King looked amused and crossed his thick arms over his partially exposed chest, a chest I was trying my damnedest not to look at. “What is it that you want?” he asked.
The old Mia, the one who hadn’t watched a twisted, sick criminal named Vaughn gut her brother like a fish, would have danced around the answer. She might have even asked nicely. But the new Mia, who’d had her life turned into a never-ending stream of chaotic crap, knew she had to watch out for herself. And I don’t care what anyone thinks anymore. That’s for sure.
“I want them destroyed,” I said. “I want the 10 Club dismantled.”
“You do still care. Proof being your request.”
“Stay out of my head.” I shot him an angry look. “I’m not here to engage in a mental exploration of my feelings. I’m here to lay out the terms of our deal.” I held up a finger. “That was number one. There’s more.”
“While I am intrigued by the rationale behind your requests, what you ask is impossible.”
“Impossible is dead people walking around for thousands of years and driving cars. Impossible is bringing someone’s deceased brother back to life with a rock.”
His eyes glowed with a subtle humor. No, I didn’t care why.
“Those are improbable,” he said smugly, “not impossible.”
“So is ending the 10 Club,” I argued.
“Point taken; however, what you ask means having to kill them all. That would take years. We don’t have years; we have seven days.”
Yeah, thanks to you.
I thought about the situation for a moment. “Okay. Then kill their leaders, starting with Vaughn.” They’d be crippled without any formal organization. The members paid an enormous sum of money into a pool each year to buy their unfettered freedom, making them above the law of any government. Without someone at the helm, someone powerful and ruthless they all feared, the club would fall apart under the weight of their own selfish, evil, cutthroat agendas.
“An excellent point, Mia. By the way, you never inquired as to why I made the deal to surrender my belongings in seven days.”
“Why? Wait, don’t tell me. It has something to do with the Artifact.”
“Very good,” he said a little too haughtily. “In fact, it has everything to do with it.”
“So you have it?” I gasped as I spoke.
“Indeed, I do.”
“Ohmygod.” Why wasn’t he dancing a jig? This man had been hunting the Artifact for, well, I didn’t know how long, but I guessed it was thousands of years.
“However,” he added, “that was not the only reason I made the deal.”
I stared in anticipation. This news was already big. Huge, in fact. We had the goddamned Artifact! All I needed now was…well, to trust the guy and find some way to love him.
That’s what all this vacation and marriage crap is really all about. Now that he had the rock, he’d planned to woo me because he needed me to develop some sort of romantic feelings for him. Always one step ahead.
King’s handsome face sparked with an arrogant grin, indicating I was right. “I also bartered for my wedding present to you.” He dipped his neatly groomed, full head of black hair, gesturing toward the kitchen. “Right this way.”
My mind twirled in ecstatic circles as I followed King down a set of stairs hidden toward the back of the enormous home, near the servants’ wing. I couldn’t believe it; he’d managed to get the rock. That meant I’d soon have Justin back to my poor parents.
“Where do these stairs go?” I asked.
“My dungeon, where else?”
That explained it. The stairwell was scary as hell with violent colors dripping down the walls. Sometimes, I felt grateful for my Seer gift. Sometimes I wanted to turn the damned thing off.
“I’d hoped it was your laundry room,” I replied.
He laughed. “That room is behind the kitchen.”
“Nice to know.” Because I am going to be washing my underwear later.
King chuckled at my little unspoken joke, but I wasn’t exactly kidding. The further down we went, the more petrifying the energy. It reminded me of Vaughn’s basement, actually.
As mentioned, Vaughn was a murderous psychopath and the world’s most twisted fuck of a human being. Not only did he enjoy mutilating women, but he took their skins and put them on his dead lover. The monster had murdered hundreds of women and also ended my brother’s life. Not a shock that he was the leader of 10 Club, too.
King stopped at the bottom of the stairs and punched a code into a keypad at the side of the door. When the door sprang open, the smell of dank seawater filled my lungs. A faint orange light glowed from inside.
