The Wife Breaker (Dark Vows Duet 1)

The crowd boos as his dead body splatters to the floor. My veins are rushing with adrenaline. I register what happened and lock it up in a dark part of my brain I refuse to open, like a Pandora’s box. I want to keep fighting.

But I don’t get the chance.

I’m tased in the cage so they can control me. While I’m still twitching from the electricity rendering me useless, they cuff me again and throw me back into the cell I exited with Manuel.

There used to be three men in here, now we’re back to two.

I lie on the cold floor roaring with pain as their sick drugs make their way out of my system. My only friend, L, crawls to my side and helps me get through the horrific side effects of what they just put me through. I already know by now the only way to stop the pain when the drugs wear off is to take more. But the guards love to see us suffer. There won’t be more coming, perhaps for days or weeks, just so they can see me in pain and enjoy their feeling of power over me. It’s like going cold turkey every single time they pump me with the drugs. And I fear it’s making me addicted.

I can hear L’s voice from far away, telling me I’ll be okay, telling me I didn’t mean to do what I did.

But I did.

I had to kill Manuel. It was him or me, a fight I couldn’t lose, because it would mean betraying Rain, too.

Her blurry image reappears in my thoughts as I roar from the pain and L pours water into my mouth to calm me down.

“We’ll get out of here,” he tells me. “Some day, we’ll be free, and we’ll rain hell on the people who did this to us.”

“Swear,” I get out in a low growl. “Swear to me we’ll escape.”

He thinks for a second before taking my hand in his.

“I swear, Heath. You and me, we’ll get out of this alive. We’ll take control. We’ll become the most feared men. We will.”

He keeps repeating those words over and over that entire night. I slowly recover from the damage those drugs have done to me, but I’m willfully avoiding the thought of my murder.

Because I am a killer. The worst kind of murderer, because I killed somebody I cared for. God will not forgive me. L won’t forgive me. Hell, I won’t even forgive myself.

By the time the drugs wear off early the next morning, I’m a wreck.

The reality of what happened is finally hitting me fucking hard.

I took a life, a young life that held so much promise. And worse than that, I know I’ll have to take more. Despite my pact with L, perhaps I’ll have to go into the cage with him next.

And as I watch my caring friend making sure I’m okay, I wonder whether I could kill him, too.

I’m sure if it came down to it, I wouldn’t hesitate to take his life.

For me.

For my parents.

For Rain.

“I thought about it,” L whispers. “Our plan. We can get out of here.”

“How?” I manage weakly, picking myself up to lap more water from the bottle he’s offering me.

“First of, we’ll start stockpiling drugs,” L mutters. “Anything they give us, we’ll put away, so we can be stronger when we need to escape.”

“And then?”

“And then we’ll kill them all.”

L’s voice is dark, a world away from when I first met him. The cage has changed him, too.

“And then?” I repeat.

“Then we’ll take over their operation,” he goes on. “And whoever tries to go against us, we’ll kill them too. Or better yet, put them in the cage like they did to us.”

The thought of giving our enemies their own medicine fills me with righteous rage. I want this. I want to punish them, do to them what they did to us.

I want these men to suffer first, before I track down my uncle and make him pay for putting me here in the first place.

In the years I’ve spent here, my hatred for Xavier has grown more malicious and more murderous. I will struggle not to kill him on sight when I see him again. But I want him to suffer. My mind’s already made up about that. He will go through hell just like I did. And I’ll enjoy my front-row seat for every second of his suffering. I can’t fucking wait to humiliate him. I’ll drag it out before finally putting his out life like a match.

A face appears in my thoughts. Freckled, pale skin. Bright blue eyes. Long, golden blonde hair.

Rain.

It’s been so damn hard to hold on to memories of her with everything happening in this hellhole, but I’ve clung to them with a desperation I didn’t know I possessed.