Angry God (All Saints High, #3)

by L.J. Shen

He groaned, a human sound from a man much more than a human. “You were never Good Girl because you are good. You’re Good Girl because you’re too good for me, and we’d both be wise to remember that.”

“And issues and anger-management problems and enemies. The things I’m capable of…” He took a step away from me, letting my hand drop between us. “You shouldn’t be with someone who can do what I’m about to.” I had no idea what he was talking about, and still, somehow, I knew he was not exaggerating. I’d always had this feeling Vaughn was going to kill someone someday. It had gone through my head the night he came to seek me out after I saw what I saw. I’d wondered if he’d slit my throat. “I can take care of myself.”

“We have a past and a present, Len. No future.” “I never asked for a future,” I said, sounding a lot more confident than I felt. “Goddamn shame.” He tsked.

“Then don’t do it,” I whispered. “Be good enough for me.”

“If we keep this going, and something happens, goodbye would be too much to take. I already want to rip the world apart when someone else touches you.” “Every painful goodbye starts with a wonderful hello.” I smiled sadly, leaning into his palm, feeling my eyes bright and vivid with unshed tears.

His chest caved, and he took a ragged breath, jerking me to his body. “I don’t know what to do with wonderful things. I always stayed away from them. You kill me, Astalis.” You killed me when I was twelve. The part that was supposed to like other boys? You took it with you.

“Mine.” He grabbed my jaw, kissing me so deeply I thought I was going to choke.

“This hurts,” he said angrily. Pain. I’d doubted he was able to experience the feeling until now, much less confess it. “Why?” “Because you’re better than me. And it’s fucking killing me.”

“I’m going to fuck you.” He fingered me faster. I moaned, lolling my head against the wall. “Fuck you before he does. Fuck you so you’ll always remember I was the first. Fuck you just like you’ve fucked me, over and over again, since I was thirteen.”

Not that I was courting Lenora. I was just going to fuck her, take what I needed, and leave.

um..

Which was a pile of steaming bullshit. What was wrong with me? I wasn’t feeling alive. I was feeling horny. That’s it. I just wanted to get my dick wet.

I bought brownies, wine, and flowers, then threw them into a garbage can before I made it back to the castle. I was torn between wanting to impress her and wanting to kill her.

Thing was, I no longer wanted to punish her. I didn’t want her pain, her insecurity, to scratch at the things that made her tick.

Mainly I couldn’t understand the way this made me feel—observing her on my bed, which smelled like me, going through my shit. The pleasure was unexpected. Foreign. My chest constricted, and I tried to take a deep breath, thinking maybe I’d pulled a diaphragm muscle.

“Drop it,” she repeated, all mischievous and…cute. Yeah. Okay. She was cute and pretty. Big fucking deal.

“Precisely.” I scoffed. “Why would I put myself in a vulnerable position?” She held my gaze, her voice turning serious. “Because I asked you to.” Momentarily speechless, I regarded her. She was serious. I stepped from the recliner, dropped my towel, and straightened to my full height, hands on hipbones. Stark fucking naked.

“What are you ashamed of, Vaughn?” I sneered. It didn’t matter. She stood up and walked toward me, cupped my face with her tiny hands. It almost felt maternal. “You’re beautiful.” She kissed the tip of my nose, closing her eyes. “So beautiful,” she whispered.

I wrapped my arms around her, trying to comfort her because she…what? Pitied me? Em-fucking-barrassing, but apparently I was willing to go this far to be inside her. My knee-jerk reaction was to kick her out. My plan was so close to execution, and this was going nowhere fast. But I couldn’t.

mmmm i dont like where this is going..

She was a beautiful liar. Luckily, I didn’t mind a little deceit. People were obsessed with the truth, like they could fucking take it. Me, I liked messy and manipulative.

She did, too. The crazy, humorless laugh of two people who understand each other perfectly, yet are stuck in a world that makes no sense to them. I never thought I’d have this with a girl. Or a guy. Or any fucking human, for that matter. Not even my parents fully understood me.

Show me more of your crazy. My veins hummed with exhilaration. It’s turning me the fuck on. I was so hard I didn’t even have time to be worried about what I was about to do to her. With her.

“You say you don’t like blood, but I tasted your lips, and you’re a little demon. It’s on your breath. I think you’re far from normal. I think you’re every shade of screwed-up in the coloring book, just like me, and I knew—saw it—when I gave you that brownie all those years ago. But the biggest lie you tell yourself is that you’re not mine. Get a clue, Astalis.” I threw the chisel at her feet, turned around, and walked out of the cellar, leaving her there alone.

I wasn’t worried for one second that she was going to peek at my work, see my statue. She was a liar, yes, but she was my liar. I didn’t need a trust fall. I’d dive headfirst and know she would catch me.

I was kind of hoping my choke-count would stay at one with Rafferty Pope, but knew damn well I was about to finish every motherfucker who’d touched her if I didn’t like the answer coming from her mouth.

We stood like that, both of us facing the wall, for just a second before I spun her around. She stared at me with those blue-green-hazel eyes of hers, which always fucked me up like no other rival ever could.

She slid down, holding her stomach, laughing her ass off. We rolled on the floor, getting covered in stone dust, with Len wiping tears of mirth from the corners of her eyes. I didn’t even know what we were laughing about. I wasn’t the laughing type. Nothing was particularly funny to me, even then. I think we were just…happy.

