Page 79 of Psycho

The hair on my arms stood up as I watched him move with a sort of power that seemed impossible to obtain with his tall build. Yet he moved with grace and ease.

And I was weary.

“What are you doing here?” I questioned, torn between telling him to get fucked and begging him for answers. But when he neared the side of Peyton’s bed and gazed down at her slumbering form, the urge to claw his eyes out burned brighter than any need for knowledge.

“You know,” He started, still staring at my sister, “When I heard that Dane had let someone into his solitude aside from Mrs. Straight, I thought he intended to torture her with his insanity.” He looked over at me fleetingly, “Before he killed her for the fun of it.” Returning his almost caring gaze back to Peyton, he continued. “So I traveled to the States for the first time in years, so I could check in on him.”

I sat silently, letting him tell the story without interrupting him.

He continued on, “Peyton surprised me when we met. She wasn’t what I expected.”

“How so?” I asked, never having heard the story before.

He chuckled, “Well, for one she threw two different lamps at my face and had a footstool in her hands, ready to fire again when Dane finally showed up.”

I smiled at the mental image of Peyton attacking Tamen, a man bigger than a monster, with lamps. “She’s a firecracker.” As soon as the words left my lips, sadness followed them, laced with uncertainty whether she’d ever wake up again. “I don’t know what I’ll do if she doesn’t wake up.”

He looked over at me again, but his stare was indescribable. “You’ll go on with life, because you have to. You have no choice.”

I scoffed at his coldness and scowled at him. “Easy for you to say, considering you’re technically to blame for most of this situation.”

He stood up to his full height and turned to face me, towering over me even from the other side of the bed. “I made you join Damon and The Velvet Cage?” He countered, “I made you steal money from powerful, influential men?” Cocking his head to the side, “I made you invoke the urge for revenge in Maddox and then sit by and simply watch as he eliminated dozens of those powerful influential men simply because he wanted a way in between your thighs?”

“God, you’re cold.”

“Wrong.” He challenged, “I’m English.”

“Same thing.” I sneered, looking away from him. “Which is saying something, because you share blood with Dane, who’s literally unhinged, yet you’re the cold brother.”

“I don’t share blood with Dane.” He stared at me, burning a spot on my cheek as I looked at my sister instead of him. “I share blood with Lincoln. Dane is the byproduct of the man who sired us both, turning him into a cold-blooded assassin.”

That was the first mention I’d ever heard of Dane’s lineage, aside from the occasional mention of Tamen’s name over the years.

And to say I was curious was an understatement.

“Your father is to blame for his—” I hesitated, but Tamen went on.

“Insanity, yes.” He finished. “In a way, Maddox’s too.”

Now I was really fucking curious. “How so?”

He grinned, knowing he had me on the hook for information neither man would freely give up. “Has Maddox ever told you how he got his start in our world?”

“No.” I admitted, “He doesn’t talk about his past much.”

“Figures.” Tamen tsked his teeth and then sat down on the window ledge, crossing his arms and ankles like he was relaxed while I was on edge and jumpy from his presence alone. Just a few days ago, I thought he was going to be the one to kill me, after all. Those feelings don’t just go away. “He was a loner, way too fucking weird to have friends and far too big and bulky to go unnoticed. That kind of attention tends to attract the wrong kind of people.”

“What do you mean?”

“When he was a kid, he caught the attention of a scumbag gang that ran in his streets. They wanted to fuck with him simply because he looked like an easy target. He was big and dumb and far more fun to torture than the other twats on the block. So, they started fucking with him.” Tamen shrugged like it was no big deal, “Stealing his food and backpack, pushing him around and tormenting his everyday existence for the fun of it.”

“He was eleven, wasn’t he?” I whispered, remembering how Maddox told me he was eleven when he killed his first person.

“Bingo.” Tamen whistled, “He took their abuse for a few weeks before he snapped, which, to be fair, was a few weeks longer than I would have guessed he could last. But one day, they cornered him in the back of their school, after class, and started their same old bullshit.”

“What happened?”

Tamen shrugged, “I don’t know, details were pretty scarce because of the gore of it all. Supposedly, Maddox fought three of them off at once, but when the adults finally found him, drawn by the animalistic cries of the punks that fucked with him, there was only a red sludge left on the concrete walkway. Even his teeth had chunks in them.”

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