Darkness & Lies: A Brotherhood Novel (#1) (25 page)

She really didn’t care for his attitude, but that was just who Behr was. She decided to shrug it off as a chara
c
ter flaw of his.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that I talked to your friend.” She traced the intricate pattern from his shoulder down to his elbow. “You were right; he was with that vile creature.”

Behr
listened closely
,
not daring to give away any emotion on the subject.

Wrapping her arms around his waist, she inhaled the rustic, woodsy scent of him. She’d always loved the unique smell of men.

“Don’t
worry,
though.
I think I found a way to get his mind back in the game.”

Behr stiffened as his mind ran wild with the poss
i
bilities of what she had done. Did she kill her? Had she killed Erias? No, that was something she would never do. Well, not unless she felt threatened. And the only way to threaten her was to make her feel like she wasn’t number one.

He really hoped Erias hadn’t been dumb enough to do something like that.

“How did you manage that?”

S
he laughed into his back. “Easy.
I took away his distraction, the little human female.”

“Did you kill her?” he fished.

“Of course not,” she snapped. “A pure soul like hers? Michael
would be
splitting the Earth to get her
back,
and his fury would pale in comparison to An
gel’s. Never
mind,
the kind of punishment he would dole out.” She shuddered. “No, I would never be that great a fool.”

Turning to face her, Behr was careful to keep his emotions in check. If Erias lost h
is
woman,
he would be i
n
sane. He’d known
him long enough to know that Erias would move heaven and hell for those he cared about and would kill anything that tried to stand in his
way.

Which didn’t bode well for him.

It didn’t take a genius to know that Erias was gu
n
ning for him. Friends or no, if Behr didn’t find some way to make this right, his balls were going to be served up on a silver platter when Erias caught up with him.

Caressing her cheek with the backs of fingers, Behr let his eyes rove over her body. Toying with a strand of her long, golden
hair,
he asked her the one question that he would need to know if he were to take
action.

“Well, if you
’re
not a fool as you claim, and you didn’t kill her, what did you do with her?”

That was smooth
,
wasn’t it? He hoped it was. Sometimes Persephone was an int
uitive old hellion and
others…well. She
was a blond
,
after
all.

Persephone closed her eyes to the delicious sens
a
tion of Behr’s calloused hand touching her skin. She was on fire. She wanted to be with him. To tangle herself up in him. She wanted to be slammed into walls and have her hair pulled. Angel used to be that way, but now he was all about work. She hardly ever saw him anymore.

“Mm, she’s safe,” she moaned, craning her neck back so he could have better access
as he dipped down to have a taste of her skin
. His lips were divine. “I put her in a place no one will ever find her.”

An
d that could only be one place that he knew of.
In the deepest pits of Hell.

Tartarus.

Chapter 1
9

Cheyenne couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed. She couldn’t tell if it was day or night, what was up or down. Not even her hand in front of her face.

It was so dark.

Huddling into a corner against the dank wall, she could feel the grit and grime coating her fingers and soa
k
ing through her jeans.

The smell was horrendous. A strange bitter smell that reminded her of a mixture between skunk and rotting flesh. When she was first dumped here her stomach churned violently. She even threw up a few
times, but
now, she had grown strangely accustomed to it.

Her ears strained against the constant onslaught of screaming. It was so loud; she couldn’t discern what dire
c
tion it was coming from. It seemed to be all around her. She thought she might go mad from it. Maybe she already was. Was this real? Was anything real?

Without light, it was impossible to tell how long she had been in this…place. The last picture she had was E
r
ias’s cold demeanor toward her while he stroked the jaw of the woman he so obviously had a relationship with, while he told her that Cheyenne was nothing to him. Meant not
h
ing to him.

And he was the one she had deemed worthy of gi
v
ing her virginity to? How stupid was she? She should have just given it up to Jeffery Rosenthal if that was the case. At least he had pretended that she meant something to him. He wouldn’t have had the guts to sleep with her the
n
tell her to her face that she was a lousy lay.

No, she had to pick the one guy guaranteed to break her heart. Worst of all, he put it all out
there,
and she still ran into his arms. They should put a picture of her in the dictionary right next to dumbass.

Maybe Kris was right. Maybe she was just a tease. She did, after all, give him everything but the one thing that she held
dear,
and he had cared for her more than anyone had in her entire
life.

She’d known him forever
and a day,
and even though he could be a douchebag and a
jerk,
and he had messed up royally when they had been together, he had been spending every day since trying to make it up to her. Yes, that hadn’t been lost on
her.

