Raphael (Deadly Virtues #1)(20)

Raphael groaned, heat pulsing in his groin.

He might not get another chance to have this. He finally had her in his hands. The one . . . she was the one.

Decision made, Raphael stepped back, the woman’s small body dropping to the floor. He stared down at her face as he towered over her. Fair skin smothered in makeup that covered its natural paleness. He saw her true skin through the tear marks that had flooded her face as he’d squeezed her perfect throat. Her eyes were crystal blue when they were open. Raphael became hard when he remembered the fear in their depths as he had begun to rid her of life. Eyes that tried to plead with him for mercy.

He could’ve laughed. He didn’t offer mercy, only death.

Sporadic freckles were dusted across her nose and cheeks, making her look younger than she probably was. But that hair . . . her perfect hair . . .

Raphael reached down, ignoring the voice in his head forbidding him from doing what he craved. That voice belonged to Gabriel. Gabriel reciting the Fallen’s Ten Commandments . . . Thou shalt not bring prey back to Eden Manor . . . Thou shalt practice self-restraint . . . Thou shalt kill only the Chosen . . .

But Raphael forced himself to drown out those words with the heavy music outside. He picked up her limp body. Raphael groaned out loud, his cock swelling until it was painfully hard, when her hair draped over his arms and almost touched the floor. He cupped his dick and ran his hand along its caged length. He thought of her hair around it, wrapping around and around, pulling so tightly it hurt.

“Such potential,” he whispered into the silent room as his eyes dropped to the woman. He gazed down at her neck, which was stretched as her head hung over his arm. It was red from his hands. It was the perfect size. He recalled how it had felt to wrap his fingers around her fine bones. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before. She had fit him like a glove. Was made just for him. She was slender and, before his attack, had not one mark on her skin. “It’s her. It has to be her.” He felt his dick throb just imagining being inside her as she smiled up at him, her arms wrapped around his back.

Raphael knew he was never going to get anyone more perfect than her. He didn’t care that she was an innocent. He never cared if any of his kills deserved it or not. They were nothing to him. It was Gabriel who insisted on killing only those who harmed others.

And this woman wasn’t innocent, he reasoned. Any connection to the Brethren made her deserving of a slow and painful death. He was simply protecting his brotherhood. At least that was what he told himself as he fled across the room for the door that led to the exit. He was grateful that the private rooms were equipped with an easy escape route. Sometimes the private sessions were so intense people didn’t want to go back into the club.

Raphael tucked her close to his chest and walked down the stairs. The doorman was occupied with a woman trying to get in uncarded. Raphael took advantage of the distraction to slip into the shadows and open the back door, balancing the unconscious woman in his arms. Sticking to the back alleys, Raphael made his way to his car. He put the woman on the back seat and laid a blanket over her so no one would see. From the glove compartment, he withdrew the mask he kept there and doused it in chloroform. He tied the mask around her head, the chloroform-soaked gauze smothering her mouth, jumped into the driver’s seat, and hit the road. With every mile he made toward the manor, thoughts of how he would take her, how he would seduce and then kill her, were all he could concentrate on.

Seventy minutes later and a mile out, Raphael realized he couldn’t drive up the main driveway. The staff might see him. He decided to enter through the back way they rarely used and slip in through the tunnel that led from the unoccupied garden house to the ground floor of the main house.

Killing his lights, Raphael slowed as he made his way along the back road. The tires of his car crunched on the gravel. He prayed it wasn’t loud enough for any of his brothers to hear. The manor looked to be in darkness. But that didn’t mean anything. He and his brothers existed well in darkness. Even after ten years of being out of Purgatory, they still struggled with the light—in all its forms.

Raphael parked his car behind the garden house. Silently, he retrieved the woman from the back seat and stepped into the barren building. He made his way to the bookcase that would give way to the tunnel and pulled on the copy of Wuthering Heights. The bookcase moved. Raphael kept his eyes forward as he traveled the length of the tunnel. He listened intently at the door at the end. Hearing nothing, he sneaked into the house and quickly climbed the stairs, only stopping when he had entered his private rooms and locked the door.

For the first time since he arrived home, he glanced down at the woman in his hands. The mask kept her unconscious. Looking around his suite, he searched for where to put her. He decided on his walk-in closet. Like everything in the manor, it was huge, more than large enough to keep her. And none of his brothers would go inside. When Michael came into his rooms, he wouldn’t even look in its direction.

He quickly ducked out of the room, locking it behind him, and rushed back through the tunnel and into his car. Pulling back out onto the main road, he switched on his headlights and entered the manor through the usual front entrance. He was back in his rooms in ten minutes flat.

Raphael knew he wasn’t thinking rationally. He knew he was disobeying the commandments, Gabriel, and his brothers. But he wasn’t being led by his head. It was lust and want and his greatest fantasy within arm’s reach that were in control. And he happily surrendered himself to them.