The Darkest Temptation by Danielle Lori

Author:Danielle Lori [Lori, Danielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Made Series
Publisher: Danielle Lori
Published: 2020-12-09T18:30:00+00:00

súton

(n.) the end of something

The home sat as still as a grave while I stood beneath the staircase and stared at the elaborate woodwork that hid a door from sight—the one Albert and Viktor just vacated before leaving the house. I expected the entrance to be locked or require a special passcode like it would in any decent spy movie, but it opened right up to reveal cement stairs leading down to hell.

Nerves shook in my hands as I hesitated at the threshold and listened for the tortured screams of damned souls, only to be welcomed by silence and a cold draft. A sane person wouldn’t go down there, but it seemed I was losing my grasp on rationality with the rest of the house.

Closing the door behind me, I rubbed a hand over the goose bumps on my arm and headed down the stairs. When I reached the bottom, I pretended the room was any other unfinished basement with mortared stone walls and a dampness thickening the air, but the fallacy grew harder to accept each time I viewed a bloodstain on the floor as well as the barred cells lining the far wall.

I should have found it a reprieve the cells sat empty sans one and that I wasn’t soundly sleeping upstairs while people rotted below, but there was nothing relieving about seeing Ivan leaning against iron bars and giving me the look he always did when I did something he disapproved of.

“You should not be down here,” he censured.

It was bizarre seeing him existing in this dungeon so indifferently—this man I’d known for years, who was insanely picky about his Americanos and had an allergy to cheap cologne and traffic.

“Nobody told me I couldn’t be,” I returned, hiding my uncertainty of how Ronan would feel about it if he found out. Not for my own sake, but Ivan’s.

“I am telling you now. Go back upstairs.”

On my way to his cell, I ignored him and gingerly stepped around a bloody plastic tarp on the floor.

“Mila.” It was a frustrated growl. “There is blood everywhere. I do not want you to pass out and hit your head on the cement floor.”

As I reached him, a small smile appeared at the memories of him pushing my head between my knees after many altercations with O-negative while he murmured accented, encouraging words—especially one cheerleading pyramid fail where Ivan jumped over a fence to reach me, which aroused the entire team’s envy. I’d always taken his presence for granted. I refused to do the same with his life.

Reaching through the bars, I wiped some fresh blood from his busted lip. His hand lashed out and gripped my wrist, a sudden wave of discontent rising in his eyes.

“What the fuck has he done to you?”

I blinked. “Nothing, really.”

“Nothing, really?”

“Well . . .” I swallowed. “I saw him cut off a man’s finger, shoot someone in the head at the dinner table, and, apparently, he murdered another few in the driveway. But things have been going okay for me.

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