Scarlet Angel (Mindf*ck #3)(18)

“Every time I think I can walk away…that’s the only time I close my eyes and see it happening all over again,” I say to him, sighing long and hard. “Sometimes I think I really did die, and that I’m truly the avenging angel my brother said we’d be together.”

I feel as though I only have one purpose in life.

“Maybe you are,” he agrees. “But maybe you’re allowed to give up vengeance for hope.”

“Then why do I see the nightmares when I consider stopping?”

His lips tense.

“Exactly,” I tell him, motioning around the room. “If my life was spared to right the wrongs of that time, then I won’t be at peace until they’re all dead. Others in that town are suffering. You know it. People just like Lindy who speak out against the ‘justice’ they dole. Women like Diana who has spent the last ten years worried one day her son would turn up dead or missing. People like my father who was killed for crimes he didn’t commit.”

He nods dully, knowing I’m right.

“It’s your choice, Lana. I’m just saying I’m with you regardless of what you choose.”

Tears. I hate tears. But they keep reappearing in my eyes at random.

I go to plop down in his lap, and he wraps his arms around me, pulling to me to him as I hug him. “You know you’re my second favorite brother, right?” I ask him, a joke I’ve said since we were kids.

He laughs against the side of my face. “Yeah. I know. Just like you’re my favorite sister, but only because you’re the only one I have.”

As we both laugh at the small bit of the past we’ve held onto, my mind turns over the past events of the last few days. The newest additions to my string of kills.



“Scream for me,” I tell Anthony, smiling while he bleeds, his cries of agony like sweet music to my ears. But the melody is off key, not hitting the same notes as it usually does.

This normally feels so much better.

“You fucking cunt! I knew you were evil. Just like your father.”

“No. I was sweet,” I tell him, meaning it, as I slowly slide the blade across his chest, leaving a shallow cut there. He gives me nothing more than a wince. “I was na?ve. I wasn’t a virgin, but I wasn’t the whore you labeled me. My body was my temple and all that, until you all held me down, took your turns, and left me for dead. You killed Marcus. And he gave his life so that I could come back and pick you off one at a time.”

He screams when the knife slides down, and I taunt him again with the words he once used against me.

“Scream for me, Anthony. Scream loud. No one can hear you. No one cares.”

He does scream. He screams into the vast nothingness of the basement that is completely underground. Really, they make it too easy sometimes.

But I won’t leave him here. No one will ever know I was here at all.

“You’ll burn in hell. What we did was try to destroy the evil in the world. Evil is hard to kill,” he spits out.

“You seriously want to justify what you did as an act of justice? You claim righteousness even after your acts of violence and sin?”

He grins, his mouth a bloody mess. “You can’t sin against the devil. You’re straight from his loins, just like your father. They’ll stop you. Good always triumphs over evil. I’ll be avenged.”

My lips twitch, amused at how delusional he truly is. “This is good triumphing over evil,” I say quietly, watching as his eyes narrow to slits. He hates me considering myself the avenging angel, and I use it to my advantage. “This is your punishment. The act of good prevailing.”

“You and your faggot brother were already going to hell. We just sped things along.”

“If you’re the one in the right, why isn’t there some divine intervention saving you?” I ask him, standing slowly. “I was resurrected from the ashes, surviving against all odds. Yet you’re down here, suffering for the crimes of your past. Not me.”

He opens his mouth, but closes it. “See?” I muse, smirking. “Even the devil can quote Scripture for his own purpose. William Shakespeare, in case you’re wondering. But I’m not the devil, Anthony. I’m the angel who has come to take you all to hell.”

He finally screams louder than he has before when I take away that last bit of power he had, slicing it off at the base, kicking it away like the trash it is.

“You’ll never hurt anyone else,” I whisper darkly, drinking in the sounds of his pain, and ignoring the hollowness I feel for the first time ever.

I won’t stop.

I can’t.

Now to go back to Kentucky.

“I’ll tell the next one you said hello,” I go on, talking over the sounds of his sobs. “Your bestie is next.”



I’m jarred out of the memory by the sound of someone pounding on Jake’s door.

“Shit,” he hisses, glancing at the monitor beside us.

I scramble off his lap, my heart thumping painfully in my chest as I see Logan knock on the door again. This cannot be happening.

“Mr. Denver,” Logan says, looking up at the camera Jake never bothered to hide on his front porch. “If you’re in there, we’d like to speak to you.”

Donny is beside him, looking all MIB with his glasses on. Logan opens his thingy and flashes his credentials to the camera.