Page 73 of Unleashing Mayhem
Matty wiped at his eyes with his free hand, but they wouldn’t stop streaming with tears, irritated by the smoke. He was blinded by it, unable to see his feet in front of him. He didn’t think it was painful enough to have been tear gas, but it seemed like it was something close to it.
Yet the hand guiding Matty was sure, unaffected by the streams of people running past, and soon they’d made their way off the street and into the door of a building, Matty wasn’t sure which one.
“Is this where Ivan is hiding?” he asked, keeping his head ducked down and his eyes shut tight, hoping that resting them would help them recover faster.
There was no answer as the door slammed behind them.
And that was…wrong. Even the few times Matty had seen him frightened and unsure, Nix was never quiet for long. He wouldn’t leave Matty to guess and wonder when Matty had asked him a direct question.
Matty finally looked up as he was pulled further inside, to the back of the building. The air was clear here, and Matty’s coughing had eased now that he could get a decent lungful. His eyesight still wasn’t great, but he could see now that it wasn’t Nix leading him at all. The form was wrong, much too broad, and whoever they were, they were wearing black.
Nix had been wearing red, hadn’t he?
And the hand on Matty’s bicep wasn’t hot enough to belong to a demon anyway.
Matty jerked his arm away, and his movement was sudden enough that his captor didn’t fight it. “Who—”
The words froze in his mouth as the man turned to face him. He was wearing a face mask with a respirator, presumably to breathe easily through the smoke bomb that had gone off.
But Matty knew who it was even before the man lifted the mask off his face.
He should have known the second that hand had touched his bare skin. He should have recognized the grip, the painful pull of it.
But Matty had let himself feel safe for just a moment, even with the chaos—had let himself believe he had people watching his back against the threats that surrounded him—and he’d allowed his worst nightmare to come to life without realizing it.
The face that met Matty’s when the mask was off was clean-shaven and olive-skinned. The man it belonged to was somewhere in his mid-fifties, and he might have been considered handsome if not for the lack of humanity in his dark eyes.
“Hello, Matteo,” Dominico purred, leering at Matty like a long-lost lover. “Did you really think you could hide from me forever?”
23
Matty
When Matty had been alone and friendless in a world of monsters, he hadn’t been able to exist in Dominico’s presence without shaking.
It had been like his body hadn’t been able to help itself, trapped in a mixture of acute fear and PTSD from all the punishments that had come before.
Matty would always stumble on clumsy feet and choke on his words, and the more he’d dissolved, the more pleased Dominico had been with his reactions.
It had disgusted Luca, that weakness of his.
Matty was different now. He wasn’t alone or friendless, and he knew without a doubt that Nightmare was coming for him. That he would sense Matty was in trouble and he wouldn’t let any man, demon, or mobster stand in his way.
Dominico was no longer the biggest monster in Matty’s life.
But Matty’s body remembered.
It remembered every cut of Dominico’s knife, every broken bone, every startled wake-up in the middle of the night, pulledfrom sleep into acting as a monster’s plaything. It remembered every mangled body they’d seen, dead boys who’d served as a warning of Matty’s intended fate.
So Matty still shook as Dominico tied him down to the metal gurney, his muscles weak and treacherous. He was bonded now, and Nightmare had told him that meant he had a demon’s strength to call on, but Matty didn’t know how. He barely knew how to move his lungs to breathe.
Maybe the bonding hadn’t gone right. Maybe Matty was too weak of a vessel to be a real demon’s mate.
The shadow at Matty’s chest pinched at his skin, as if in retribution for his disparaging thoughts.
Right. Matty choked in a breath, his throat still sore from the earlier smoke. Weak or not, he wasn’t alone. Nightmare would come for him. Matty didn’t have to be strong in the face of his worst fears come to life. He didn’t have to be deadly and vicious like another demon might have been. He only had to survive. That was all Nightmare would ask of him.
To survive.
