Page 42 of Darkest Descent

Asher met my gaze, frowning. I had fallen completely unconscious during the call with Dad, but woke up swollen and sore between my legs. Asher told me what Hunter had done, and in one of the most horrifying moments of my life to date, I found I didn’t care. Him simply fucking me was the least of it. I spiraled then, worried about what the lack of concern for my body meant for my mind, but it was another thing to add to that list.

The long fucking list of things to heal and fix.

Asher had been angrier, but then he’d seen it, heard the words spat between father and son over us.

“Hunter, there is too much on that list already for you to think something like that would destroy this,” I told him, admitting those dark feelings aloud. How twisted was I? But if it ruined our dad, I was all for it. “Please, don’t do that again,” I said, referring to the suicide attempt.

“I won’t,” he admitted. “As soon as it was too late, I regretted it. I need to see that bastard have his brutal ending.” He took a long, deep breath. “The reaction I had when the two of you walked in just a second after I pushed the chair from under me told me all I needed to know.”

“We all want to see his end,” Asher interjected. “And it won’t be possible if it’s not the three of us.”

Hunter smiled then, like he was imagining what could be ahead. We were halfway to planning it, had so much up our sleeves for what we might do to Dad, how we would reveal ourselves, how we would torture and kill him. It was all to come, and Hunter needed to be here for it.

“His life needs to end at the hands of all three of us,” I said, stroking Hunter’s stomach as I curled up into him, leaving the ice cream to melt on the bedside table. “So you tell me what you need to get past this, and we can put it aside until we have time to heal without him in the world.”

“We’re all broken, Hunter,” Asher continued my thought. “What you did to us shattered the last of what we had left, but we’re in pieces already.” Asher’s hand met mine on Hunter’s abdomen, and together we rubbed his skin, his stomach, and his chest. Hunter hummed and his eyes fluttered shut.

I was scared all my hatred for him would come rushing back once we’d completed our mission to kill Dad, to end his hold over us. But for now, these two men remained the most important thing to me. I needed them both like I needed air. Everything else could wait.

Asher and I slid our hands down to Hunter’s cock, grinning at each other when we found it hard and waiting, a bead of pre-cum at the tip.

Yeah. We were fucked up. Something inside all of us was broken. But we were broken together. And that’s all that mattered.

27

Alice

Two weeks later, my heart was in my stomach as I strolled up the driveway to the family home. The place I’d grown up, happy memories fogging with questioning it all.

We had the car parked just down the street, ready for our escape later. The men walked around the back of the house, each doing their own thing before meeting in our planned spot. The garden was large, with different sections making it easy to hide as we slipped in.

I let out a slow breath. The bag on my shoulder was heavy, digging into my flesh, and I couldn’t wait to put it down. The contents were something I was far from comfortable having so close, but Hunter assured me the man he’d hired was very reliable. He told me he wouldn’t send me off with something unsafe, and I believed him. How funny, how fast opinions could change. Before all this, right at the beginning, I would have considered him the most unsafe thing of all. Now he was a net for me to fall onto. Him and Asher.

Two weeks of talking, sharing memories and emotions, touching each other again, starting tentative, and working up to what we all wanted. No limits. No boundaries.

It was late, so the house was dark and silent as I stepped over the threshold. The code on the front door was the same as the last time I was here, not surprising me at all. Dad was cocky. He thought his biggest threat was gone now. We were dead and Hunter had fallen quiet. No more leverage, vengeance exacted.

Mom and Dad would be in their separate bedrooms this late at night, and all the staff had left for their own homes a while ago. We double-checked the outside cameras Hunter installed almost a year ago to make sure. Didn’t want innocent collateral damage here. Our consciences weighed heavy enough already. Dad never did like having anyone hanging around overnight, something I now knew was because of his illicit and illegal activities. In those early days, when Hunter was in the basement, and then later, when he was sneaking into Asher’s room to abuse him.

Couldn’t have witnesses. No, no.

Mom was too drugged out to notice or care, and I was oblivious. Kept sheltered.

They hadn’t had a funeral for us. In fact, our deaths or disappearances were nowhere on any news site. Like they covered it up. I wondered what they told our friends? The rest of our family? Our school, even. It had been well over a month since Hunter had taken us, and radio silence. I suspected money, bribery had come into it. I’d thought a lot about my friendships, my connections, over the last few weeks, and though it made me sad to see them go, they felt vapid now. Empty. They would never accept Asher and me, let alone a new, older brother. And the idea of being close to them but not sharing our love, was painful.

The air in the hallways was still as I stalked through them, wondering where my brothers were. This was a big house, obnoxious with its size and opulence, with a ton of fancy features and rooms that I never went into. I placed my bag down at the bottom of the stairs, as planned, and climbed them. Hunter was going to our mother’s room first. Neither Asher nor I having the stomach to end her life, but understanding the necessity of it. He told us he’d make it quick. Despite everything, I didn’t want her ending to be brutal.

Asher and I planted the bombs. Then we were meeting where we knew the monster would be. I walked past my bedroom, Asher’s bedroom, the many spare rooms, feeling nothing, until I reached his wing. His room.

Dad wasn’t alone when I pushed the creaking door open and stepped inside. His two sons stood above him, looming like grim reapers come to claim his soul, or hellhounds ready to drag him to the pits below. I hoped Satan raped him every day down there, tore him apart from within for everything he’d ever done to the people he was supposed to love the most. For now, he was asleep, with no idea what was coming for him. The fucker looked peaceful.

“All good?” Hunter asked on a murmur, and I nodded. His voice was still a little thin, but he was almost all healed. We’d all done a lot of healing over the last two weeks, dealing with our actions and the consequences of them. Hunter was an eye for an eye man, unsurprisingly, and insisted we hurt him. Asher fucked him raw while I squeezed his balls with my fist, and afterwards we’d all cried and hugged. In the weirdest of ways, it helped.

Since then, things had been getting better at a slow pace. And tonight, it was the final cog, the last item on the list, before we had nothing left but that horrifying healing looming in front of us. What would we need to do to each other to find peace?

“How long have we got?” Asher asked, looking at his watch.

Hunter glanced at his phone. “One hour and thirty-four minutes.”

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