Kiss The Villain: Chapter 30

The person who was texting me all that information about Kayden and his wife is a bulky bald man with a blond beard and bulging blue eyes.

An ugly dagger and roses tattoo slither from beneath the collar of his black shirt, up his neck and his bald head.

We’re in the location he gave me over the phone—near the beach, in front of a warehouse with a rusty roof and a door off its hinges.

The sea’s cold air seeps into my bones as I lean against Medusa, my blood slowly dripping onto the concrete. I wrapped my wounds in a bandage earlier, when I decided I’m not dying yet. Not until I hear the entire story.

But I still messed up Medusa’s interior with all my blood.

She seems to take the hit whenever I fuck myself up because of a certain fucking⁠—

No.

I need to stay calm.

I can’t go through this if I’m not calm.

“Name’s Declan O’Connor,” he says in an Irish accent, toying with a toothpick between his teeth.

“Don’t give a fuck about your name.” My monotone voice sounds far away, as if I’m separated from my physical form and can only hear my words from underground.

“You probably should. I’m Caysie’s brother. Different mammies, though.”

Figures. He’s ugly as fuck compared to her.

Cassandra Davenport. Kayden’s wife.

He had a wife.

A wife.

A dead wife, but a wife.

And apparently, he’s richer than me. Way richer.

Even I have heard the Davenport name. He’s one of them—the people who own the imports and exports sector on a national and international scale.

And he has a wife.

Had.

Their wedding video still plays in my head on a loop. The smiles. The happiness. The goddamn soft look in his eyes.

I scratched the screen with my fingers over and over again as if I could erase her, but I couldn’t.

And I can’t.

Because she’s already dead, but she still lives inside him. No matter how much I scratched, I couldn’t remove her from his side.

So I wanted to remove him from my blood, which is why I cut the length of my forearm again.

And again.

And fucking again.

But he’s still there, beneath my skin, while she’s beneath his.

Because he’s made up a whole new life for her, and I’m here to hear where I fit into this fucking circus.

“While I’m sure your family story is to die for, I’m more interested in what you brought me here for.” I stare at Declan. “What do I have to do with the revenge?”

“Ye always this disrespectful, boy?”

“I’m being respectful now, believe me.”

“Ye bring a man to fucking England, of all places, ye have to be thankful I’m even talking to ye.”

“I’m so thankful, I’ll cry,” I say with a poker face. “But if you’re going to waste my time…”

I turn toward my car, my eyes blurring. The ground shifts beneath my feet as my vision crosses. I’m lightheaded.

Must be all the blood loss.

“Your grandfather was there.”

I let go of the handle and slowly face him. “Grandpa?”

“Alexander Carson, yes. He was present in Senator Baltimore’s house the night Caysie was raped and killed.”

I shake my head once. “He would’ve never done something like that.”

“Cause he’s so gentle and loving toward you?”

Because he thinks people like that are subhuman. He wouldn’t indulge in what he calls ‘barbaric’ acts, not after Harper.

“Well, he did, or he was there and covered for it, which is the same according to me and Davenport. We had a list of all the people who were there that night, and we slowly but surely took them out. Boat accidents, strokes, suspicious deaths on foreign soil. You name it. We tortured some of them, too. I thought we were done about a year ago, but apparently, Kayden has been digging deeper, and he confirmed that there was one more man who was wiped from the cameras, but a maid verified that she saw him. Yer dear granddaddy.”

He throws away the toothpick. “He must’ve covered his tracks as soon as the senator died. He’s smart and discreet, but Kayden is just that in love with Caysie, and he wasn’t satisfied with all the people we killed. He just needed more and more. He became obsessed and lifeless; only revenge kept him afloat. I like that about him, ye know. The undying love and unbreakable loyalty. I still hate that he hid Alexander—and you—from me.”

My hand twitches and I stare at him.

It all clicks into place.

Kayden’s reaction to when he thought I wanted to rape Yulian—he thought I was the same as what he thinks Grandpa did.

The way he belittled me during the mock trial for defending the accused.

How he used to say he was giving me a taste of my own medicine.

Did he adopt a new identity and come all the way here to…destroy Grandpa through me?

“Ye figured it out, yeah?” Declan smirks. “Kayden wanted to break you, then kill you. Would hurt yer granddaddy worse than his actual death, since ye’re the apple of his eye.”

“He made me attached to him for revenge as well?” I ask, not recognizing my choked voice.

“Why else? Kayden only ever loved Caysie, ya wee fool.”

Only ever loved Caysie.

Sandra. That’s what he called her.

The woman he loved so much that he went crazy to avenge her death.

