Page 58 of Bloody Desecration

Rick spoke, “She was also never supposed to find out.”

Pushing away from the bed, Gareth released my hand and crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s bullshit.” To say he sounded grumpy wouldn’t be quite right, but he wasn’t so angry he was pissed. No, more like annoyed at it all. At Rick, at Alistair, at me for daring to say a pluralI love you.

“So, you can either end this stupid game, or you can continue it and wait for me to say it again… but who knows who I’ll say it to first?” I tapped my chin, pretending like I was thinking about it. “It might be Alistair. Or maybe it’ll be Rick. Are you willing to take the chance it might not be you, Gareth?”

Gareth glared. Oh, how he glared, but unlike the beginning, when I’d first met him, that glare didn’t intimidate me anymore.

“Hell, maybe I’ll never say those words again to any of you,” I spoke with a shrug. Gareth should know I wasn’t one to be toyed with. After everything we’d been through, he should know I didn’t like being pushed like this, nor did I like being kept in the dark.

If it meant I got to keep these three at my side for the foreseeable future? Yeah, I think I could manage not confessing my love for them.

Gareth looked at Alistair, then at Rick, and then finally at me. I could see him thinking, and I knew he was aware that I had him cornered. Normally, a cornered Gareth was the most dangerous Gareth of all, but I wasn’t afraid of him or the things he could do.

No, we were far past that point now. I was past that point with all of them.

No one in this room had clean hands. We were all killers. We had penchants for blood and pain, and we weren’t afraid to get messy. Sometimes, we acted without thinking—some of us more than others. The monsters in the dark, the ones hiding beneath your bed at night, they had nothing on us.

When no one said a single word, I broke the silence by asking, “So, what’ll it be?”

The look Gareth gave me, the look they all gave me, was my answer. As vicious and vile as these men could be… they were mine. They were mine and I was theirs, and even though Brett was still out there, our story together was only beginning.

Chapter Twenty – Brianna

You’d be surprised at how quickly things went back to normal after such a bloody, cruel experience. All those bodies… Gareth being arrested and then let go, the world now knowing Brett Banks was the killer, someone who’d wanted to frame Gareth for all of his crimes; the man himself still hadn’t been caught. His car had been found on the side of the road somewhere, full of blood, but no body to be seen. Local authorities brought in cadaver-sniffing dogs and all that, hiked all around the acres near the abandoned vehicle, and still the man didn’t turn up.

General consensus was that he might be dead, but until we found a body, we couldn’t be sure. All I knew was, he hadn’t turned back up in my life since, and there’d been no random bodies displayed in the local park or in the parking lot of the high school.

Kaity and the others apologized to me the day I returned to school. I took a week off, mostly because I was anxious that Brett would suddenly reappear, but when it became obvious he was gone, I made the decision to go back. Didn’t have much school left, anyway. A month, at the most, then graduation.

And then… God, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Everything I’d ever known had gotten flipped upside-down, and now that I was a Montgomery, everything was within reach. If I wanted to go to college and study art, I could. If I wanted to lay around the house and do nothing with my life, I could do that, too.

It was weird, at first, going on, day by day, while knowing my mom was dead. I didn’t miss her. Maybe that made me a terrible person, but I’d never felt love toward her, and she sure as shit had never expressed love to me.

Don’t get me wrong. I was still a little upset at Alistair for choosing to keep that information from me, because I believed I had every right to know whether my mom made it on that plane or not, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that big of a betrayal.

Still, I told him not to do it again.

Going to her funeral—closet-casket, of course—I had to act sad. I had to accept everyone’s apologies and sorrows and meaningful words, though most of them were Alistair’s wealthy friends. Or, I guess, acquaintances, since the man didn’t really have friends. Kaity, Angelina, and Cherith came to pay their respects, and to once again apologize about how they’d treated me before.

Seriously, they were all texting me multiple times a day, like we were best friends now, like I’d taken Erin’s place in their friend group now that they could be sure Gareth didn’t have anything to do with Erin’s murder.

Not that I was complaining, of course. I’d spent my whole childhood never really having friends, too focused on my art, feeling too different from everyone else to want to try being social. Now that I had three men who could help me with that dark side of myself, it was nice to have three normal girlfriends.

What sucked the most, though, was the fact that I couldn’t talk to Kaity and the others about anything involving Gareth, Alistair, or Rick. I couldn’t tell any of them that I was with them, let alone that I was with all three of them. Gareth was my stepbrother, technically, even with my mom dead, and Alistair was my stepdad. Rick was… well, not quite as old as Alistair, but still way too old to be able to walk around Eastcreek, hand in hand, when he wasn’t working.

I could only imagine the rumors that would fly.

So, for the time being, we had to keep our relationships secret. If I wanted to go out with any of them, it had to be far away. The only good thing was Rick was now allowed to come over to the manor anytime he wanted—or, rather, anytimeIwanted.

Things got quiet. Gareth didn’t snap and kill anyone randomly. No more bodies, no more serial killers—other than the ones I was living with—and no more surprises, which let us relax and enjoy ourselves for the first time in a long time.

One afternoon, after school, I was with Gareth in the pool house. I’d packed up some of my paint and brought them here, and I was attempting to show him how much easier it was to paint actual pictures when you had more than one color.

Gareth had set up a two foot by two foot square canvas on his easel, a paintbrush in his hand and a look of disgust on his face. You’d think I’d just told him to eat shit and not, you know, paint something using the colors blue and purple.

He ran a single purple line down the canvas before dropping the paintbrush to the floor and throwing his hands up. He let out a sound full of disdain and shook his head. “Nope. No. Fuck no. I tried, okay? I tried. I just can’t do it. I need to paint with blood, otherwise it just doesn’t work.”

“Gareth,” I said, standing beside him and trying my hardest not to laugh at him, “you didn’t even try. You did one line of purple. Pick up the brush and try again.” I picked up the paintbrush and handed it to him. When he glared at me and made no moves to try again, I went on, “You know, sometimes I find sketching out my idea makes painting it easier—”

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