Page 37 of Violent Reign (Violent Kingdom)

I come back to the present. I pull away from Nathan, meeting his eyes. They’re so much like mine, and how could I have never questioned that? Brown with gold flecks.Tiger eyes, my mother used to say to me. I’ve got tiger eyes, and so does my cousin.Blood related.What does it mean?

“You were in the pool that night,” I whisper. “You were all wet. I found you in my bed.”

Nathan looks at me, sadness clouding his eyes. I haven’t seen any emotion other than anger in him since I woke up tied to his bed, unless you count lust. But here, now, he looks positively bereft.

“I loved her,” he says quietly.

“I know you did.”

He shakes his head. “Not like that. I mean Ilovedher. I was in love with her.”

I feel the blood drain from my cheeks as I digest his words.

“She was pregnant when she died,” I say softly. Gently. “Did you know?”

He nods, never breaking away from our gaze. I’m walking right into the devil’s lair, prodding the truth out like this, but I don’t have a choice. I have to know.

“Was it your baby?”

He tucks a stray hair behind my ear.Was it your baby, Nathan?But we both know what I’m really asking.

He shakes his head slowly.

And that’s when I know. Iknow what you did, Nathan.

“She didn’t kill herself, did she?”

He shakes his head again. So sad. So terribly sad.

My eyes fill with tears for my dead sister. My murdered sister.

He loved her.He killed her.

“She fought so hard,” Nathan whispers, resting a hand at the base of my throat. “I thought it would be easy, you know? I was bigger than her. Stronger. But she fought me.” He starts to cry, tears bleeding from his eyes. “She fought like a fucking warrior. I waited and waited for that moment when she’d finally have to give up, and it took so fucking long.” His lips tremble. Does the monster actually have a soul? Is he really upset that he murdered my sister, the girl he claims he was in love with, by holding her underwater until she drowned?

“Nathan,” I say brokenly, because I don’t know what else to say.

“I didn’t want to hurt her,” he grinds out. “I had to. He said I had to.”

“He?”

Nathan nods. “My father. Enzo. He said if I didn’t kill Addy, he’d make me go back in the hole.”

Suddenly, the water is too hot, the room too small. I want to be sick. “What hole?”

Nathan stares so deeply, it’s as if he’s climbing into my soul. An unnerving sensation.

“Nathan, what hole?”

He skates his fingers along the surface of the water, as if mesmerized by it. “These scars? He gave them to me. It took years to get them all. Every time I disobeyed him, I’d get another one. Every time he visited me in that place.”

“Nathan, what place?” I ask urgently.

“That room in the basement,” he says, and I start to cry. “You know. The room where I kept you and Rome. The house in Oakland. It’s registered to a shell company somewhere, but it belongs to me. It’s where I grew up. It’s where I learned to kill. It’s where I became invincible.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

AVERY

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