I didn’t allow myself to ponder his words. I had enough on my plate to deal with without adding eccentric madman.

  He sipped his drink as we walked down the hall, heading towards the stairs.

  On our way down a buxom blonde dressed in red bypassed us, giving him a sly smile much like the one Megan had given the chapel guard.

  “Kellie,” he greeted her.

  “Bishop,” she replied in a sickly sweet tone that would have Camilla laughing her ass off.

  Clearly, the two of them were fucking one another. It couldn’t have been more obvious. The look of contempt shot in my direction only proved my assumption. It took effort not to roll my eyes.

  When we reached the foyer, Bishop bumped my arm and offered me his drink.

  I gently pushed it back in his direction.

  “What? Don’t like frappes?”

  “I don’t know where your mouth has been.”

  Were we really discussing this? I truly had entered a madhouse.

  “That’s fair,” he replied as we began to trek down the hall where the main door was located. “Although it could be considered insulting in regards to Cam.”

  “What did you say?” I turned towards him so fast I nearly tripped and fell on my face.

  “We’re here.” He winked at me and pulled open one of the ballroom doors.

  “What did you mean?” I asked, following him into the empty room.

  “You know this room is beautiful when it’s all done up,” he mused aloud.

  I crossed my arms as the chill set in.

  I wasn’t going to keep repeating myself. These men got a kick out of fucking with someone’s head.

  We walked all the way to the back corner where a door I hadn’t noticed from before sat positioned as part of the wall. He pushed it right open and entered a darkened, narrow hall.

  I hesitated, drawing up short.

  Bishop paused and looked at me over his shoulder. “Come on; nothing is gonna hurt you. Besides, I’m right here.”

  Was that supposed to be reassuring?

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To your friends.”

  My friends…?

  I crept forward to try and glean a better look at the hall he was standing in, but everything was black.

  “Do you want some assistance?”

  Again his tone was teasing, but there was an undercurrent of something else— it was disturbing.

  Realistically I knew I didn’t have the option of saying no. He could drag me in there with him at any second. My choices were no longer my own. The decisions I made were already pre-determined before being presented to me as questions.

  Swallowing down my nervousness, I stepped into the hall and carefully moved past him.

  “Just go straight,” he told me.

  Nodding, I placed my hands in front of me and made my way forward. It was even colder here than the main part of the house.

  Eventually, a red glow began to light the end of the passage, and I realized where it led.

  A few steps later I was passing through another open door and into the chapel. I continued further into the room before stopping completely.

  Ryker was there. So were Pope, Camilla, and Lilly too. It was different than yesterday, though.

  None of the apostles were present. In front of that dreadful altar were two chairs with leather straps hooked around feet and arms.

  Finding the mobility in my legs, I took even steps forward, rounding around so I could confirm what I was seeing.

  I looked between Marcy and Jeremy, both gagged and bound, the strong scent of feces and urine clinging to their clothes.

  “W…what is this?”

  I wasn’t asking anyone in particular, but it was Ryker who replied.

  “This is a confessional.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Ryker

  “This is a confessional.”

  The look on her face was one to remember. Something between disbelief, anger, and that tiny bit of curiosity she tried so hard to hide.

  Her eyes went from Marcy and Jeremy to the other people in the room, finally coming to me.

  “Confessional of what?” she questioned, nearly seething.

  Bishop grinned at me from behind her. The bastard took in a healthy view of her ass before giving me a thumb on his way to sit in the pew right beside Camilla.

  I knew it was a matter of time before she would need to be restrained or sedated, and Bishop had made it more than clear he wanted to have his fun with her.

  Now she was his responsibility.

  “Ryker.”

  I moved my attention back to Faith. She was looking to me for answers, and something about that made me all the more endearing to her.

  Such a vision she was, standing in my chapel in her short tart slip of fabric. I could still feel the sting from her nails leaving tracks down my back.

  I needed to wrap this all up within the next few days.

  Malignant would be going through drastic changes over the next few months. The black market had never been thriving better, and I planned to take full advantage, which meant getting Faith home as soon as possible.

  If she broke during the process, I’d just fix her up later. That was the fun part about owning someone entirely.

  What you did to them was completely up to your discretion. It made up for my hesitation to kill her when Sam died.

  Pope stepped forward and placed both his hands on the altar, eyeing Faith like she was a new dolly he wanted to implement his brand of torture on.

  “They’re going to tell you their grievances, and you’re going to absolve them of their pain,” he explained to her like we were at a business meeting.

  “What does that even mean?”

  I held up a hand to silence him when he would have responded.

  “How about I show you?”

  Without waiting for her response, I went to stand behind Jeremy and Marcy, tugging both of the rawhide gags from their mouths.

  They coughed and took a second to wet their whistles, eyeing one another like an alley cat and a pit-bull.

  Camilla tilted her head to the side, immediately picking up on the tension between the two.

  Faith took a bit longer to catch up. Poor girl tried to see the best in everyone. That often resulted in situations like this one.

