Raphael (Deadly Virtues #1)(4)

Diel turned the file around to face him. “Sex dungeons,” he said, amused. “Your favorite place to reside, Raphe. Apart from her hair, it’s what you like most, yeah?”

Raphael nodded. “And she frequents my favorite club too.” Raphael smiled and met each of his brothers’ eyes. “The most extreme and fucked-up toys to play with.”

“Wicked good,” Diel replied, smiling coldly too.

“She needs to be killed slowly.” Uriel moved closer to Raphael to see the picture in more detail. His voice had dropped into a low growl. “The whore is in love with herself. All that shitty work.” His mouth curled in disgust. “Murder the bitch over hours. Make the cunt scream until her voice gives out.” Uriel rubbed the spot over his upper chest, above the Fallen’s brand that they all wore with pride. Uriel’s body was littered with piercings and tattoos, marring every inch of his skin but for his neck and face. He was tracing one of the many words he had inked into his skin, the biggest one. The one that read “UGLY.” It was ironic; Uriel’s face was anything but. Uriel’s gray eyes met Raphael’s gaze. “When you’ve done it, you come and tell me how loud she wailed. How much you fucking made her pay. I need to know. I need to know every second of her pain, or I won’t be able to sleep.”

“Always,” Raphael said. And he would. One of the biggest pleasures they shared was the retelling of their kills. Every detail, every feeling the murders elicited . . . how their victims begged and pleaded to be spared, to be given mercy.

Mercy was never awarded by the Fallen.

No one was ever spared.

There was no goodness in their souls. Tears and cries rolled off their consciences like raindrops; protests and pleas made them smile.

Raphael closed the file. “I’ll see you all later.” Raphael walked through the vast mansion and upstairs to his own rooms. He crossed the bedroom and went through the hidden door in the vintage-wallpapered wall and into his private room. He headed straight to the large wall that was filled with pictures. Pictures of his kills, taken minutes after death, eyes wide open and faces frozen in a perpetual state of quietus. Graffitied words written in red and black expressed what each victim had done. How they had screamed. How they had clawed at his skin . . . how they had choked on their final breaths.

His gaze drifted to his left. To the one wall that was adorned with a gilded gold frame, a table of unlit candles, and an empty vase awaiting the single rose that would fill it and sit center stage.

A heavy pang of disappointment hit. He clenched his fist by his side.

Not yet, he thought. Not yet . . .

Pinning the picture of his next victim to the north wall of the room—his planning space—he began to plot. As Raphael stared at Angela Bankfoot, his desires for how she would die grew darker and darker. She wasn’t who he wanted. For that, she would pay. Raphael focused on crafting the seduction techniques: the whens, the hows, the methods by which he would tempt her to her eventual demise.

A while later, Michael strode into the room. He had a shot glass of blood in his hands, as he did every night. Raphael knew it was Michael’s own, extracted from his veins only minutes before. Drops of blood still stained his wrist, his black shirt barely disguising the wound. Michael sat on the chair on the corner, dipping his finger into the glass and circling his lips until they were painted a deep shade of crimson red. Around and around his finger went as he lapped at the liquid, the movement staining the skin around his mouth.

“When?” Michael asked, never taking his eyes away from his blood. As always, his shirt was open to his navel, and the vial he always wore sat over the Fallen’s insignia that was burned into his skin. Ever since they moved into the manor, Michael had started coming to Raphael’s room each evening. He never stayed the night, just remained in Raphael’s company until he went to bed. They wouldn’t always speak; Michael rarely did. But he always turned up.

They had lived in Purgatory for years. Years of torture, with only each other to rely on for support. When they escaped Father Quinn’s clutches and Gabriel gave them each their own rooms, it was too foreign for them all. For the first year they had all slept in the same room, together, on the hard floor of the Tomb.

The damp, the lack of windows and light, the stagnant air, the cold . . . it had been all they had known for so long. Even Gabriel had joined them, unable to sleep himself. As the years passed, they slowly began to gain independence. But they congregated each night at dinner and, more often than not, many other times in the day. It was brotherhood in its strongest form. They didn’t know how to live without one another—they didn’t care to find out.

Michael had been the youngest of the Fallen next to Raphael. The two of them were naturally drawn together. Even ten years later it was still the case.

“I begin tomorrow,” Raphael said, answering Michael’s question. He stepped back and glared at Bankfoot’s picture. It stared back at him, her blown-up red lips offending his golden eyes. Raphael took hold of the string on his finger and loosened it, letting his finger find momentary relief, only to once again wrap it around the base, then the knuckle, up to the nail . . . over and over again. “First, I will make contact with her, capture her attention. Then I’ll lure her in.” Raphael felt his breathing deepen as he envisioned the play. He thought of the club, the darkness and smoke that filled every part of the space. The smell of sex and cum, and the wooden contraptions in the open for everyone to see.