Page 28 of The Beautiful Dead

Gold, bloodied, torn from a dead man’s hand.

A trophy.

A claim.

A gift.

His fingers curled around it instinctively, possessively. “What’s this?”

I tilted my head. “A memento.”

Remi pinched the ring between his thumb and forefinger, inspecting it under the low light.

A reminder ofthatnight. The start of an obsession forged in blood.

His grip tightened. He nodded once. He understood.

The night he watched me kill a man from the shadows. The night he should have run and fought for someone who could have been innocent.

The night he didn’t.

I could have made him do anything at that moment when I’d pinned him to that alley wall, my switchblade at his throat. Hewould have let me,willingly. He handed me total control, that power I craved almost as much as him.

Now, his silence called to me again, tempting me to demand his thoughts, to pry them from his skull and study them one by one. Instead, I pushed him back—just enough to remind him who had the power.

Then, I turned toward my bike. “Come. Let’s go home.”

I didn’t look back to see if he followed me. I didn’t need to. I felt him like we were already in sync. Like some invisible thread had woven itself between us, pulling him forward, tethering him to me.

And I knew, without a shadow of a doubt—he would follow.

CHAPTER 6

REMI

If someone had told me a month ago that I’d get picked up in a cemetery by a hot guy in a leather jacket—the same guy I’d watched kill a man with his bare hands—I’d have laughed in their face.

If they’d told me five days ago, I’d have called a psychiatrist and had them committed for their own safety.

And yet—here I was. Fresh out of the hottest shower I’d ever taken, in the biggest bathroom I’d ever seen, lying on a massive king-size bed covered in black silk sheets that felt like sin against my skin.

Last night, I was curled up on a stained mattress in a rat infested corner of a filthy shelter, wondering what kind of karmic debt I was paying for in this lifetime.

Now, I was here.

In his world.

A place so far removed from my own, it didn’t feel real.

Life had never been easy for me—especially in high school, where I was a walking target, laughed at for being different. A freak. A nobody.

But in the silence of the night, when I felt alive and the world was asleep, I’d sit with my sketchbook, drawing them the way I saw them.

Ravaged. Broken.

Bleeding out on the floors of the places they thought made them untouchable.

Society could keep its carbon copies. I had no interest in being another clone mass-produced to fit their mold.

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