3
Flying, fluttering, floating. Nothing to hold onto, only the threads of a vision: flaming wings and raging righteousness.
Angels were real. Rebel was a kidnapper. And I was lost in the black.
I flailed, battling to rise up to the light.
J, this is no time for the strong and silent act. I’ve been abducted and I can’t wake up.
Silence.
Alone, I stomped hard on the sickening terror rising in my gut.
I need you. I’m asking.
My own thoughts echoed deafening, now that the voice in my head had been silenced.
Help me, help me, help me…
My eyes opened. And I awoke from the dark…into the dark.
I gasped, shivering. Then I sniffed: spicy cinnamon spelled the air. Whatever I was stretched on, hugged me softly like a…bed?
I tried to sit up but I couldn’t. Something tight but caressing encircled my wrists and ankles. When I tugged at my arms experimentally, a chain clanked.
Kinky bastard angel.
I’d been spread-eagled to a bed by the punk who’d slaughtered Toben.
And I’d reckoned losing my job had been a screw up?
I sighed, booting my foot and clinking the chains.
I’d never played the damsel before and no way in any kinky angel’s dream was I playing it sacrificial now.
Yet it was there again: the slam — slam — slam of sweetness in line with my heartbeat. A rhythmic, tingling tide of sensation and taste. Sweet, coppery, and impossible to deny.
It was in me. For me. Rebel’s blood, I knew now. Familiar, I rode it.
Hell, it was my new addiction. And it told me that Rebel must be near.
Creak — a white ray of light bled in through the opened door, along with a burst of anarchic punk music: Angelic Upstarts’ “Teenage Warning”.
Then came a throaty giggle — but it wasn’t Rebel’s. Some bitch was out there with him.
Punk rebellion, giggles, and chains? It wasn’t as if I’d expected a freakshow like Rebel to kidnap regular style.
I blinked as the room awoke from the gloom in all its Tudor, oak panelled glory. When stone carvings of wolf heads snarled out of the ceiling’s corners, I flinched. The four-poster bed I was shackled to by suede lined gold cuffs had twisted front posts, intricate roses carved into the bedrails and frilly burgundy curtains: a princess’ wet dream.
Yet I was no captured princess; I was the beast.
I thumped my head back against a pile of scarlet rose embroidered pillows.
When the music died, Rebel slunk into my fancy prison cell. His studded leather once more hid his wings.
I screwed shut my eyes.
Rebel wanted a fairy tale? Then I’d play Sleeping Beauty, but he’d better hope he didn’t awake what was hidden, slithering inside me since my twenty-first, with a kiss.
Except, I hated the relief. It flooded me when I’d glimpsed Rebel’s familiar flame of hair and slouch around the door, his hands tucked into the pockets of his trousers.
I’d been caught in that shank-sharp line between craving my kidnapper, so I wouldn’t be abandoned, and terror at being powerless.
I don’t do powerless, not even for angels, the kinky sort who were stroking the backs of their fingers down my arm.
My bare arm.
I was naked, under the caress of a black wolf fur throw; the midnight strands tickled my tits. ‘Call a bitch romantic,’ I bit out, ‘but I like to save the bondage for the second date.’
My eyes snapped open, only to be staring directly into Rebel’s startled gaze.
A true angel with violet eyes.
So, what did that make me, with my one violet eye, and one black?
Rebel drew in his breath, stumbling backwards and landing on his arse. He gazed up at me with such meekness, the bloke could be mistaken for a cherub, not a killer angel.
Fool me once…
‘You’re awake then?’ Rebel grinned, bottom shuffling to the four-poster, before kneeling next to me, as if he was the slave, and I wasn’t bound to the bed. ‘You gave me a fierce scare with the almost dying bollocks these two weeks gone.’
I gawped at him. ‘Two weeks?’
‘Some git stabbed you.’ I jolted with the flash shot memory of Bisi twisting the Zombie Slayer into my kidney. But there was no pain remaining, not even a dull ache. I felt the strongest…fittest…most powerful…I ever had. ‘We’ve been healing you.’
‘You mean stripping me? Where are my clothes?’
He flushed. ‘I didn’t… I mean, I haven’t…’
‘The newbie desperate to see a human woman’s—’
‘Lay off, Lady Muck. Ma said—’
‘Angels have mummies?’
‘It was humans who helped you, like Ma. And she said you should be dead.’ He smoothed his fingers through the wolf fur throw, soothing himself. ‘I’m adopted.’
Who wouldn’t want to adopt an angel? Just as no one had wanted to adopt a freak with mismatched eyes.
Rebel’s scrutiny was suddenly too intense.