She had watched him make strides over the last year to be everything he thought she wanted him to be, but she never gave him an inch. She wanted to punish him for his crimes. He had always been a bit
of a man
whore; she knew that as well as anyone. Maybe even
better, but
she never let him know that she had forgiven him.
Instead,
she kept
h
i
m
at a firm friend distance and watched him squirm under the pressure to be perfect. He’d even forgone sex with anyone else. Something he hadn’t gone more than a week without since he was fourteen and lost his virginity to Jenny
Peters.

Yep, she was a
tease, but
she still didn’t think she deserved to be treated the way he had treated her back at the hotel room. He was
hurt. She
knew, but had he been any better when he’d betrayed her?

Men. Why couldn’t she have just been born a lesb
i
an?

A sudden, shrill scream reverberated off the walls drilling into
her
ears and giving her an instant
headache.

Oh
,
God, where was she?

She could hear metal scraping against metal and what sounded like a whip cracking. And with each snap of it, she heard another
scream, but
she couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. It was sharp and echoed in a weird, an
i
malistic
way.

Shaking from terror, Cheyenne squeezed her eyes shut and curled into herself even more
,
trying her best to disappear.
Please let this be a dream.
Why couldn’t she wake up? 

The squealing hinges of a gate nearby caught her a
t
tention. For all the time she had been here, no one had come this
close. The last time she had heard
that gate open it had been when that bitch had left her here to rot.
How long ago had that been? A day, a week…a year? She didn’t know.

She looked up to see a small torchlight flickering against the walls as whoever it
was,
came closer. Cowering lower, she wished herself
invisible.

As the light filled the
room,
she was finally able to catch sight of what she was dealing
with.

The gray walls surrounding her were shinning, slick with some sort of moisture that streamed
down in small rivulets. Chains—
some broken, some not
—
hung from the walls. And as the light grew brighter and filled out what she now knew to be a cell, she could see some of the boney r
e
mains belonging to
former
prisoners still hanging by
them, but
what scared her even more was the undulating floor b
e
neath
her.

At
first sight,
it appeared to be waves, rolling and
swaying, but
as she looked closer she was able to make out a tail and some
hair.

Leaping to her feet, she realized that she was su
r
rounded by rats. They were feasting off the corpses of two bodies lying in the middle of the room and the grime that was caked under her finger nails…was their coagulated blood that had streamed across the floor.

Cheyenne wanted to scream. She wanted to be sick. She wanted to die. Anything to make her wake up from this nightmare.

“You hold up better than the average demon,” a strong, male voice said.

Wow, but he was handsome. With wavy
blonde hair
and
deep-blue 
eyes set into a delicate but masculine face, he looke
d like a Greek god. He was tall
and refined, with a muscular frame. He wasn’t nearly as bulky as Erias, but there was
still
enough
there to
make a woman swoon. Most of all, there was an unmistakable power about him as he stood there, analyzing her in
kind.

He bent down and
,
oddly enough, sniffed her. Not knowing what to make of it, her first instinct was to shove him away, but she didn’t know what she was dealing with here and considering the crazy shit she had been subjected to lately, she held herself taught and just hoped that he didn’t try to do anything more.

Suddenly,
he stiffened
,
and then jumped in
to
her face so fast she let out a startled
squea
k. “Why
are you here?” h
e demand
ed. “I don’t smell demon on you.
Are you human?”

“I…”
Oh
,
God, what should she say? Of course she wasn’t a demon.
She still wasn’t sure
those even exist
ed.
If she told him she was human, would he rip her face off? Or would she end up on the floor being eaten by vermin just like those poor souls on the floor?

“Human?” she asked
, unsure if it was the right a
n
swer
, bracing herself for her demise.

Instead,
the guy snagged her arm and dragged her from the cell
.

“Where are we going?” she chanced asking him, practically sprinting to keep up with his long strides as he pulled her behind him down the dark, narrowed hall and closer to the source of the screaming she had been hearing during
 
her
stay.

He didn’t answer her. He just kept dragging her, his fingers biting into her flesh.

They entered a room
lit
up with torchlight so bright Cheyenne had to shield her sensitive eyes. He dropped his hold on her then and left her side. Forcing her eyes wide, she took in everything around her and almost screamed from the horror of
it.

Men lay stretched out on
stone
slabs in the center of the room where winged creatures with mottled green, black and yellow skin cut away at their flesh with their sharpened claws.

Even more were strung up on
blood-stained 
walls crying out in agony as skeletal figures whipped them with barbed chains that tore open their back
s
revealing muscle and
bone.

Even more—men and women alike—
lay writhing on the floor being repeatedly raped and sodo
mized by ga
r
goyle
–like cr
eatures with fangs like a saber
–tooth and
five-inch 
claws that carved at their bodies as they held tight
to
their victims
so they
couldn’t get
away.