It took a lot to impress me but Cali had been doing just that from the moment we met.
She reminded me of a lioness, stunning and fierce as fuck. Now I understood why her skin was white as snow: it was a canvas meant to be covered in red. She looked like a goddess covered in blood, a homicidal angel with devil horns.
She surpassed my expectations and passed her first test. I had to be sure she wasn’t with The Order, and now I knew. Her hatred was a beautiful tool. Her pain was power.
There was no way to fake her kind of madness. I could see it boiling beneath her surface, eager to emanate. I didn’t need to push her into it; it already swam in her veins.
“So the madness got her, too,” Grimm mused, staring across the room to where Arlen was sleeping on the sofa.
“If she wasn’t with The Order, she was with another group,” Cobra theorized, blowing out a ring of smoke. “A group that either isn’t up to par on this century or they were keeping shit from her—specifically, shit about us. We all know she didn’t end up in those woods by accident.”
I crossed my arms and nodded. I wanted to know who kept her so sheltered that she didn’t know the one thing about me the entire world seemed to know. Unless she was as skilled in the department of duplicity as I was, then she truly was clueless. It was both a blessing and a curse for her to be so naïve. The blessing was, of course, in my favor. I was going to take everything she had to offer until I possessed her mind, body, and soul.
The feeling she invoked in me was primal.
If I was a shark, she was the blood in the water. I was the wolf and she was the rabbit. I wanted her so immersed in me that when she was faced with truth of my world, she would be immobilized.
“She’s…” Cobra trailed off, stubbing out his joint.
“Childishly maniacal,” I finished for him, opening a cabinet.
“Yeah, that.”
Handing him a bowl, I rolled my shoulders. “I don’t think that’s intentional.” I leveled him with a look that warned him to choose his next words carefully.
“I’m not judging; I was just pointing out your girl might be crazier than you.”
“David had her cut out of her mother’s stomach and raised her on his own. Who the fuck knows what went on during that time? She wasn’t fucked up when we saw her; maybe it’s her head’s safe place,” Grimm said. “Are we sure we want to deal with this?”
“Damn, Grimm, I feel your emotions so strongly,” Cobra joked.
I knew why he was really asking us that question, and didn’t bother answering it. Cali was not Tiffany. I didn’t need to use her to that extreme, and I sure as fuck would never share her. The thought of another motherfucker touching her was enough to make me see red.
A soft ping had us all looking towards the stairs, watching Cali make her way down them. She was freshly showered and dressed in an over-sized white tank and black lacy knee highs she tied together with a fitted leather jacket and the same pair of black boots from earlier.
She definitely had a certain way she liked to dress; pulling it off with a box of dead people’s clothing was impressive but I’d rather she have whatever she wanted at easy disposal.
With a smile and wave, she made her way into the kitchenette where the three of us were, giving Arlen a quick once over.
She impaled me with her blue gems and smiled a little bigger. I felt that shit in my gut.
I did a lot of sick shit. I killed without remorse and ruthlessly took whatever I wanted. I didn’t believe in any of that love at first sight bullshit—I didn’t even know what the fuck love was—but I was fucking positive Cali was my soul mate.
“Hey ya’ll.” She greeted all of us but came straight to me.
If any other chick tried this with me, she would have been drop kicked to the other side of the room. I didn’t do clingy, emotional, or needy. I did Cali.
Pushing a few stray strands of blonde hair out of her face, I gripped the back of her neck and pulled her into me, sealing my mouth over hers. She placed her dainty hands on my chest and sighed, parting her soft lips and twining her tongue around mine.
I loved the way she smelled because she smelled like me—like she was mine.
I felt like a goddamn Neanderthal as much as I kept repeating that word in my head.
My dick was constantly engorged since I’d met her. Fucking had never been a must on my to-do list and now it was at the top of it. Cali was a pain slut and I was more than happy to give her what she needed. Everything about this woman made me feel more insane than I already was.
“When you two finish mouth fucking, the chili is done,” Cobra drawled.
“I’ll wake the brat up,” Grimm volunteered, giving Cali an appraising look as he turned away.
“You need to eat.” Breaking away from her, I took the bowl from Cobra’s hands and nudged her towards the table. She eyed the ram-head centerpiece but didn’t comment on it.