“You weren’t kidding, were you?” It really was a dungeon.
“No.”
I held my position mid-stairs. “Who do you have down there?”
King smiled at me, a wicked gleam in his beautiful eyes. “Come see for yourself.”
I was too afraid to move.
“You have nothing to fear,” he said coolly.
“Then why do I see those color—”
King grabbed my wrist, his hand covering the “K” tattoo, which meant I couldn’t easily resist doing what he told me. It was an instant override switch for my mind. This was why I frequently found myself hating the man. When he couldn’t persuade or manipulate me into doing something, he forced me.
Not knowing what I was in for, my heart thumped wildly inside my chest. One step. Two. Before I knew it, I stood in a long corridor lined with empty cells. The black walls dripped with seawater and tiny cascades of slimy green algae.
“This way. I promise you will not be disappointed.” He yanked me to the door at the end of the passage and punched in another code. This time, when the door popped, he shoved me past him and shut the door behind me.
What the hell? I turned and pounded on the door. “King! You son of a bitch! Let me the fuck out of here!”
I heard no reply. Instead, he shoved a thin blade underneath the door.
My hand froze mid-strike. “What the fuck, King?”
“That knife won’t do you any good,” said a familiar voice, a voice that made my heart turn into a lump of dread coated in corrosive acid.
“Vaughn?”
His beady, brown, cataract-covered eyes gleamed with joy from behind a set of rusty iron bars. “Yes, Miss Turner, it is I.”
CHAPTER THREE
I felt Vaughn’s eyes drilling into the back of my head as I pummeled the door with my fists and screamed. Of all the messed-up things King had ever done, this took the cake. Bastard!
What I couldn’t begin to fathom was why? Why would he call this a gift? Why would he risk pissing me off when we were so close to breaking his curse?
“Aren’t you going to say hello?” Vaughn chuckled with a slithery tone that reminded me of a snake who’d swallowed its own blackened heart, the pitch somewhere between a hiss and a cancerous cough.
I slowly turned to address the monster sitting in the cell behind me. He wore a brown sweater torn at the shoulder and brownish slacks. His stringy silver hair was caked with dried blood from what appeared to be a large festering gash on the side of his head.
“King do that to you?” I asked.
He dipped his head. “Who else?”
“With your philanthropic track record, the possibilities are endless.”
His thin lips curled into a treacherous grin. “Yes, well. One doesn’t enjoy life without acquiring a few foes.”
“One of whom is standing right here, contemplating killing you.” Was that what the knife was for? King thought I might enjoy a little revenge?
Christ, he probably did. King had a dark, ruthless side, one he didn’t hesitate showing to his enemies.
“Kill me? You?” Vaughn crossed his legs, and that’s when I noticed his hands were cuffed behind him, anchored to some sort of metal ring on the wall.
That’s pretty messed up. The guy can’t even scratch his nose or take a piss. Nice work, Ki
ng.
He continued, “You may be my enemy, but you don’t have the balls to pluck a hair from my head, let alone stick me with a knife.”
“You sure about that?” I asked.
“Quite. You’re weak, Miss Turner, just like that piece-of-shit brother of yours.”
I turned to the bars and gripped them with enough force to strangle a man. “You don’t know a thing about Justin.”
“I know more than you.” Smug satisfaction gleamed in his eyes.
“Such as?”
“Have you ever asked yourself how this whole thing got started? You, me, King?”
I knew Justin had somehow met Vaughn and Vaughn’s significant other, Jamie. I knew Justin had made a deal with Vaughn to get funding for his archeological dig, and in exchange, Vaughn would get dibs on anything Justin unearthed. I knew Justin, at some point, fell in love with Jamie and got her pregnant, which is when they tried to run from Vaughn. Of course, it all ended badly for her, the baby, and Justin.
“I know all I need to know,” I replied.
“Oh, but you don’t. The little fucker thought he could take my woman and have me killed. He thought he could walk away with my money and power. The entire tragedy is his doing.”