Hell, where were my sunglasses?
I bit my tongue to stop the scream. Clothes were nothing but cloth. But stealing my sunglasses was a violation that burrowed deep to the places where the nightmares gnawed.
I thrashed in the chains; my shoulder sockets pulled. I arched like a wild cat, until even the suede chaffed my ankles.
Someone lay over me, holding me down and still.
Safe.
I sobbed, resting my cheek against this someone’s cheek, as their heartbeat throbbed against mine and our legs tangled.
I was cocooned in the sugar copper of their scent.
‘My sunglasses,’ I gulped out.
‘I’m a muppet.’ Rebel petted my hair, and — in that moment — I didn’t want to break his fingers.
A gossamer press of lips to my forehead, before he eased off me. He opened a drawer in an oak chest of drawers beside the bed, snatching out my sunglasses. When he pushed them onto my nose, I cringed.
How had I allowed myself to sob in Rebel’s arms exactly like that captured princess?
‘If you ever touch my neck again, like you did when you kidnapped me?’ At my snarl, Rebel slumped onto the bed, his own collared neck swan-like and exposed, as if in supplication. ‘I’ll snap yours.’
Rebel fidgeted with the frilly edges of my pillow, before nodding. ‘I’m sorry,’ I was shocked by the pained contrition in his eyes, ‘I had no right. But you’re alive—’
‘I’m your prisoner. In a creepy arsed mansion. Strange, but I’m all out of happy juice.’
‘Ma said you had to keep still for the herbs to work.’
‘To hell with that, mummy’s boy. Where are the other angels? Because if I believe in you, then there must be others, you get me?’
‘They’re not here.’
Rebel’s gaze slid away from mine: definite shiftiness.
‘Cheers, Mr Specific.’ I banged my wrist cuffs together. ‘Now I’m all fixed up, where’s the key?’
He rubbed his thumb over the bruises, where I’d pulled against the cuffs. ‘It’s too soon. I have to protect you.’
‘From what?’
His thumb traced circles on my inner wrist. ‘Everything.’
‘Too late, pretty boy,’ I hissed, hating that I couldn’t move or shank with more than words, ‘epic fail. I’ve lost my job, apartment…life. Oh yeah, and you killed my boyfriend.’
This time there was no contrition. ‘Git deserved to die. He was after selling you. And your sister.’
Jade.
Rebel could shank with a word.
‘You reckon I’d cower here, whilst my sis is missing?’
He leaned closer as he whispered, ‘Don’t tell.’
Then his fingers pressed into my neck, and I shuddered at the invasion, as unexpectedly our bodies, minds, and souls became melded. His power surged through me, holding me motionless in its thrall.
In the bondage of my chains, Rebel also held me in the bondage of my mind, suspended above an abyss, whilst he flicked through my memories, so quickly they blurred like life seen from the back of a motorbike. Narrower and narrower, they focused on Jade: the flick of her pink-streaked black hair and shy beam, when she’d curled up with me to open her birthday present.
A crystal angel on delicate gold chain.
Suddenly, as if the memory was the launching pad he’d been searching for, Rebel was soaring. Then he was gone. And I was alone above an abyss.
I howled into the void, before a pull dragged me back to the wood-panelled room scented with cinnamon.
‘I warned you, bro, I’d snap your neck.’
‘Away with you, an empty threat,’ Rebel shrugged, even as he peered at me anxiously. ‘I’m thinking you’ll be after knowing about your sister?’ I didn’t understand his glance at the open door or the flash of guilt across his pale face, before he murmured against my ear, ‘All I know for sure is she’s no longer connected to you.’
My heart thudded. ‘Listen, bastard, Jade will always be—’
‘Rebel, come here. You are in need of your lesson.’ A man’s deep, aristocratic command from the corridor outside.
Rebel jumped and grimaced.
I remembered his urgent Don’t tell.
What the hell frightened an angel? Or made him hang his head like a naughty school kid?
Rebel dawdled across the bedroom, clomping his boots on the oak floor, before glancing over his shoulder at me with a tight smile. He curled his hand around the door, glancing back at me with a rebellious grimace. ‘I won’t leave you in the dark.’
Except, without my sister, or J, and now without Rebel, that’s all I was.
Not connected to me? Screw that.
A long moment’s silence and then…
Whish — crack.
I startled.
Whish — crack.
Then a stifled yelp. Rebel’s yelp.
Whish — crack.
The beating washed over me in a whistling wave, as Rebel’s cries broke to weeping.
This was the lesson being taught by the owner of that deep voice, which Rebel had jumped to obey?
