She was female.
Diel heard the priest again, and, needing to feel someone’s hot, wet blood coating his skin, he climbed on the bed and took out one of his knives. Red mist took hold of his urges once more, and he began to stab. He stabbed and stabbed until he felt the spray of blood freckling his face, the hardness of bone shattering under the blade, until the priest lost any fight and became a slice of rotten meat beneath him. A creak on the floorboard behind him made him turn, and he saw the woman again. The one with the pink hair was on her feet, her wide, unreadable eyes locked on his. Her gaze dropped to his neck, and then the brand on his chest.
Diel leaped from the bed, ready for more. The monster paced inside him as it studied the woman. It snarled and hissed, but it wouldn’t look away from her.
It was fixated.
She held up her hands. “Wait,” she dared to say, but he charged at her and crushed her against the wall with his wide, naked chest. With his hands on her upper arms, Diel lifted her off the floor, hissing at the feel of her fragile body in his grip. As he glared into her deep brown eyes, her stare drifted to the bed, then turned back on him. Diel still tasted the slain priest’s blood on his tongue.
He smiled.
Diel moved one of his hands to the woman’s neck, feeling her pulse throbbing fast beneath his fingers. He leaned in and inhaled. She smelled of lavender and some kind of sweet musk.
Goosebumps broke out over his body when she quickly lifted her arm between them and wrapped her hand around his throat too, above his collar. His cock punched against his jeans as she squeezed, as her fingers moved over his deep, rough scars. He growled, his monster snarling but suddenly obsessed with ending the woman who dared to fucking touch him. Diel began to squeeze, and the woman’s skin flushed, her lips parting as oxygen failed to reach her lungs.
But then she dropped her attention to his chest again, to his brand, and something flickered in her gaze, something he didn’t understand. And that was all it took. That split second of distraction was all it took for the apparently no longer unconscious hooded person behind him to get off the floor and press a taser just below his jaw. Hundreds of electric volts pounded through his body. Diel squeezed the throat of the pink-haired woman harder and harder, trying to kill just one more, before black spots invaded his vision and his muscles began to weaken.
But the one with the pink hair didn’t take her eyes off him. Even as his knees buckled and he dropped to the ground from another shot of the taser to his ruined neck, she watched him, her hand still around his throat too as he dragged them both to the floor. He yanked her on top of him, her face hovering above his. He could feel her breath ghosting over his face. Could smell that lavender-and-musk scent that drifted up his nose and exploded in his veins like a hit of heroin. And as he lost consciousness, he vowed to remember the dark eyes of the one who’d dared to end his spree before he was fucking ready.
And when Diel next awoke, he and his monster were in firm agreement that she would pay. She would scream, and she would breathe her very last breath under his hands.
Chapter 5
Noa ripped the man’s hand from her throbbing throat, coughing as she scrambled off his limp body. Dinah raced to where Noa lay and crouched down beside her. “You okay?”
Noa went to answer, but her eyes were fixed on the unconscious man. What the fuck was he? Her eyes drifted to the priest, to the remnants of what was left of him on the bed—just a mass of blood, bones and torn-up flesh. Then they moved onto the collar around her attacker’s neck. The thick, smooth metal seemed to have no seam.
He wears it all the time, she realized. He wears a collar …
“Noa, we need to go.” Dinah tried to pull Noa to her feet. But Noa was fixed on the man on the floor. She could still feel his hand around her neck. Her skin burned, but she knew the damage didn’t even come close to the scars that ringed his neck underneath his collar. His collar had shifted to expose red, raw, ruined skin underneath.
Just like …
Noa’s eyes burned, and she closed them to relieve the sting. The darkness took her back to a few years ago. To the only other time she had seen a scar like that, as severe as that, underneath a much less impressive collar. Her stomach rolled and her heart squeezed, guilt and shame plaguing her.
The smell of the blood of the slain priest on the bed only made the memory stronger. Blood had been on her hands that night too—it had been there ever since, no matter how much she tried to wash and scour it away. Rage and hatred had clouded her vision in that moment.
“Noa!” A hand gripped Noa’s face, and she opened her eyes. Dinah had pulled back her hood and lowered her scarf, exposing her face. “We need to leave.” Dinah glanced at the bed and the dead Brethren priest. “Beth and Naomi have got the kid. We need to move.”
Noa’s eyes found the man’s chest. Her heart started racing. “His chest.” She crawled forward until she was crouching beside him. He was coated in blood, but she knew what she was seeing. Noa ran her hand over her torso, over the pentagram … over the small upturned cross in the center of her chest. The brand that had been seared into her skin as a child. She reached out and lowered her hand to the man’s chest. She stopped breathing—the black body of the sword was rough underneath her fingers. His skin was ruined there.
“Saint Peter’s cross,” Noa whispered, then closed her eyes and traced the rough skin with her fingertips, searching for a familiar pattern. Her pulse thudded in her neck as her fingers found, underneath the inked wings-and-sword design, an upturned cross. She opened her eyes. “He wears the mark,” Noa said breathlessly and looked up at Dinah, who was regarding her Coven sister as if she were insane. Noa’s eyes widened. “He wears the Brethren’s heretic mark, just like us.”
Dinah looked at the man’s chest, and Noa saw her swallow in shock. Dinah quickly composed herself. “We have to leave, Noa. It’s too risky to have been here this long.”
Dinah got to her feet and took hold of the ledger they had found hidden in a safe behind a picture in the priest’s room. She placed it into a folded-up shoulder bag she had brought with her just in case they found anything of worth. And worthy it was. If they’d retrieved what they thought they had, they had just discovered a small section of the Holy Grail when it came to hunting these Brethren pricks. “We need to get this back to the tunnels. We need to make sure it’s kept safe. When they realize it’s gone, there’ll be hell to pay.”
Noa got to her feet, but they were as heavy as lead when she tried to go to the door. She cast her head back toward the man on the floor. He was huge. Tall and broad and stacked with taut muscles. But that collar, that scarred neck, that upturned cross on his chest …
“No,” Dinah said. “We can’t take him.” Noa looked at her sister, but the words slid off her as if she were made of Teflon. “He’s a fucking psycho, Noa. Did you see what he did to us? What he did to the priest? Do you remember that he tried to choke you the fuck out? And on top of all that, he wears what looks like an electric collar. A grown-ass man wearing a collar. I mean, what the fuck?”
“Get his arms,” Noa said, ignoring Dinah’s rant and reaching into her waist belt. She removed a needle that was filled with a drug that would keep him knocked out cold. Dinah shook her head in frustration, but when Noa glared at her, she cursed under her breath then grabbed his arms, slinging the bag containing the large ledger over her shoulder. Noa injected the drug into his arm, then stowed the empty needle in the pouch attached to her holster. She moved to his legs.