Vengeful Gods: A Why Choose Enemies To Lovers Romance by Elliott Rose

Author:Elliott Rose [Rose, Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cosmic Imprint Publishing
Published: 2024-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

38

There’s a moment, right as the life finally drains from a person’s eyes, when they’ve given up the fight. It’s a look of resignation as they accept their inevitable fate.

Sometimes, I catch a glimpse of it as I’m kneeling on their windpipe in the bowels of some underground fight ring headquarters. While my victim lies bleeding beneath me, coated in the grime of their existence.

Other times, I can only imagine the fleeting glimpse that might appear as their neck snaps, and they crumple to the ground. Lifeless, before they’ve even hit the rotting floorboards below our feet.

I tug my helmet off, feeling the sting as it scrapes over the fresh cuts along my nose and eye socket. The asshole I had been tasked with eliminating tonight was scheduled to be dispatched in the fifth. Which meant taking enough blows to make the bout look believable for the drunken hordes baying for blood.

The stench of piss and mildew and vomit still clogs my nose, even after traveling for hours. Usually, the long rides like this one will clear some of the filth away.

But tonight it feels like it has embedded itself into my very bones.

I swing my leg off the bike, and I can still taste ash and gasoline on my tongue from where I stopped to burn my clothes.

There’s a dull ache in my brain, not from the fight, not from the blows landed—from the unease at returning for the first time after so many days away.

When I left the compound four days ago, the others were curled up asleep in the lounge together. Thorne saw me leave, I know he did, but he was too invested in holding Fox tight in his arms.

Something shifted that night, and it has kept me on edge ever since. I can’t put my finger on it, and maybe that’s the thing that has my skin feeling like it’s crawling. Uncertainty and distrust are foes I know well.

I learned the hard way never to put faith in anyone bearing the Noire name.

My sister paid for entering their poisoned world with her life.

Initiations, such as the one I’ve just attended to oversee some of the new members who have made it into the ranks of the Anguis, are so often the same formula.

Blood. Death. Fealty.

That’s all they require in their holy trinity of fucked up allegiance.

But for the likes of me, my sister—Thorne and Ky, too—we weren’t given a choice. Children like us were a commodity bought and traded. The offspring of junkies and desperate people who found themselves in even more desperate circumstances. There’s no trying to guess what motivates someone to sell their own child.

We don’t know anything about the people who offered us up into the jaws of darkness.

All we know of life has been driven by the environment we were raised in. All we have ever known is the way a society such as the Anguis has rooted itself in our ligaments and tendons and bones, whether we choose to accept it, or not.

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