I knew she’d do it. I knew her crazy ass would do just about anything. And I needed to calm myself down, because I was beginning to get ideas. Unlikely ideas, like taking Len with me on my quest to live on every island in Italy and France and Greece, like touring European museums together, and bungee jumping, and scuba diving—all the things I’d wanted to do alone after my business here was done.

I was her first. She was mine.

Yes, I was. I was glad Knight didn’t have mind-reading abilities. He’d ride my ass until retirement if he knew I’d wondered how it felt to sleep with Len in my arms.

Lenora’s head shot up, her gaze chasing mine. Fine, I’d declared us as a couple without consulting her. But really, we were exclusively fucking each other and throwing fits whenever the other breathed in another person’s direction. It wasn’t far-fetched.

and I was stupidly in love with the boy I hated. The boy I’d never really hated.

The boy I’d convinced myself I hated so I would never have to face the feelings I felt right now: sheer fright that he was going to snatch my heart from my chest and stomp on it with his army boots.

“I am hell bound, and you are heaven sent. You’re the first girl I ever looked at and thought…I want to kiss her. I want to own her. I wanted you to look at me the way you look at your fantasy book—with a mixture of awe, anticipation, and warmth. I gave you a brownie, hoping you’d remember me sweetly, praying the sugar rush would spin a positive feel around that vacation. I remember how you looked at me when you saw me killing jellyfish. I never wanted you to look at me like that ever again.”

“You,” he whispered, kissing my cheek, “are so effortlessly yourself.”

“The minute it’s done, I’m leaving. I can’t let you waste your life with someone like me. You deserve more, and if trouble ever finds me, it sure as fuck isn’t going to touch you.”

I’d told Edgar I would make his daughter fall in love with me and get her out of her emotional funk. That I would court her, love her, cherish her, and be a friend to her. He, in return, sold her dreams to buy her happiness. With me. We’d both lied to get what we wanted, and it had blown up in our faces in a spectacular fashion.

NOOOOOOOOOI WHAT

There wasn’t any point in seeing her again. It would just make shit harder. I knew she was on the other side. Alone. Soft. Beautiful. Mine, for now. I turned and walked away, feeling for the first time what it meant to have a hungry heart.

Love. I was in love with Lenora Astalis. Had been from the goddamn get-go. I’d offered her a brownie because I wanted to talk to her. I’d followed her back to her room at Carlisle after she’d entered the darkroom because I wanted to thrust myself into her life with a dirty pact. A bargain. A silent contract. I bullied her because I loved her. I loved her because she was the only girl who looked at me and didn’t see money or status or violence or a heartless prince. She saw me.

I felt my dress shirt soaked with her tears. I hated to see her like this. I’d kill a few more Harry Fairhursts with my bare hands if it meant making her happier.

“No. Don’t. Please don’t scold me, or ask me why him. There was something about the two of you in a room—any room, at any point of your childhood—that made the air sizzle, seconds before you put your hand to the material and made a masterpiece. There was magic there, and it was tightly woven. I wanted to pull it thread by thread by thread until I unraveled it completely. Your mother noticed it, too, the day Vaughn sneaked you a brownie.”

How could he let him leave? How could he let—no, force me—to fall in love with Vaughn, then watch as he left me? But he’d never intended Vaughn to leave, had he? And then the inevitable dawned on me, heavy as the rocks Vaughn fought with to create art. I was in love with him, wasn’t I?

He was psychotic, erratic, eccentric, and completely unlovable in any way…and that made me love him more. Because I knew how completely doomed he was. How much he needed it. Our love was so much more than love. It stripped us of pride and anger and hate and insecurities. We were bare and beautiful and pure when we were together. And now he is gone.

“All those months, I gave you time to figure yourself out, Lenny. But I never went away. I was always here. Always loving, hoping, praying. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I love you now. Then. Always.”

I would later stumble across a line from Edgar Allan Poe that made sense of it all—he said there’s no superb beauty without some sort of strangeness in the proportions.

I approached you, casting a shadow over your face, blocking the sun. I remember the moment you looked up and stared at me, because once you held my gaze, I couldn’t look away.

It wasn’t a good or exciting feeling. It was terrifying. I gave you a brownie because I needed to do something. But when it came down to eating my part of it, I couldn’t do it. I was too nervous to eat. From that day forward, I wouldn’t eat much in front of people in general.

You never came. Until you did. Until you showed up at my school senior year.

You were pure, beautiful, talented, and carefully tucked in your own rich world of art, books, and music. I was torn, miles away, in a rich beach town I hated, a kid who’d seen and felt way more than he should have.

We were an unfinished business, personal and always walking the tightrope between love and hate. But we were always something, Len. We will always be something.

You might move on and marry someone else, have his children and get your happily ever after, but you will never be completely done with me. And that’s the small chunk of mirth I allow myself. That’s my half of the brownie. That’s my one, perfect summer moment in the South of France, watching the face of the girl I will love forever for the very first time. Because, Lenora Astalis, this is love. It’s always been love. Love with many masquerade masks, twisted turns, and ugly truths. I don’t know where I’ll go from here, but I’ll be wishing you were there.