Soulless (Starcrossed Lovers Trilogy 2)

She raised her chin at me, proud, even though she was a wreck, standing in my kitchen, with crusty bloodied thighs, swamped in my shirt.

“You’d get off on my secrets,” she told me. “You’d do nothing but laugh in my face. You’d like them. You’d like what they did to me.”

I’d have usually agreed with her. Her stories should give me nothing but inspiration for how I wanted to make her suffer in my grip, but somehow I wasn’t feeling it. The twist of something in my guts was another one of those crazy sensations that made me want to retch. What they did to me. Even the thought of what those men had done to her made me prickle with rage.

“Who did things to you, little girl?” I asked her, and her chin dropped, eyes on the floor.

“It’s none of your business,” she said, and yet again, her impudence was nowhere to be seen. “I’m not having you laugh at me like that. Fuck me up all you want, but I’m not having it.”

I stepped closer and tipped her face up to mine.

“You know I’ve got congenital insensitivity to pain. You know things that nobody else on this planet knows about me. You’d better start talking before I redress that imbalance between us with blood. Secrets or blood, Elaine. Your fucking choice, but make it now.”

Her eyes were so sad when they met with mine. “Yeah, well at least I get a choice for once in my life. I didn’t think it would be Lucian damn Morelli who’d be giving me one.”

My stare was solid on hers. “Who did things to you, little girl?”

She took a breath and the strength in her shoulders collapsed, leaving her just a tiny slip of a creature against the counter. Her fight was leaving her in the most beautiful of ways. Her butterfly wings were deathly still as she gave up her flickering attempts to fly away. She was calm in a way that surprised me, and it was strangely attractive.

“You wouldn’t want to know,” she said, and her lie was pathetic. She knew full well I’d want to know.

“Blood or secrets?”

She let out a sigh. “Seriously, Lucian. I don’t want you laughing at me. I’d rather take blood than that kind of humiliation.”

“Blood. Or. Secrets?”

My gaze was firm. Her resolve was breaking. Those butterfly wings parted for me, just wide enough for me to see that the caterpillar between them was an innocent little baby of a bug who’d never been seen before.

Nobody had seen Elaine Constantine before. Not the real, true broken core of the beauty.

“It’s a long story,” she told me and I didn’t doubt it. “It’s a long fucked-up story that’s never been told. I tried, when I was young enough to think my words actually meant something to the people around me, only to be branded a sneaky little liar.”

I was disgusted by the way her words meant something to me.

“You’d better start talking then,” I said.19ElaineOf all the people in my life I could have told my secrets to, I’d have never believed for a second it would be one of the Morelli assholes. If you’d have asked me to put money on the least likely person I’d have ever told my secrets to, Lucian Morelli would have been pretty high on the list. I’d have laughed in your face then spat at your nerve for even suggesting it. He was my enemy. My monster. The man who wanted to take my life for his thrill.

I should never have been standing there in his shithole of a kitchen contemplating telling him my story, not even one tiny little part of it. I hated myself for even thinking about it.

My mind was spinning through the memories, and my stomach was in knots, physically painful without the haze of drink and drugs to blot them out. I didn’t want to relive them. I’d spent almost every waking moment of my life trying to run away, trying to bury it all underneath my bullshit world of escaping. I wanted to escape, at any cost – even if that meant losing my life.

So why the fuck was I about to spill my soul to my nemesis and live those memories all over again?

Holy hell, those memories came roaring when they called.

I’d long lost track of exactly when my hellhole of an existence sprang from the picture perfect life I had been living. I had everything that little girls should be grinning about. Toys and games and attention, green fields and palomino ponies and brothers and sisters bickering all around me. Maybe if I hadn’t been such a sneaky little cow and had everyone tutting at me, they wouldn’t have branded me as a naughty girl. Maybe if I hadn’t been such an instinctive liar, the beasts wouldn’t have counted on my dishonesty to keep them safe in their perverted games.