Page 66 of Born in Depravity

“What?” I asked tiredly.

“Why do you look so different?”

I raised an eyebrow at that. Different?

I fucking felt different, and I didn’t like it one bit.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I replied, looking off to the side. Nikolay didn’t say anything to that. I knew him and Damien better than anyone in the godforsaken world, but right now, I didn’t know how Nikolay was feeling.

I knew he was just as obsessed with Catalina as I was, and it had less to do with revenge and more about everything she represented for us.

Freedom.

Innocence.

Beauty.

She grew up in the same world we did, but she was unbearably naive. To the point where I almost just wanted to lock her up in a room and never let her out.

Yet, now that we did have her, I didn’t know what to do with her, and Nikolay had been acting like she was a deadly disease he needed to stay far away from, while Damien was acting …

Well, I didn’t know what Damien was thinking.

Everyone knew he was nothing more than apsikhopat.

An unfeeling psychopath.

We might be infamous in this world, but it was the name Damien Vasiliev that was uttered as some sort of horror fairytale.

But he was different with Catalina, and now he was off somewhere on his own, doing fuck knew what.

As for me …

I hated the look of betrayal in her eyes.

“Are you gonna spend the night with her?” Nikolay asked.

I looked over at him. “Do you want to?”

He shrugged. “What’s the point of spending all this time with her? Are we going to sit around braiding her hair and talking about our feelings?”

I had just spent the evening brushing the long dark locks of her soft hair.

“Themalen’kaya kukladoesn’t talk,” Nikolay added when I stayed silent.

“I don’t think it’s because she can’t talk, but that she chooses not to,” I said. It had looked like she wanted to say something to me all evening.

Something dark flashed in Nikolay’s eyes. “If she can speak, and she chooses not to, then it means something happened to her at that house.”

I nodded, already thinking that. Damien said she’d pleaded with him the night before. She grew up in the same world as us, but I always thought she would be safe—or, at the very least, as safe as someone in our world could be.

Her bastard father always boasted about her.

His greatest treasure, indeed.

I thought that might have offered some protection. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps the boast had been nothing more than for show.

I knew why he did it. He was trying to find a husband for her who would benefit him. Too bad for him; we would have never let it happen.

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