  “You two know each other?” she asked, reading their body language correctly.

  “Very good, Faith.” I clapped my hands together. “Marcy, do you want to tell Faith how you know Jeremy?”

  She lifted her head and gave me a look I’m sure was meant to be intimidating but her face resembled one half of a marshmallow, so the effect was all but lost.

  “That’s alright.” I patted her swollen cheek hard enough to make it hurt, delighting in the whimper that came from her lips. “Jeremy, would you like to confess first?”

  “She buys from me,” he answered with no hesitation, quick to throw the mousy girl under the bus. “She’s been using since Sam’s funeral.”

  “What the fuck?” Camilla’s voice echoed as silence filled the chapel.

  “Using? Marcy, you’re doing drugs?” Faith questioned, moving closer to the girl she still considered a friend.

  The concern she had for her pissed me off. I knew firsthand how their relationship had deteriorated because Faith told me everything. She always had.

  “You hypocritical bitch,” Lilly snapped, playing up her role so perfectly she deserved an Oscar.

  Faith, though. She still looked concerned when I needed her to be angry.

  “All those times she said it should have been you that night. Calling you a junkie and a whore. Amazing, isn’t it? How well she hid that secret?”

  “You…why?” Faith sputtered. “Why the fuck would you start using when you saw firsthand what it did to me? Why did you treat me like shit just to turn around and do the same thing?”

  And there it was.

  The bit of anger I was looking for. Now I could hurry this bit along.

  Marcy turned her head to look at me, and then promptly began to cry. Jeremy scowled at her with zero remorse.

  “Do you ever think of that night?” I directed at Faith.

  She looked at me and nodded, knowing exactly what night I was referencing. I knew it haunted her as much as it haunted me.

  Sam was loved by everyone who met him, and that still paled to how much he was adored by his closest friend, Faith Munroe.

  He loved her like a sister, their relationship purely platonic. They were two fucked up individuals that went about handling their problems in all the wrong ways.

  My brother was an addict to numb himself from the debauched pleasures he found at Malignant. Faith numbed herself to fight off those very pleasures from manifesting.

  Two separate secrets between two people, but nearly identical.

  They could have saved one another if they’d only embraced the demons lurking within them.

  “You found his body slumped on the bathroom floor. I imagine he was cold, rigor mortis setting in by the time you discovered him, the needle still sticking out of his vein.”

  “What does that have to do with this?” she asked, taking a step back.

  “It has everything to do with this. My brother never once overdosed before that night. So explain to me why there was enough heroin in his system to tranquilize a horse? Sam was a lot of things, but suicidal was not one of them. That wasn’t why he used.”

  “What does that have to do with them, Ryker?” She rubbed a hand across her forehead, frustration marring her features when she looked at me again.

  “Confess.” I grabbed hold of Marcy’s hair and wrenched her head back. She yelped in pain, eyes going wide at my demand.

  “Pope.”

  Needing no further explanation, he lifted the syringe from the altar, bringing it forward to present to Faith.

  As I spoke, I used my free hand to pull a weathered stopwatch from my pocket. It once belonged to a friend of mine, someone on Pope’s level of sadism.

  He got stupid and paid for that stupidity dearly.

  When I found where he was a few months ago, it was too late. He died with a nail-ridden bat shoved up his ass and maggots rotting inside the various infections his body had.

  In return, I had Harper currently locked away at Malignant, but that was a much darker story to tell that had nothing to do with Faith or Sam.

  “You want me to—.”

  “When this timer stops, one of them had better have that syringe planted in the side of their neck.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “The same thing that killed my brother.”

  Her hands went up in a defensive motion, and she took a step back.

  “I won’t do that. I’m not a killer.”

  “After today you are.” My thumb pressed down on the tiny silver button; the stopwatch began to tick.

  “You.” I gave Marcy’s head another jerk. “Confess now, or I’ll do it for you.”

  “Fuck, man I don’t want to die,” Jeremy mewled, looking between Faith and me.

  Of course, the pathetic sack of shit didn’t want to die. Most people felt the same way. My brother was one of them.

  “This is insanity. You’re insane!”

  Camilla rose from her seat, ever the perfect guard dog. I admired her loyalty. It was touching.

  Not sure what she thought she was going to do though. The second she stood up, Bishop had an excuse to pull her down onto his lap and pin her there.

  His frappe hit the floor and the hand that was holding it wrapped around her slender throat, keeping her quiet and still.

  “Since Marcy can’t seem to find her voice right now, she was going to tell you she was there that night. How she pushed the syringe into Sam’s arm.

  “Jeremy and Marcy are both wastes of space and air, but I’m going to let you decide which one of them gets salvation and who gets absolution.”

  Faith’s whole demeanor changed in a matter of seconds.

  “Is that true?”

  “I came there to talk to you after our fight. You were passed out on the couch, and he was upstairs with—”

  I shook her again, digging my fingers into the crown of her skull. Her eyes screwed shut, another whimper falling from her mouth. I couldn’t let her tell the whole story because it wasn’t all hers to tell.

