But they weren’t trying to save me. There was no salvation to be found in what they were attempting to do to me.
Even if they banished the demon in me, the boy I might have been once had long since fled.
I was nothing but the monster they’d painted me as now, both broken and hollow inside, hungry and yet never sated. They’d created a void in me which couldn’t be filled. A need I had never understood and which I had no way of satisfying. It hurt. And it didn’t. I was numb to it. And yet eternally lost to it all the same.
“I think today we should take a walk down to the crypts, Mateo,” the nun murmured, her voice soft as if that somehow lessened the truth of what she was.
Lucifer had been an angel once. Perhaps the women who had given their lives to God in this place had once been pure too. But whatever had corrupted them had done so thoroughly now, and I was left with the truth of what they’d become.
Her hand wound around my upper arm and her fingernails bit into my skin as she tugged me to my feet, drawing me towards the left of the altar where the stone steps which led down into the crypt awaited me.
A tremble raced through my limbs as we approached it, my feet compliant while my soul rebelled.
I wanted to break free of her grip and run from this place of nightmares. But as I stumbled past the pew at the front of the church, my eyes met with my mother’s stare, the accusation in her cold gaze chilling me to the core.
“Be gone, demon,” she hissed. “And leave my sweet son in peace when you abandon him at last.”
My throat bobbed at her words and I forced myself to walk on. I was craving the untold promise in those words, the way I had been for so long that I couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been so.
If this demon could be torn from my soul, then she wouldn’t look at me that way any longer. She would get her child back. I would be the boy she always claimed I should have been without this thing lodged inside me.
So I forced my feet to walk on as the nun led me down the steps and into the dark, and I forced myself not to scream while they worked to rid me of my evil too. Because if I could endure just one more day of this torture, then perhaps I could finally be free of it forever.
“Up,” Jack’s voice broke the spell of the past which had me trapped and I sucked in a sharp breath as I managed to shake off the waking nightmare and found myself on the floor once more.
I blinked away the lingering memories, sucking in a deep breath and curling my hands into fists as I found myself able to move a little more.
I grunted, rolling myself onto my side and finding Jack there, his long, white hair falling into his face while his forehead pressed to the ground and he managed to get his knees beneath him. Though he seemed stuck in that position now that he’d established it.
I cursed in Spanish as I managed to make it onto my belly and began to push myself across the wooden floor by alternating twists of my hips and shoulders, my legs dragging along uselessly behind me.
“I’m going to kill that motherfucker,” I hissed, somehow making it into the front room and groaning with the effort of propelling myself across the carpet.
I could hear Jack following me and the sound of my boot being ripped to shreds came from the corner which Brutus currently occupied. The dog looked over at me as I began to shuffle across the floor towards the closest chair, its lips peeling back and giving me the strongest suspicion that it was hungering for a taste of me.
I needed to get up off of the fucking floor where it had such easy access to my throat.
With a grunt of effort, I began to make my way towards the closest chair which was by the window at the rear end of the room, furthest from the fireplace. There was another chair opposite it, a table set between them with a board game laid out on it which Brooklyn had set up and then forgotten about in favour of eating cheese.
I huffed out a deep breath as I reached the chair, looking up at the deep blue wingback from my position on the floor as it mocked me with its height.
I rolled my shoulders, my abs flexing as I fought to gain further control of my body and with a snarl of effort, I managed to lift an arm and grip the edge of the chair so that I could heave myself up.
It took far longer than I would have liked, but eventually, with no help at all from my fucking legs, I managed to heave myself onto the thing and roll over so that my ass was finally planted in the seat.
I sat there panting from the effort of getting myself into a fucking chair and my brows rose as I found Jack sitting in the chair opposite me, looking equally exhausted by the simple act of getting himself off the damn floor.
He was watching me, his grey eyes alight with something far more intelligent than Brooklyn’s claims about him would have suggested based on the treatment she believed he’d undergone in that hospital. I eyed the faint scar which skimmed his temple and narrowed my gaze on it as we silently surveyed each other.
The man was a machine. It looked like he’d done little other than work out while he was locked away in that psych facility and those two things didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Why would a man who had little brain capacity be so driven to exercise like that? I was built, but even I wasn’t close to his bulk. Not to mention his impossible height. The man must have been closer to seven foot tall than six. He was intimidating, that was for sure, or at least he would have been to a lesser man. But I was also getting the sense that there was a lot more to him than he was letting on.
The shirt he wore had been misbuttoned when Brooklyn had fastened it over his broad chest this morning and another button had fallen open while he’d been dragging himself across the floor, revealing the top of a tattoo which marked his skin. A tattoo which looked at least a little familiar to me, though with nothing but a bell on the tip of what looked like a jester’s hat on show, it was hard for me to be certain.
“So…” I said, letting the word hang there while that vicious dog of Brooklyn’s returned to savaging my boot, its eyes narrowing on us like it wasn’t wholly decided on whether or not it wanted the boot more than it wanted to attack.
Jack said nothing, his gaze moving over me slowly, studying, penetrating. He had something going on inside that head of his. Something cunning and altogether too calculating to go unnoticed. At least by me. I was a man well used to facing off against men who desired my death or worse things, and I was damn good at reading people who didn’t want to be read.
“Chess,” Jack said eventually, his eyes moving from me to the table which sat between us, the chess board all laid out and ready to go. I doubted Brooklyn would mind us stealing her game. Besides, I could do little more than lift my arm at this point, so it seemed like as good a thing as any to use to pass the time while the effects of the drugs wore off.
“Si,” I agreed, bobbing my chin at the board and indicating he should go first.
Jack lifted his hand with some difficulty, bringing a white knight into play straight off the bat and making my brow lift as I responded by advancing a pawn.
We continued in silence for a few moves, and I fought the urge to keep looking towards the clock which hung above the fireplace, the side of it a little discoloured from the smoke of the fire which Niall had let burn the corner of the room, but the hands still diligently ticking around.