Boy of Ruin (Unsainted Book 4)

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by K V Rose

  Copyright © 2020 by K V Rose

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For more information, please contact authorkvrose@outlook.com

  Cover design © Arijana K. at Cover It! Designs

  Edited by: Amy Briggs

  ISBN: 978-1-989954-02-7 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-989954-01-0 (paperback)

  To the one I left.

  Available on Spotify.

  Comedown by Bush, along with Another Life by Motionless in White were key to writing this book. But the playlist is over 100 songs so we’ll save that space.

  As with every book in this series, this is a dark romance. It does not get lighter. Proceed with caution.

  Seven Years Ago

  Her eyes are the brightest blue, and in this moment, full of fucking horror. My hand around her throat feels good, and so does the way she scratches at me, struggling beneath my body.

  So much bigger than hers.

  There’s nothing she can do to get me off of her.

  But there’re a few things she can do to get me off.

  “Look at me, bitch.”

  She swallows beneath my hand, her face slowly turning pink, tears welling up behind those ocean eyes as she averts her gaze. She’s the ugliest one between the two of them, but her eyes are hard to look away from. Especially when they’re full of so much goddamn pain.

  Reluctantly, she stares up at me, stilling beneath me, her nails still dug into my forearm. My hand starts to shake around her throat, and another wave of rage crashes over me, my adrenaline spiking all over again.

  I try to tame it back, try to draw this out.

  I smile down at her, my knees on either side of her hips, one hand planted beside her head.

  Glancing past her, I see her father trying to crawl to her. Crawl to me. But I broke his fucking legs, and that pain renders him nearly mute, small whimpers clawing their way up his fucking throat like his bones are piercing their way through his pant leg.

  The smell of iron and gasoline is sharp down here in the basement, and I can almost taste the fucking fear. This girl’s mother and her sister are dead now, naked and on their backs just past her father, in a dark corner of the basement, lit only by the light spilling down the stairs.

  I’ve lived in this darkness for two weeks.

  And it’s not the first time.

  My throat tightens as my grip loosens on the girl beneath me and I close my eyes tight, breathing in and out through my nose, trying to keep it together.

  “Jeremiah,” her father croaks out, and I know he’s almost gone. He won’t make it over here in time to save his daughter because he’s got a goddamn bullet lodged somewhere near his heart, but he’s going to watch me fucking defile her.

  It’s the least he could do.

  My stomach growls, hunger groaning through me painfully. I take a sharp breath in, forcing back the feeling. The ache.

  “Jeremiah,” my sister whispers beneath me, “I’m so sorry.”

  My eyes fly open with those words, surprise steeling through me. She rarely spoke to me, save for one thing. One thing she said over and over, and I’ve known her since I was eight. Nearly a fucking decade. I tighten my fingers around her throat and reposition myself between her thighs. She’s wearing a white dress like she’s a fucking angel, but we both know that isn’t true. I’m going to stain it with red to show her just what she really is.

  A demon, like the rest of them. Like what they forced me to be.

  “Why didn’t you help me?” I ask her, and I hate that the words come up at all. I hate that I’m asking. That I want an answer. I jerk my head toward her father, still struggling to get to us, to her. My throat is so fucking dry from dehydration, I don’t know how I manage to get my next words out, but I do, because my hand is shaking around her throat and it won’t be long before I eat her a-fucking-live. “He never loved you.”

  A crease forms between her brows, her fingers loosening on my forearm.

  “They never fucking loved you. Why didn’t you help me?” My words are jagged, hoarse, and I close my eyes again as I lean down toward her, pressing my forehead to hers. “You could’ve saved me. You could’ve…”

  She lets go of my forearm, brings her small hands to my back, almost as if she’s holding me close. As if she wants to comfort me, when I’m about to kill her.

  “Sicher,” she whispers, her breath soft against my dry, cracked lips. “Sicher.”

  My heart twists with that one word. The only word she ever consistently spoke to me, all these fucking years.

  “Sicher,” she says again, choking on it, and as I open my eyes to meet hers, I see the tears pouring down her face, her nostrils flaring as she chokes up. “Sicher.”

  A lie.

  It was always a fucking lie.

  I pull my head back to take her in, feel her pulse point flying beneath my index finger, but she doesn’t stop hugging me. Doesn’t stop holding my gaze.

  Her father is closer now.

  I consider, for one single second, the possibility that I might regret this. That she was fucked over just as I was.

