don’t end up exactly where we are now. None.”
Inhaling deeply, she let her tight muscles relax as he kissed her, his tongue claiming her mouth, his hands claiming her body, his breaths claiming her heartbeats.
“What if I hadn’t wanted to be yours?” she provoked him, because god she loved it when his eyes flashed the way they were.
“Let’s not go there, Lyla.”
The soft warning of his words did something to her. His nose brushed hers, his grip on her jaw firm.
She knew what he meant. He would’ve had her, by hook or by crook, with or without her initial consent to be his. For some twisted reason, the thought of that didn’t fill her with dread as it should have. No. She had never felt more desired, more wanted, more powerful as she did when he told her this. And she didn’t know if he said it just to manipulate her, or because he genuinely meant it, but given the last six years he had spent doing exactly that, there was little reason to doubt him.
He kissed her for a few minutes, as though cementing his words, before he lay back down on his side, this time staring up at the ceiling, one arm behind his head, the other around her. She snuggled into his side, waiting for him to pick the story back up again, enjoying the way his hand spanned her entire ass before his fingers began to stroke her spine.
“I never forgot what The Syndicate had done,” he began again. “They made a massive mistake when they let me go. Exposing me to the outside world, it only made me realize how much power I had, and how much more I could have. Inside the home, I was limited about what I could do. Outside? The possibilities were endless.”
They must have been for him. The dangerous boy he had been would grow up to be an even more dangerous man.
His voice didn’t falter. “I didn’t have any plans in the beginning. But I wanted to make them pay for what they’d done to me, and what they were doing to some of the kids in that house.”
She was one hundred percent on-board with that. “What did you do?”
He slanted her a look. “I went back after a few years, once I knew they wouldn’t be expecting me. Every year, all kids were taken to a different site for inspection while the adults stayed back.”
“You went that day,” she deciphered, knowing he would’ve wanted the kids to be out of his way. “What did you do?”
“I burned it all down,” he stated. “Every inch of that ground, every brick of that house, I set it on fire. And I stood outside, enjoying the flames as they took everyone who had been inside. Alive.”
She shuddered slightly at the vivid imagery she could see in her mind, yet no sympathy hit her for those who had burned away. They had deserved to burn in the hell they had created.
“That’s when The Syndicate came to you?” She put the pieces together from what he’d told her. “And you worked for them for some time. But why go after them afterward, when you’d already destroyed those who’d hurt you? I don’t understand.”
He stayed silent for a long minute, simply staring up, his fingers lazily moving up and down her spine. She almost thought he wouldn’t answer when he spoke up again.
“I began to collect information within the organization. I got to know about how many operations they had in how many locations, about the different trades they were in, about the powerful people on the outside who were involved in some way or the other. I took all the information, and I kept saving it. Knowledge is power after all.”
Okay. That still didn’t answer her question.
“It was in my last year working for them that I understood the structure of the organization. It’s like a pyramid, with handlers at the bottom, their managers above them, then their bosses, and finally The Syndicate leaders themselves. None of the lower levels know anyone above beside their own contact. That’s how the organization has worked for decades and kept everything secret.”
Lyla stayed still, twining her legs with his to let him know she was there without breaking his flow.
“There are—or were—five leaders. The Syndicaters.”
“Is that what they call themselves?”
A dark chuckle left him. “On the nose, isn’t it?”
It was. But people like that with that high up the organization had to be full of hubris, so she wasn’t surprised. “What do you mean there were five leaders?”
“Four of them are dead,” he turned to look at her. “Now there’s just one.”
Her heart began to race at his words, at the implication. No way. She went up on her elbow, looking down at him in shock. “You mean if he is removed, the organization can… end?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” he explained, his eyes on her. “If he’s removed, someone else would rise and fill the void. And organization such as this, that’s existed for over five decades, it cannot be taken down in one strike.”
“But you’ve been working on it for almost two of those decades, haven’t you?”
“I have.”
Why though? She didn’t get that. It wasn’t because of some kind of moral compass that he had—she knew his morality was as good as null when it came to anyone but her. Even the kids, he wasn’t attached to but rather their helplessness made him step up. But a man like him, obsessed with taking the organization down, had to have some motive.
She didn’t voice any of her thoughts, waiting patiently for him to elaborate.
His jaw worked.
“That last year I was there, amongst the data I had collected, I found my own file.”
Oh.
Oh.
“I’d been bred to an underage girl by a man in his thirties,” he stated matter-of-factly. “She killed herself after giving birth to me, and I was put into the home. My sire—”
She held her breath.
“—was a Syndicater at the time.”
Speechless.
She was stunned speechless.
At her shocked silence, another dark chuckle left him. “I am the prince of this hell in every way. Fitting, isn’t it?”
She couldn’t say a word. She didn’t know what word to say. So she lay her head on his chest, her heart thudding as his beat at a steady pace, pieces of this man falling into place.