“I don’t believe you; Justin wasn’t that cunning.”
Completely fucked up, yes. But cunning, no. Justin had once tried to cheat in a math test in middle school. The teacher told my parents that if it weren’t for the guilty look on his face, she might never have noticed something was off. It was typical Justin—he couldn’t be dishonest, even if he tried.
“Wrong, Miss Turner,” Vaughn said. “He was treacherous and greedy. He tried to make it look like I killed his crew and had the Artifact, all to bait King into coming after me because he wanted me dead.”
When this entire mess started, Justin had been working in Mexico managing his first dig near Palenque. It turned out the dig site was the resting place for the Artifact—that rock Hagne used to curse King. How it got there was a complete mystery, but the moment Justin found it, he knew the rock was something powerful and dangerous. He ran like hell. In retaliation for welshing on their deal, Vaughn killed Justin’s men.
“Justin would never have harmed his crew. He didn’t have a reason to.” From what I could piece together, Justin had already started seeing Jamie—Vaughn’s mistress slash “property”—and she had been helping him to disappear. Justin was trying to get away, not kill Vaughn.
“Think about it, Miss Turner. Why would I kill his men? I would simply take the Artifact from Justin if I wanted it—he couldn’t hide from someone like me, nor did he. And truthfully, I didn’t want the Artifact until much later, after I learned of its true value.”
As he spoke, I tried reminding myself who this person was: a deviant, wealthy serial killer locked in a cage, who might do or say anything to get free. And he didn’t know Justin the way I did. He didn’t know how Justin volunteered every weekend for his full four years of high school at the Children’s Hospital, reading stories about dinosaurs, showing the kids his collections of tiny fossils, and telling them that even the tiniest creatures leave their mark. Vaughn didn’t know that Justin was the one guy in the world who would never kiss a girl on the first date because he never wanted them to feel cheap. Justin was as rare and unique as the ancient artifacts he loved to unearth. So anyone could say anything they liked, but I knew my brother.
“I won’t listen to your bullshit, Vaughn.”
He leaned forward as much as his restraints allowed. “Oh, but I’m telling the truth. Justin was ruthless. Who do you think gave Guzman the green light to have his men hurt you?” he whispered. “He didn’t want you interfering in his plans.”
Those men had intercepted me in Mexico City when I went looking for Justin. They were animals. Luckily, King had gotten to me before they’d had a chance to do any real damage. In any case…“Justin would never d—”
“Your brother was an evil man, Mia. True 10 Club material. You simply don’t want to see it.”
“Shutthefuckup!” More lies. It sickened me. But now was my opportunity to get the truth. I wanted to know what really happened to Justin. I needed to know. I picked up the knife and began scanning the wall for a key.
“It’s unlocked,” Vaughn said, as if daring me to come inside.
Oh, I was coming inside all right.
I gave the cell door a push, and it did, in fact, swing open. Lucky day.
“Vaughn.” I held up the knife. “I want to know what really happened. And if I so much as hear a hint of another lie, I’ll slice off your ear.”
Ignoring my words, Vaughn said, “I will escape, Miss Turner, and when I do, I will go straight to your mother and father. I will peel the skin from their bodies. I will wear your mother and dance in front of your father before I fuck them both.”
I staggered back, gagging as the bitter acid crawled up my throat. Suddenly, I saw the horrific acts he envisioned for the people I loved playing out in front of me. I didn’t know if it was a product of my imagination or if I was witnessing his thoughts, but I didn’t care. It looked real.
“No!” I screamed at Vaughn as he lifted a knife to my mother’s throat.
I blinked and found myself standing right where I’d been all along. In that cell with Vaughn.
I stumbled back, panting, sweating, my head spinning. What was that? A glimpse of the future? My Seer mind at work in some strange way? I didn’t know, but I would give anything to stop what I’d just witnessed. It reminded me of Justin’s final moments when I’d been in the room, viewing everything, yet Justin couldn’t see me. I remembered thinking how weak and pathetic I was. Why couldn’t I make him hear me and stop Vaughn from hurting him? I’d thought.
