Page 42 of Brutal Empire

When the doors pinged, a bright light shone into the small cube. It led to a hallway with a white marble floor.

I waited for Bas to get off the elevator, but he just looked at the place with pain in his eyes before he quickly masked it.

“Is this one of your safe houses?”

“No,” he told me. “This was my home.”

People like us don’t have homes. We have safe houses.That had been what Daphne told me, so I assumed everyone was the same.

I followed behind him until he stopped in the middle of the living room. The windows went from the floor to the ceiling.

“Before I joined Sekten, I was just Bastian Kingsley. Heir to my family’s oil business. A name that opened many doors but not enough. So, I knew I had to be more.”

He left me standing there as he went to the far corner of the room, where a wet bar was located, and poured some liquor into a glass.

“I’ll get you Yates, but first, we must find Damian.”

“I’m in.”

Bas raised a brow as if he wasn’t entirely convinced. He pulled another cup, poured a small amount of clear liquor, and handed it to me.

“I don’t drink,” I said, even if I was looking at the glass. People my age didn’t think twice about those sorts of things.

“It won’t get you drunk,” Bas told me without judgment in his voice. He left the glass there, making it my call.

Deep in thought, he kept sipping his as he looked out the glass window. He might have reminded me of Daphne, but they were very different. Intense in different ways. He wasn’t as controlling as she was. He left more room for errors, even if it wasn’t enough.

I knew he was aware when I took the drink but didn’t make a show of watching me, even if I could feel his gaze. The drink was bitter, and I scrunched my face in disgust.

“People drink this willingly?”

“People like to have something to blame when they act on their desires, and alcohol is always there for an alibi.”

“What are your desires?” I asked before I could think better of it.

Something in the way he looked at me told me I should have regretted my question, but instead, I felt a slow burn deep in my belly. My legs shifted, and his eyes flared. The room suddenly felt hot, and a part of me wanted to cry from the rush of emotions. They felt like a tidal wave rushing toward me when I didn’t know how to swim.

NINETEEN

The little self-controlI claimed to have snapped. The beast I kept on a tight leash roared at what it saw. That look in her eyes undid me.

One of the first things Daphne taught me was how to observe people. The human body had tells for every emotion, and even though fear and lust went hand in hand, I recognized that fear was not what she was feeling, and I couldn’t fucking help myself.

It was something I didn’t think I would ever get from her. Dilated pupils as she looked at me, but what really did it was how she shifted her legs.

I was sure she had no idea why her body was reacting the way it was, but I knew. Fuck did I know, and it went straight to my head. No, fuck that—it went straight to my rock-hard dick.

I took a step closer to her, and when she didn’t take one back, my heart stammered. The better part of myself told me to hold back because if I did this, it would change everything, and honestly, right now, I didn’t care about any consequences.

This path we were on was fucking dangerous; neither of us would come out of this unscathed, and the one to finish breaking her would be me. It should have been enough to get me to pull away, but I was okay with breaking her as long as I was the one who put her back together. Jagged edges, blood, and pain didn’t scare me.

Sometimes I liked to tell myself I was a good person, that I had changed, and that I was living in hell to help the world have a little peace, but in reality, I was fucking selfish. This was all about me and my guilt. I told myself I tried to avenge Katia, but the more time passed, I knew it was to soothe the shame I carried.

Another step, and now I was right in front of her. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, and even if all I wanted to do was pull her into me, by some miracle, I refrained. Instead, I took hold of her hand. The moment I did it, she stopped breathing but didn’t pull away.

Her palm rested right on my chest, where my heart was beating.

“You feel that, Angel?” I asked, even without giving her the answer she wanted. “It’s fucking beating,” I told her, and just like the first time, those brown eyes were on me, glossed and overfilled with wonder. Her tiny palm sprawled over my chest, and she dug her fingers as if trying to get closer to my heart. “For the longest time, nothing made me feel alive. I didn’t care if I lived or died because I was so fucking numb nothing mattered.”

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