Despite the cuffs at my wrists and the annihilation of my world on Utopia Estate, I remembered the glory of Rebel’s wings and the awe that had pushed Toben to his knees. I whirlwind spun, a rage of bone and feathers, that a human would dare thrash an angel.
Whish — crack.
Rebel keened.
I hid my face against the pillow, clenching my fists. Then I let out a strangled choke.
A rattan cane bit into my throat like a garrote.
My eyes rolled back. I couldn’t breathe. My skin bruised.
‘When I first saw what the naughty boy had dragged home, I voted to feed you to the wolves.’ That throaty giggle again. The brush of petalled silk, as the woman slithered onto me like a rose oil scented snake; I gagged. ‘But no, I can’t touch what’s special. Are you, I wonder, worth the price?’
The cane eased at my throat. I retched, struggling to scrutinize the skank in crimson velvet sweater and billowing emerald skirt who was straddling me. Her wild black curls thwapped me in the face, as she swung the whippy cane like she was trying to hypnotise me.
One of Rebel’s humans. And a definite Big Bad.
‘Let me go and maybe you’ll find out,’ I growled.
The rose and thorn bitch smirked. ‘I’m not naïve like Rebel. Try harder, or don’t.’ She shrugged. A sickly rose perfume clung to her clothes, hair, and eyelashes; it sweated from her skin. ‘In Tudor times, this House of Rose, Wolf, and Fox was a schoolhouse. My uncle and aunt are, you could say, teachers of sorts. And I’ve grown up here,’ she scowled, and I shrank back, ‘in the shadow of one thing: the angel they loved as teenagers and lost.’
‘Boo hoo, yeah? Poor little rich girl. Do you want to swap childhood survival stories? Because I’m not in the mood.’
Swish — the savage with curls raised the cane above her head to cut it down across my cheek.
I recoiled against the pillows.
‘If you’re vexed, Evie, then punish me.’ Rebel caught the blow. It raised a livid red line down his palm, but he clung onto the thin cane.
Evie wrenched away the cane, flinging it to the other side of the room against the oak panelling.
Tear tracks stained Rebel’s face, and he avoided meeting my gaze.
Why would my own abductor protect me? But then why had he saved me from Toben?
Evie made a point of sneering at me, before simpering at Rebel. She wound her arms around his neck. Then she snogged him like he was the sacrifice at a cannibal’s feast.
‘You didn’t tell me your new toy was awake, my wicked love,’ Evie pouted, her ruby lips thick and wet, when she finally drew back.
‘Didn’t get the chance,’ Rebel shifted uncomfortably.
‘Want me to kiss it all better?’ When Evie dragged Rebel towards the door, I noticed he was limping.
He glanced back at me with an apologetic shrug.
‘Why are you letting these humans own you?’ I asked.
He stiffened, faltering in the doorway. ‘They don’t own me, but I’m their boy because they adopted me.’
Naïve? That’d be right. These humans had twisted the beauty of true adoption, but Rebel didn’t have a clue.
I lay in the twilight, amongst the silk, fur, and chains, unable to escape the squeak of bedsprings, banging of the headboard, and the moaned ecstasy, whilst my enemies screwed.
As Evie shrieked her way to a climax, an older woman clopped into my bedroom in over the knee boots. ‘As Rebel’s Ma, I should introduce myself.’
I lay motionless, expecting another vicious attack, but unlike her niece, Ma was English country woman does mindfulness, in a vintage ruched black dress lined with fur and a sharp silver bob. A large wolf pendant glowered at me from around her neck.
Ma perched on the edge of the bed, before pressing a gold goblet of water to my lips.
Too parched to do careful, I gulped. ‘Cheers.’
Ma didn’t reply. Instead, she broke off a piece of dry toast from an oak platter, and I nibbled from her thin fingers like a baby.
It hurt to swallow.
Ma’s gaze was shuttered, as if she wasn’t handfeeding a naked prisoner to the soundtrack of shagging just next door.
How had my life become being the prisoner of an angel and his crazy adoptive family?
At least Ma was acting kind. When she brushed crumbs from my mouth, I smiled.
Until Ma murmured, soft as honey but sharp as a shank, ‘Fool that you are, little girl, you imagine you’ve faced this world’s nightmares or — dream on — that you’re the nightmare. Whatever.’ Her lip curled, like a surly teenager. ‘The angel is ours. And if you ever think to steal him…’
A dry hand clamped over my mouth. Another pinched shut my nose. I hollered against the gag. My lungs struggled and strained. Panic clawed.
Ma’s eyes — crinkled at the edges but not with kindness, I realised with shock, rather with a dancing cruelty — chased me into the dark.