Jegudiel (Deadly Virtues 2)

Diel drew back, shame and guilt replacing any confusion he had felt over the past two months. He’d failed her. He’d spent all his days up to that point protecting her, but in the end, he had failed her, and they had fucking taken her away.

“They took her.” Diel backed toward the door to his bedroom. “The Brethren took her.” He met Sela’s eyes.

“Brother,” he said, sympathy flooding his expression. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Diel laughed but there was no humor in it, just shame. Pure shame. His feet shifted faster toward the door.

“Baby.” Noa tried to approach him. But Diel needed to leave. He needed to get away from the bedroom, from the memories that were still slamming into his brain like kamikaze planes, one after the other bringing another missing puzzle piece of his life that felt like napalm to his shredded black soul.

Diel grabbed the doorknob and started running. He ran down the stairs and out into the grounds and just let his feet take him away. His mind was flooding like a capsized boat—the shack that they were raised in, his mother’s constant drug use, the abusive boyfriends she brought around, one after the other, an ever-revolving door.

His feet stumbled when he remembered Father Burke coming to their secluded house in the middle of nowhere. Charity, outreach from the church to those who needed it most. To minister to the poor and forgotten, to give out the Catholic Church’s aid. Only it wasn’t the Catholic Church offering aid; it was them, the Brethren. Using the mainstream church as their guise, to find sinners to hurt and destroy.

Lies. All fucking lies. And they’d set their sights on Diel and Cara.

Cara …

The wind slapped at Diel’s face as he ran past the lake. His lungs burned, but he relished it. He wanted the pain back. He searched for the monster within his dark soul, needing it to rise and take all this pain and the headfucks away. But it wasn’t there. It wasn’t separate from him anymore. It was him. It had been him all along. It was Diel who had forgotten his sister. He had failed her years ago as they took her away. By forgetting she even existed, he had failed her in irredeemable measure.

The folly came into view. The rain pelted down on his head. Diel burst through the door of the folly, the place where Noa had taken off his collar. The place where monster and man had merged. Only now he knew it hadn’t been a fucking monster within him. It had been fear. Fear had made his soul split in two, to hide the reality of his life from his broken, unfixable heart.

Tension built in his muscles. Diel’s hands balled into fists, and when he couldn’t take the guilt anymore, the sorrow, the shame, he threw back his head and released it all in a deafening roar. He roared and roared until his body lost all of its strength and his knees buckled. He hit the stone floor with a thud, his palms slapping flat on the ground, prostrate before the memory of his little sister. He didn’t know what the priests had done with her. She’d been all he’d ever had, and he didn’t know where she was.

Arms threaded around him, and a soft cheek lay on his back. Noa. Tears fell from Diel’s eyes onto the floor below him, crashing to the old stone tiles in a guilt-ridden baptism.

“I have a sister,” Diel said through a thick throat.

Noa kissed his skin and held him tighter. “I know.”

“They took her.”

“I know.”

Diel’s face contorted with sadness. Such sadness that it robbed him of all strength. His head bowed lower and he felt exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept since that day the Brethren took him and his sister from the shack. But Noa was right there, holding him up. From the minute she had burst into his life, a thief in a black hood, she had held him up. She had opened his eyes. She had stolen his once-dead heart and wrenched it back to life.

At this moment, it was no different.

“Finn Nolan,” Diel said, eyes blurred. “My name was Finn Nolan.” He swallowed the emotion in his throat, the invisible hands that threatened to choke him. “My sister … my sister was called Cara.”

“It’s beautiful.” Noa moved her arms. Diel mourned their loss, but then she was before him, holding his face and guiding him to meet her stare. She looked just as wrecked as he felt.

Diel sat back on his haunches. His head tipped back for a moment, then he faced Noa. He couldn’t move. The rain beat on the stained-glass windows; the wind whistled down the chimney of the unlit hearth. And Diel was depleted. He was broken. He was completely destroyed.