“You could have done that a lot gentler, you shithead,” Arlen snapped as she took a seat beside Cali and glared at Grimm, who was holding her shoulder.
He gave her a rare smile and placed another bowl in front of her.
“This is really, really good,” Cali enthused, licking her spoon and giving me all kinds of visuals.
“Compliments to the chef, who also happens to be a pretty badass redheaded dude.” Cobra grinned and Cali beamed back at him.
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a weathered picture that was creased and wrinkled from how many times I had folded and unfolded it.
While it would be ideal to stay buried in Cali’s pussy all day and eat chili all night, that wasn’t realistic. I still had shit to do and the clock hadn’t stopped ticking.
As soon as she took her last bite, I placed the picture in front of her. “How many of these people do you remember?”
Her reaction was instant. An onslaught of emotions flashed across her face and I knew every one of them intimately, starting with anger, shame, and disgust before the pain was masked with indifference.
“All of them,” she answered in a flat tone.
“Which one hurt you?” Grimm interjected, asking the question I had never planned to ask but was going to.
Her blue hues darted around the room. Before she could have another episode like she did in my playroom, I brought her focus solely to me.
I gripped her jaw and turned her face towards me, blocking everyone else from view.
“Who was it?”
“All of them,” she whispered.
I refused to make eye contact with him after I answered. Grimm making a sound in his throat gave me the perfect excuse to look away.
No wonder he knew my name; he had to know I was David’s daughter, too.
The last thing I expected him to do was pull out a photo of David and his most trusted followers—me being amongst them.
I’m sure we looked every bit like a happy father and daughter from an outside perspective with the smile he had painted on his face and arm wrapped around my waist. No one but him and a few of his friends knew he was forced to hold me up so the picture could be taken because I had been ass-fucked the entire night before.
“Even the women?” Cobra asked. “Never mind; don’t answer that,” he backpedaled when Romero and Grimm both glared at him.
“It’s…okay.” I shrugged, trying not to think about it as I answered him. “The woman who raised me taught me how to give blow jobs and eat pussy.”
“All those fuckers deserve death,” Arlen spat. Her angry response was the only sound in the room for a good five minutes.
My face flushed and I looked down, using my hair as a curtain.
“She’s right.” Romero stroked the top of my head and expelled a deep breath. “How did you watch your uncle’s meets without getting caught?” he asked, steering the conversation in a better direction.
“They keep extra habits in one of the old confessional booths. I just wore one of those and hid inside it until he was done, and waited for one of the sisters to walk past alone.”
“That was really fucking stupid of you. If he’d known you were right under his nose, what do you think he would’ve done?”
“Stop calling me stupid!”
“Then don’t do stupid shit. What time does he do his meets and how far is it from here?”
“He meets every night at eleven, and I don’t know how far the church is from here because I don’t know where I am.”
“He meets in a church?” Grimm laughed darkly. “Does it have a lake behind it?”
I furrowed my brows, eyeing him suspiciously. “Yeah…how did you—”
“We can make it there if we head out now. There are robes and habits in the storage room.”
I let out an annoyed breath. They kept cutting me off. “Alright, so we’re going to church. Let’s hope it doesn’t burst into flames the second we all walk through the door.”
“Do I have to go?” Arlen piped up, drawing everyone’s attention to her.
“Fuck yes, you have to go. You’re not Cali; you don’t get a deal. You need to ask yourself, do you really want to be in? Because this is how you start earning that right.
“And be careful how you answer, cause if you say no, then we have a problem we need to immediately rectify,” Cobra stated.
“I’m not leaving Cali and you sure as hell ain’t killin me so yes, I want to be in,” she snapped back at him. “And before we go runnin off to some church, where is everyone else?”
“We are everyone,” Romero swiftly responded, pulling out my chair.
“There’s only…three of you?” she asked, her voice full of skepticism.
“Strength is in unity, brat, not numbers,” Grimm answered.
“Only five people live in this house,” Romero cut in with a hard tone, ending the discussion.
Arlen and I glanced at each other with the same knowing expression—he had just majorly deflected the question.
He was hiding something.