  But then I think of Sid Rain.

  I think of her in that cage. In the darkness. Beating her head against the iron bars hoping to split her skull. Sleeping face down in her own piss because moving was too much of a burden, it cost too much precious energy. I imagine all the ways she might have wanted to kill herself. Did she ever try to use a bandana, like I did, to hang herself in a space that she couldn’t even sit up in? Did she ever find a sharp point of her crate to dig into her wrists? To bleed out, starving, and alone?

  Did she ever have her hands bound so tightly, she suffered permanent damage?

  What
else did they do to her?

  Did they rape her?

  The moment of pity I feel for the girl beneath me is gone. She was fed. Clothed. She wasn’t the favored sister, but she was fucking cared for.

  A manic smile curves my lips, because I know I’m not going to stop.

  I’m naked as it is, as I’ve been for most of the near decade I’ve been in this house of horrors.

  They all deserve to fucking burn.

  I let go of her throat, reach for my cock between us as I turn to stare at her father.

  He’s crying too, those dead eyes full of grief. All these years, I never saw a single fucking emotion on his face. Not until this moment.

  “Yeah,” I taunt him, smiling as I push against her entrance and she whimpers, “you feel something now, fucker?”

  The rain is the only thing that makes me feel alive these days, and tonight, it’s like a fucking tsunami. My hair is plastered down my back, running shirt stuck to my drenched skin, rainwater and sweat mingling in the black, soggy fabric. Fat, warm drops fall from the night sky relentlessly, and off in the distance, I hear thunder rumbling, see lightning spark above the canopy of the forest.

  I know I should turn back, but I’ve been running until I can’t breathe lately and right now, I’m still fucking breathing.

  A few nights here recently I’ve wished I’d stop altogether.

  I splash through a puddle, my sneakers instantly soaked, water spattering up my exposed calves. It’s been too hot in North Carolina to wear pants even though it’s only April. I imagine the summer will be torture.

  Especially if I’m still pregnant when it comes.

  I shake my head trying to rid the thought, my wet ponytail whipping the side of my face as I do. Wiping my wrist over my brow, I blink, trying to clear my vision. It’s hard enough to see as it is on any given night in the dark woods behind my new home, and with a downpour like this, it’s nearly impossible.

  Still, I don’t stop.

  My heart is racing, chest heaving, and my calves start to ache, but I keep going, rain pelting every inch of me.

  The constant onslaught is more than an attack. It’s a reminder.

  I’m alive.

  I can still feel.

  Speeding up, the forest flies by in a blur and I have to duck around a low hanging branch at the last minute, nearly twisting my ankle in the process as my sneaker slips in the mud. But I correct myself and keep sprinting until I think I might fucking faint and white spots pop in front of my eyes.

  I tip my head back and open my mouth, letting the water fall onto my tongue as I slow to a fast walk, my lungs near bursting, my pulse so loud I can hear it in my head, even past the storm.

  Lightning strikes again as I close my mouth and dip my chin, my hands on my knees when I come to a stop.

  The sparks illuminate the trees overhead, forking violently through the blue-black sky. But it illuminates something else too, and suddenly, I really can’t breathe.

  I straighten, my hands in fists by my sides as I take a step back, fear crawling down my spine. The rain is so loud around me that I can’t hear my own voice when I shout, “Hello?”, wanting the figure I saw in that flash of light to know that I saw them.

  There’s no response. Even if there had been, the storm would’ve drowned it out. Still, I have this strange feeling whoever it is isn’t here to fucking talk.

  Fuck.

  I take another step back, reach around for the zipper at the top of my shorts in the back, trying to tug the pocket open with slippery fingers. I feel clammy. Cold.

  I shouldn’t have fucking done this.

  Every night, I’ve disabled the alarm of the house and snuck out the back where I know the guards aren’t positioned because Jeremiah wanted to give me some semblance of a normal life.

  He wanted to trust me.

  Some nights he works late, his schedule is erratic, so I have a key in my pocket too, in case he locks up and accidentally locks me out, not knowing I’m out here.

  But it’s not the key I reach for now as I manage to get the zipper open.

  It’s the switchblade.

  I thumb the latch, gripping the handle tight as I take another step back, my hand trembling.

  Fuck, Jeremiah is going to kill me if I die out here. Bring me back from the dead just to slit my throat and say, “I told you so, sis.”

