The Annihilator (Dark Verse #5)(55)

She blinked, surprised. “What?”
“They let me go,” he repeated. “They knew with her gone they couldn’t control me again, and I was already twelve, getting older, more dangerous. So they decided it was better to let me go than to keep me and risk everything.”
She drew in a sharp breath. “Where did you go?”
“Nowhere, everywhere.” His fingers traced her naked back under his t-shirt. “They left me on the streets, and I stayed there for some time, stealing what I had to. I squatted in a school for a while, pretending to be one of their students, using their resources. The school was some kind of specialized one, and they had a martial arts class they gave to kids after hours. That interested me, so I got in there too. Then I squatted in one of the empty houses in the rich neighborhood when the owners had been away somewhere.”
That sounded wild to her, and absolutely terrifying. To be that young and be out in the world. “And nobody suspected anything?” she asked, both awed and scared at the thought that he’d lived through all that.
She saw his lips twitch, one of his hands coming to her jaw, thumb over her lips. “Just because I’m real with you doesn’t mean I’m like this everyone, little flamma,” he told her almost affectionately. “I fool people. It’s second nature to me. Even back then, I knew exactly what to fake into charming everyone into believing me, and they ate out of my hands. Boys wanted to befriend me, and I used them. Girls wanted to fuck me, and I used them.”
Oh, the danger of him.
She wondered what it would have been like, in another reality, if she had been in that school with him. Would he even have taken a second look at her? Would he have manipulated her into believing he liked her when he just wanted something else all along? Was he manipulating her now?
The longer she looked at him, the more his lips curved in a smile, the tighter his grip got on her jaw. “Second thoughts?”
“If I had been a girl there,” she worded her question but then left it, not wanting to know.
He rolled her under his body, his mouth inches from hers. “If you had been there, I would have fucked you. Then, I would have stalked you, and I would have made you mine. There is no reality where you and I exist that we don’t end up exactly where we are now. None.”
Inhaling deeply, she let her tight muscles relax as he kissed her, his tongue claiming her mouth, his hands claiming her body, his breaths claiming her heartbeats.
“What if I hadn’t wanted to be yours?” she provoked him, because god she loved it when his eyes flashed the way they were.
“Let’s not go there, Lyla.”
The soft warning of his words did something to her. His nose brushed hers, his grip on her jaw firm.
She knew what he meant. He would’ve had her, by hook or by crook, with or without her initial consent to be his. For some twisted reason, the thought of that didn’t fill her with dread as it should have. No. She had never felt more desired, more wanted, more powerful as she did when he told her this. And she didn’t know if he said it just to manipulate her, or because he genuinely meant it, but given the last six years he had spent doing exactly that, there was little reason to doubt him.
He kissed her for a few minutes, as though cementing his words, before he lay back down on his side, this time staring up at the ceiling, one arm behind his head, the other around her. She snuggled into his side, waiting for him to pick the story back up again, enjoying the way his hand spanned her entire ass before his fingers began to stroke her spine.
“I never forgot what The Syndicate had done,” he began again. “They made a massive mistake when they let me go. Exposing me to the outside world, it only made me realize how much power I had, and how much more I could have. Inside the home, I was limited about what I could do. Outside? The possibilities were endless.”
They must have been for him. The dangerous boy he had been would grow up to be an even more dangerous man.
His voice didn’t falter. “I didn’t have any plans in the beginning. But I wanted to make them pay for what they’d done to me, and what they were doing to some of the kids in that house.”
She was one hundred percent on-board with that. “What did you do?”
He slanted her a look. “I went back after a few years, once I knew they wouldn’t be expecting me. Every year, all kids were taken to a different site for inspection while the adults stayed back.”
“You went that day,” she deciphered, knowing he would’ve wanted the kids to be out of his way. “What did you do?”
“I burned it all down,” he stated. “Every inch of that ground, every brick of that house, I set it on fire. And I stood outside, enjoying the flames as they took everyone who had been inside. Alive.”
She shuddered slightly at the vivid imagery she could see in her mind, yet no sympathy hit her for those who had burned away. They had deserved to burn in the hell they had created.
“That’s when The Syndicate came to you?” She put the pieces together from what he’d told her. “And you worked for them for some time. But why go after them afterward, when you’d already destroyed those who’d hurt you? I don’t understand.”
He stayed silent for a long minute, simply staring up, his fingers lazily moving up and down her spine. She almost thought he wouldn’t answer when he spoke up again.
“I began to collect information within the organization. I got to know about how many operations they had in how many locations, about the different trades they were in, about the powerful people on the outside who were involved in some way or the other. I took all the information, and I kept saving it. Knowledge is power after all.”