“Oh yes,” Vaughn said, unaware of what had just occurred. “I plan to videotape the entire thing so you can watch. Would you like that, Mia? I would. I have every detail planned in my mind, and it makes me hard merely thinking about it.”
I looked down and saw a bulge in his pants. It sickened me beyond words.
I found my legs moving, heading straight toward that vile excuse of a human being. Hovering outside my own rage-filled body, I watched my arm lift and plunge the knife into Vaughn’s chest near his heart. I felt a profound sense of joy and relief as his eyes lit with pain.
Holy Christ. I dropped the knife, and it clanked to the floor. I’d stabbed him. And…it felt good.
“Thank you, Miss Turner.” He winced and grinned simultaneously as blood flowed freely from the wound.
That’s when I realized…“Wait. You wanted me to kill you.”
He breathed heavily now. Clearly the pain was intense, and clearly I gave no fucks.
Vaughn coughed up a bit of blood and continued grinning. “You have no idea who King truly is, do you?”
“Of course I do.” I knew more than he did. That was certain.
He shook his head slowly and whispered, “No. Not who he was, but who he became—who he really is…” He gasped for air and began to chuckle. “And you think you’re safe with him.”
More head games. “I don’t give a shit what you say. Your words are meaningless lies.”
Determined to make some sort of point, Vaughn ignored me. “You do not know anything, Miss Turner. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be attempting to ascertain why I prefer dying over,” he hacked and spit out a mouthful of blood, “over…” he gasped for air, “being King’s dungeon pet.”
I could only assume that Vaughn referred to the fact that King had the ability to pop inside a person’s body and evoke copious amounts of pain.
“And the Seer bitch thinks I am a monster…Me!” Vaughn chuckled.
The man actually believed he was a nice person compared to King? Psycho!
“Yes. I do think you’re a monster,” I spat.
“Perhaps I am, but you are blind. Blind about King, as you are about your fuck of a little brother. That’s the beauty of it all. You sacrifice everything to save someone who w
ould leave you to be violated and mutilated by a group of thugs.”
“You’re lying.”
“I have no reason to lie.”
Of course he did. He wanted to watch me suffer. I’m sure it wasn’t anything personal; he simply got off on it. Even now as his body gave out and blood flowed from the wound, he enjoyed this. The sick bulge remained in his stained pants.
I couldn’t take it anymore. This had to end.
I picked up the knife and stared into his eyes. Then I sliced his throat. “Who’s getting off now?”
“Mia?”
My head turned toward King, who stood in the doorway behind me, shock covering his face. “What did you do?”
I looked at my bloody hand, having to think about it. Was this a dream? “I think I, uh, slit the bastard’s throat.” I dropped the bloody knife at King’s feet as I passed him.
CHAPTER FOUR
Later that afternoon, after a long, long run to ward off an imminent mental breakdown—yeah, Mia Turner is officially a murderer—I strolled along the empty beach, focusing on the sensation of the warm white sand sifting between my toes. Sadly, it did little for me. Neither did the sound of crashing waves—something I normally found soothing.
Cold hands shoved deeply into my jeans’ pockets, I stopped to gaze out across the endless stretch of blue ocean, the wind whipping my face. To be frank with myself, I wasn’t sure what felt more disturbing about the morning’s events: the weird and very real vision I’d had of Vaughn hurting my mother, the ease with which I’d killed him, or the relief and satisfaction I’d felt afterward.
Definitely, the lack of remorse. Because, holy hell, it felt goddamned euphoric knowing this world had been rid of Vaughn. Now, if I could only get my hands on the rest of 10 Club.
You’re going to go on a killing spree, Mia? Really?
No. But I wanted to, and my mind didn’t know what to make of it. These were not the emotions of a decent person, but of a ruthless criminal. And if it weren’t for my confusion over that fact, I would be off looking for King. Sadistic pig. I bet he got a kick out of locking me up with Vaughn.