  I glance over my shoulder as I keep retreating, refusing to turn my back completely on the hunter. I can’t see shit in the darkness, even toward the house. There’re no lights on and Jeremiah wasn’t home when I slipped out this time.

  He had a late night “job” he said before he told me goodnight.

  Lightning crackles across the sky again, and the hairs all over my body stand on end. For a second, I’m motionless, scanning the forest in front of me. Beside me. My knife is held aloft, the handle slick beneath my wet fingers, and I grip it tighter, biting my lip and holding my breath as I use that half a second of light to find the person watching me.

  But I see nothing.

  No one.

  They vanished.

  I start to think maybe it was just my imagination. Sometimes I have hallucinations, stemming from my recovering memories. Usually I know when it’s happening, because Reverend Wilson is dead. The men who touched me, they’re all dead.

  The ones I didn’t get, my husband killed.

  But this didn’t feel like a hallucination.

  It felt so real.

  Still feels real, like I’m being watched.

  Taking a breath, I go to spin around, but before I can, strong, sure fingers circle over my wrist, an arm banding across my chest and prying the knife from my grip, holding the blade to my throat.

  The hand on my wrist moves to clamp over my mouth as I gasp, trembling and momentarily mute with fear, my heart seeming to stop beating altogether.

  Someone’s hard chest is against my back, the blade’s sharp edge to my neck as I stand motionless, my mind telling me this is real but another part of me wanting to believe it’s all in my head.

  Is it all in my head? Am I crazy too? Just like my husband?

  “You’re all wet, sis,” a voice says in my ear, trailing the point of the knife lower, ripping into the fabric of my running shirt. I gasp beneath Jeremiah’s hand even as I reach for him behind me, gripping his shirt in my fists. He keeps dragging the blade down, slicing through my shirt, my sports bra, freeing me, the tip of the blade grazing my skin.

  “Jeremiah,” I say beneath his hand, my chest heaving, voice low, and I don’t know if he’s heard me. “Stop—”

  He tightens his hand over my mouth as the blade cuts through the hem of my shirt, the scraps of wet fabric in pieces, my chest and belly exposed. But he doesn’t stop with the fucking knife. Instead, he skims the sharp point softly over my low belly, up my ribcage, my sternum, before coming over my left breast.

  I can’t breathe, my knees shake beneath me and I have to lean back against him for support. When he circles the flat side of the blade over my nipple, hard and tight from the rain and the cool steel, the irony isn’t lost on me that I’m looking to him for protection from…him.

  “I think I told you not to come out here alone,” he whispers against my ear as a shiver slides down my spine.

  The onslaught of rain has slowed to a light shower, but I hear thunder rumble in the distance. I see another flash of lightning making the dark forest eerie with the brief spark of light, and the outline of trees become unnerving. Haunting.

  Jeremiah slides the blade across my chest, circling my other nipple and I close my eyes, fear, anger and lust warring within me.

  He knows better than to touch me like this. But with his erection pressing into my back, a knife to my chest, I know better than to try and fight him right now.

  With my foster brother, you choose your battles, or you end up fucking dead.

  Still, when he finally drops the knife and I can breathe again, taking in great gulps of air, I relax marginally in
to his touch. Into knowing it was him out here, and not someone else.

  He might be the scariest monster who could ever stalk through this forest, but as his hand softly cups my breast, his thumb smoothing over my nipple, I know that he’s my monster.

  Even still, I grab at his hand, trying to pull it off of me.

  I can’t do this.

  I cannot do this.

  Not to my husband.

  I can’t break his heart more than I already have.

  I start to struggle in Jeremiah’s grip, and I swear the hand over my mouth trembles.

  For a second, I pause, my fingers latched around his wrist.

  Is he shaking from anger?

  Restraint?

  Was that...something else?

  But then his hand stills and he says, “Do you really want to fight me, after you disobeyed me?” He squeezes a handful of my ever-growing breasts—one perk of pregnancy I’ve discovered in my second trimester—and licks the side of my wet face. “You taste like a fucking brat,” he murmurs against me, “and brats need to be punished.”

  He pulls at my nipple and I gasp against his palm, my eyes flying open, still trying to yank his hand down, but it’s impossible. The flex of muscle and tendons beneath my fingers is all that gives, and I know I can’t fight him that way. My brother is a fucking beast.

  I raise my foot, ready to stomp on his, just like he taught me in our self-defense lessons, when lightning strikes again, flaring the thick of the woods in bright purple light.