  “You’ve got thirty seconds.”

  Much quicker than I expected, she snatched the syringe from Pope and surged forward. And just as I predicted, she plunged it into Jeremy’s neck with no dilemma, pushing every drop of the lethal drug into his system.

  The effect was instantaneous. His body seized up, the heroine working like a charm. Foam gathered at the corner’s of his mouth, dripping down his chin.

  While she was momentarily distracted by what she’d just done, I removed the handgun from the back of my pants and put a bullet straight through the side of Marcy’s skull.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Faith

  I didn’t feel bad about what I’d done. No one would suffer from Jeremy’s death. If anything, I’d done the world a favor.

  I was a killer, so what?

  The earth was still turning, I was still kidnapped by the deranged man I’d fallen in love with, and my mind was still as gone as it ever was.

  The fact I was a murderer wasn’t what was bothering me.

  It was the five-star dinner spread on the table before me while Marcy’s blood dried on my skin and clothes that had me feeling nauseous. She’d been there that night and I never even knew.

  How could one of my closest friends’ kill the other? It sounded like something from an LMN movie. How did I not know?

  The answer reverted to the same reason as always.

  I couldn’t fucking remember.

  I’d been a drunken mess that night, hating myself when I discovered I was pregnant two weeks later.

  I had stumbled into the bathroom needing to throw up coming upon Sam’s body.

  His lifeless eyes’ flashed through my mind, causing me to close mine. He was such a beautiful person. To learn, he didn’t overdose but that he was murdered? I felt like I’d lost him all over again.

  Diagonal from me, silverware grated together as Ryker cut into his filet mignon, enjoying his meal as if everything was perfectly fine.

  There was no way he was finding all this out only now.

  No, something told me he’d known the truth for quite some time.

  “What was she going to say?”

  My voice sounded strange to my own ears. I hadn’t said a word since hours earlier.

  Hadn’t shed so much as a single tear for the girl I once considered a best friend or the dealer I used to score from. My heart wasn’t aching for them; it was hurting for Sam.

  “Oh, so you do speak?”

  I stared at my baked potato so that I wouldn’t have to look at him.

  “Answer the fucking question!”

  He set his fork and knife down and wiped his mouth before clearing his throat. “It’s clear to me you’re feeling a little stressed. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have just spoken to me like you’ve lost all common goddamn sense. But don’t worry; I have a remedy for that.”

  I shoved my plate off the table in a petulant fit of rage. The meal hit the floor in a mess of broken glass as the square dish broke into pieces.

  The answer was hovering in my head, and I didn’t want to believe it, but so many things made sense when I slid that piece into the puzzle.

  And I couldn’t handle it.

  “Megan,” Ryker called out, rising from his chair.

  He was calm.

  Had I been fully aware of what was going on instead of drowning in my own tormented thoughts, I would have realized he was too calm.

  Megan came scurrying into the room with her head down, carrying something in her hands. She must have been lurking nearby this entire time.

  It almost looked like something was wrong with her mouth.

  I didn’t have the time or even care to study it before she disappeared as fast as she entered.

  Ryker set what she had handed him directly in front of my face, giving me a second to see what it was, a gauntlet full of a dark, ambrosia colored liquor. Something so potent I could smell it from my chair.

  “I think you need a drink.”

  I pressed my elbows into my sides and stiffened, jerking my head no.

  “Just take a sip, pretty girl. I promise it will make you feel better. It will make me feel better too. You know it’s perfect for taking the edge off.”

  Again, I shook my head no. My vocabulary became a useless jumble of words I could no longer pronounce.

  I’d had no desire to stick the needle of heroin into my arm and ride the familiar wave that came with it.

  Perhaps because I knew it equaled death.

  This drink though…I wanted it.

  There was no better painkiller than the numbing of all your senses, becoming oblivious to everything around you.

  One sip, however, could wreak havoc on all the hard work I’d done to maintain my sobriety.

  For someone like me, liquor, beer, whiskey…it was all the same, and the only place for it was in the very depths of hell. Ironic considering that’s what Ryker referred to this place as.

  “Faith, don’t be rude.” He moved behind me, deftly tangling his fingers in my hair. “Take a drink.”

  “Ryker,” I breathed through the tears gathering in my eyes.

  “You won’t shed a tear for the friend you lost or the man you killed, but you’ll cry for your sobriety.”

  His words made no impact on my psyche. I already knew I wasn’t a good person. I’d never claimed to be a saint knowing full well I was the worst kind of sinner.

  Those demons he spoke of freeing had never been caged. They’d just been ignored and forgotten. I numbed their desires with alcohol and drugs until rehab forced me to convince myself and those around me that I was normal, that I was okay.

  I lifted my hand to show the serenity prayer bracelet that symbolized how far I’d come, hoping to appeal to some kinder part of him. It was the wrong thing to do.

  He grabbed my wrist, wrenching it back until it felt as if the bone would snap in two.