One Dirty Night - Page 140

I honestly didn’t know if I was the T-Rex or the goat in this scenario.

Honestly, I was both.

It took all my fucking willpower to restrain myself. To smother the parts of me that were rotten and monstrous all while doing my best to be good. To be a genuinely nice guy who didn’t crave such debasement.

To be like him.

My half-brother who’d fought such urges and won. Who’d not only survived with the inherited compulsion to cause tears and get hard on pain but to find a wife capable of leashing him.

Fuck, I wanted that.

I wanted the freedom to be me all while too shit terrified to even approach a girl these days.

Not after what I’d done.

Not after what I’d wanted to keep doing.

The familiar black hunger clawed its way through me and every despicable part of me came out to play. My hearing seemed to sharpen, my nose became more acute to the scents of writhing, sweaty bodies dancing in the club around me; even my teeth ached as if they could lengthen, ready to puncture sweet flesh and lap up the hot blood inside—

Christ, stop it.

My fist spasmed around my glass of whiskey.

The cheap imitation crystal fractured, cracked, then exploded into shards, tearing through the meat of my palm, and drenching my newly purchased suit in liquor.

“Merde, you okay, Ward?”

Ward.

The name on my falsified birth certificate but not my true name.

My true name I’d only just found out and under no circumstances could it be uttered around this scum.

Cursing under my breath, I glanced at the man beside me.

The man I’d painstakingly stalked, befriended, and done whatever it took to gain his trust. Six months it’d taken. Six months to slime my way into his inner circle when I should’ve run in the opposite direction.

He was the type of human I did my utmost to avoid because he represented who I truly was at my core. Each time I hung out with him—slowly evolving from shared drinks with acquaintances to watching dark-web porn in his den—I came face to face with the monster inside me.

It clawed and snarled. It thirsted for things not normal. It howled for things not sane. My dreams were full of despicable deeds and my body hardened at the foulest images. The first time I’d been invited to his house to watch some sick shit he subscribed to, I’d had to run to the bathroom to throw up.

Just because I had urges didn’t mean I would ever, fucking ever, give in. I’d walked away when I’d wanted to keep going. I still had a shred of decency…unlike the animals in those movies. But, little by little, video clip by video clip, I shut down the parts of me that I’d clung to all my life. I turned my back on the last embers of light and embraced the disturbing darkness within me.

That choice had gotten me this far.

But at what cost?

My fucking soul, that’s what.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I muttered, snatching a serviette from the holder on the bar, watching with morbid satisfaction as the pristine white soaked a vibrant red with my blood.

I shuddered as I imagined it was someone else’s blood. A nameless woman with her eyes wet and legs spread—

Fuck.

Clenching my teeth, I scrubbed at the wound.

I was so fucking twisted.