The woman he loved so much, he injected himself beneath my skin just so he could get her justice.

I scratch at my wounds, peeling the bandage off and ripping the flesh open, then digging my fingers inside.

I want the blood out.

All of it.

I want him out of my veins.

My skin.

My insides.

I want to throw him up.

Spit him out.

Send him back to his Sandra.

But no matter how much I dig, he’s still there, somewhere I can’t reach.

Beneath the outer layer of my heart, maybe in the beats themselves.

Maybe I need to dig my knife there, see if I can make it stop.

The thumps and the pain.

I just want it to stop.

It’s so loud in my head, the demons screeching so noisily, it’s deafening.

My quiet white room is now splashed with blood from the void and I want the red gone.

Stop.

Someone make it stop.

My vision blurs and I stagger, falling against my car, still digging and probing and scratching at the skin, over and over.

And fucking over again.

Why can’t I get him the fuck out?

“What a weird little cunt.”

Declan’s voice is close now—behind me, I think—but I don’t give a fuck.

I want the blood gone.

I want the pain to stop⁠—

“Right, boy.” Something pricks the back of my neck. “You’re coming with us.”

I think I hear other heavy footsteps and voices, and my eyes are closing, my fingers still twitching in my arm, in the blood.

The blood that I can’t remove him from.

Because I’m drifting.

Into the pitch-black void.

I wake up in water.

No. Water was thrown over my face, reeling me from sleep. Drug-induced sleep.

Because the inside of my mouth is dry and tastes funny, like sandpaper and detergent.

I’m in a metal chair, my hands bound behind my back and my legs strapped to the chair’s legs. My arm wounds are messily bandaged, probably so I don’t bleed out.

A mixture of humidity and the rancid body odor of the two buff men standing in front of me fills my nostrils but fails to disgust me.

I think I’m losing my sense of feeling. Maybe it left my veins with all the blood.

It’s better this way. I need my ability to shut down now.

The room looks like a basement, with stone walls, low lights, and a metal door.

Typical torture chamber shit, I suppose. I’ve never been in one because my grandfather made sure I wasn’t caught. Maybe I should have been.

If I had been, I wouldn’t feel so…insignificant.

Like a goddamn speck of dust.

A toy that you throw away and it bounces back just to be kicked and used, then thrown away again.

And again.

I’m being punched now. I don’t feel it.

Sure, my body is rattling against the chair, my hair is pulled until I feel it ripping, and my stomach and chest are kicked. The chair topples over, and I fall on the floor, hitting my head.

Yes, it hurts physically. It does. My pain receptors are working overtime, my nerves shocked from the assault.

But inside? It doesn’t hurt.

I’m still in that white room with all the blood splashed on the walls, and I’m trying to wipe it away, to get back my peaceful white room where I can just close my eyes and breathe.

Just for a while.

But they’re talking now—the men who were hitting me—saying things about how I creep them out and how I don’t scream no matter how hard they hit me.

They need to stop talking, because their voices are polluting my white room. The one in my head that I escape to when my mind gets too loud.

The one Kayden turned so white before he splashed it in blood.

My blood from that useless organ behind my rib cage that won’t stop beating.

Being alive.

And for what?

A shoe presses against my stomach, and I ignore Declan, who’s peering down at me, his face uglier in the dim light.

“Ye wanna die, don’t ya?” He smirks. “Ye think it’d be that easy?”

I don’t reply, because I have nothing to say to him. Maybe it’s better if he kills me, because that white room is dripping in crimson no matter how much I wipe the fuck out of the walls.

“Torture doesn’t hurt freaks like ye,” he says while sliding a toothpick in his mouth.

“That’s true. It’d save you time and manpower to kill me, actually.” My voice is husky, my jaw bursting with pain when I speak.

“No shit, ye weaselly cunt.” He grabs me by the hair and then lifts my head up. “Heard ye a goddamn fag who’s been sucking Kayden’s cock. Ye do have eyes similar to Caysie’s. He must’ve thought of her while deep-throating ye⁠—”

I headbutt him. Hard.

So hard, I reel from it and blood explodes on his forehead and mine, because my vision is red—literally—rivulets sliding down my nose and into my mouth.

Declan curses, then bursts out laughing. “So ye’re a little quiet psycho until he’s mentioned? Ye don’t like the thought of being Caysie’s replacement?

“I’m no one’s fucking replacement!” I glare up at him, thinking about how to strangle him. Watch the life bleed out of those repugnant eyes.

“Maybe I have a better way to torture ya.” He grins and calls his men, who once again inject me with something.

And then my world turns black again.