Page 55 of The Beautiful Dead

I wanted to find out.

I wanted to ruin him.

Because Remi wasmine.

He stirred, thick lashes fluttering against his cheek, a soft sigh escaping his parted lips. I clenched my jaw, restraining the growl that curled in my throat. The urge to sink my teeth into his delicate flesh, to leave a mark that would never fade, was nearly unbearable.

Last night had been a fucking disaster. A revelation. A war.

He’d finally seen the truth of his aunt, of who she really was, what she was capable of. And while the reality of his mother’s condition weighed on him, he had no idea how freeing it was. Once she was gone—once that final tether snapped—there would be nothing left to hold him back.

No Brielle. No guilt.

Just me and him.

If he ever thought of leaving—if the idea of a life without me so much as crossed his mind—I would remind him exactly who he belonged to.

His mind had been a mess of foreign emotions I didn’t understand last night as he gathered every shred of evidence that tied Brielle to my father. He was fracturing at the seams, but when the weight of it became unbearable, he turned to me.

For some reason, my touch grounded him. My presence calmed him. It did something to me I didn’t fully understand—or maybe I did. Maybe I’d always known it would be this way. He was mine after all.

When he was ready—once the last veil of his innocence was stripped away—I led him deeper into the truth. Not all of it—not yet—but enough to pull him further into my world.

Remi had been fascinated in his twisted way—obsessed—once the shock wore off. Not just with Brielle’s crimes, but with what happened to the bodies. Mainly the bodies. He wanted to know how she had made them disappear, how she had hidden the truth beneath the city’s feet.

It was a dangerous game. One that I played well.

Under the cover of night, I led him through the woods bordering Hollow Pines National Park, deep into the tangled labyrinth of trees. Hidden from the world was an old, abandoned cottage—one of my father’s properties, left to decay in the silence of the forest.

Beneath it—beneath the dirt and rotting foundations—lay something else. A specially built bunker containing the key to their crimes, it was a graveyard hidden in plain sight. A state-of-the-art incinerator capable of reducing bodies to ash in minutes was at the center. Its official purpose? To safely dispose of soiled items from the home. Its real purpose? To erase the bodies of Brielle’s and my father’s victims.

There was also a torture room that he had used before his injury. Although it was abandoned, it was still haunted by the ghosts of its victims.

As we stepped into the darkness, my mind filled with visions. Brock and Brielle—begging. Screaming. Bargaining. My lips twitched as I tasted their fear. They thought they were monsters, but they were nothing but weak, spineless bottom-feeders who hid behind the shadows of men stronger than them.

Remi would soon see it too. I could feel it.

And because I knew my little lamb better than he knew himself, I had his sketchbook with me. This place was the kind of hell that set him alight. Flames of darkness flickered in his eyes as he took it all in.

He had spent hours sketching. Capturing every twisted image that bled from the depths of his mind.

It was beautiful. Savage. Primal.

A vision of death by fire, inked into the pages of his sketchbook that bled from his soul.

Even in sleep, I could feel him in my blood, in my bones, in the marrow of my fucking existence. He wasn’t just mine. He was part of me. Fused with my DNA.

Soon, he would never leave my side because this wasn’t just an awakening. It was a rebirth. When he finally stepped into the flames, he would emerge as a god.

The god of death.

“You’re crazy, you know.”

It was a statement, not a question, so I stayed silent. I watched as he slowly blinked awake, taking me in; his eyes narrowed when his brain registered my hand wrapped around his throat, but instead of pulling away, he leant into my hold. His eyes begged me for more, and my fingers flexed and tightened. His heartbeat fluttered under my fingertips, and a ghost of a smile flickered at the corners of his mouth.

“Who are you, really?”

His ice-blue eyes bored into mine, his gaze unflinching as his hand trailed up my arm, tracing the ink embedded in my skin.

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