A Portrait of Pain

  A Portrait of Pain

  Jane Washington

  Contents

  1. It Will Not Be Me

  2. Mercy in Memory

  3. The Words Unspoken

  4. Life Rearranged

  5. The Benefits of Internalisation

  6. The Happiness Delusion

  7. Baby, Baby, Naughty Baby

  8. Reality Show Horror

  9. Trick, Treat, or Defeat

  10. Familiarity in Flames

  11. The Strain in Restraint

  12. Team Silas

  13. Outlawed and Underestimated

  14. The Final Barrier

  15. The Legacy of Death

  16. Cautionary Casualties

  17. Cogs in Motion

  18. Bad Guys and Bombs

  19. Last Words

  20. The Survival Game

  21. Loved Ones

  22. The Sleeping Threat

  23. Goodbyes

  24. The Final Battle

  Epilogue

  Also by Jane

  Acknowledgments

  Connect with Jane

  Copyright © 2017 Jane Washington.

  All rights reserved.

  The author has provided this ebook for your personal use only. It may not be re-sold or made publically available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  www.janewashington.com

  Edited by David Thomas

  www.firstreadeditorial.com

  ISBN-10: 0648054209

  ISBN-13: 9780648054207

  “Pain and pleasure, like light and darkness, succeed each other.”

  -Laurence Sterne

  Beyond the glass a fearful song,

  Inside my chest a keening sound;

  The rhymes go on for far too long,

  This world our battleground.

  I listen to sounds so violent,

  To each desperate cry and plea,

  And I know one of us will quiet …

  But it will not be me.

  I look up from the notebook, my teeth grinding together in a grimace. The spine was well-loved, and I had written on every page. Disjointed thoughts, rhymes, memories …

  One of us would grow quiet, but it wasn’t going to be me.

  I had tried my best to prevent the bonding, but now it was done. I wanted to blame Seraph, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. She wasn’t in her right mind. The Atmá magic was ruling her, the same way it would have ruled the rest of us if we hadn’t been given Dominic’s medication. I didn’t blame her … I was sure that she never would have betrayed me intentionally… but there were people who had, and those were the people who I could blame.

  They had ignored me for far too long. They had ignored me while I was a kid, showering their attention on my twin; on Jayden and Eva … the ‘talented’ ones. They had ignored me while I grew stronger, while I stalked the talented Seraph from the darkness, while I had the talented Eva sent away, and wrapped the talented Jayden around my finger.

  I made them all my slaves.

  I was the one with the real talent.

  They couldn’t ignore me anymore, because now they were dead. Weston, the man who had held my strings, forcing me to dance like a useless puppet for so many years; and Dominic, the man who had created me.

  “Dead.” I laughed, the sound carrying, echoing.

  “What?” The girl glanced up, blinking, confused. “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing,” I snapped, motioning the screen. “Play it again.”

  She hit the button to play the video, and I sat back in my chair, parting my legs and folding my arms behind my head. On the screen, Seraph was dressed like a hooker. She was straddling Cabe Adair’s lap, her body moving with the lithe grace of a trained dancer, even though I knew that she had no experience whatsoever. I knew, because I knew everything about her.

  “Such a slut,” the girl muttered, disgust and hatred fuelling her voice.

  I smirked, my eyes remaining glued to the image on the screen. Amber Kingsling was just jealous; she always had been, but now it was worse. Now she knew that Noah had never been hers, and that there was no way she was ever getting him back. I was coming to a similar conclusion about Seraph, although she had been mine, once. We shared a womb, after all. But the Klovoda had destroyed us—ripping us apart and putting us in separate homes; not allowing me to make contact with her until they deemed her ‘ready’. I was never going to get her back. It was too late … and it was all the Klovoda’s fault.

  Now … I had to make them pay.

  I had to make them all pay.

  “Again,” I growled, as the recording finished.

  Amber looked at me strangely before pressing the key to replay it. I leaned forward, my eyes trying to drink in every detail. They were so wrapped up in each other, not caring about the cameras on the wall, not caring about the security guard standing just outside the curtain, rolling his eyes as he texted on his phone. I had enhanced the video earlier to see what he was texting. Apparently, he had been informing the owner of the club that the ‘new girl’ was having sex with one of the clients in a private room. It wasn’t clear whether the owner had texted back or not. Maybe he had gone into his office to watch. They allowed underage girls with fake IDs to take up a job, so they obviously weren’t that stuck on their own rules.

  There was no sound on the video feed, but sound wasn’t needed; the proof was there in their faces, in the tremble of Seraph’s thighs as she rocked into Cabe, and the clenching of his hands as he hid his face in her neck. I could see a stretch of skin, from the tops of her thigh-high socks to the hem of her shorts, and her tight little ass was being framed perfectly, rising and falling as her spine arched and her head fell back.

  Fuck …

  “Okay …” I knew my voice sounded rough, but there was no preventing it. “Turn it off. You know what to do with it.”

  Amber jumped up from her seat, racing after me as I made it to the door. “Wait—Danny.” She paused, her blue eyes looking up at me, her sleek hair brushing her shoulders.

  I didn’t know what she wanted from me, not until her hand slipped down the front of my pants. I was affected by the recording, and now she knew. She laughed, the breathy sound annoying me.

  “I knew it.” She shook her head, her fingers closing around me. “I knew you were messed up. She’s your sister, Danny. Your twin.”

  I groaned. I couldn’t help it. She laughed again, her hand beginning to move. “You know I’m kind of like your sister, too. My dad created you …”

  She was a devious bitch, but parts of my body didn’t seem to care. I let her continue, my head falling back against the door, my grip curling around her wrist, encouraging her.

  “You’re just as bad,” I found myself saying. “You’re all over me just because I’m about to make her life hell. That’s how much you hate her. It’s making you hot, the thought of me hurting her.”

  “Yes …” she hissed.

  “I’m going to kill her,” I groaned, tightening my grip on Amber’s wrist until I heard her gasp of pain. “I’m done playing games.”

  “She’s going to die?” Amber asked, working her hand faster.

  “Yes,” I gritted out.

  I was beginning to understand the multifaceted nature of grief, and it was infinitely more complicated than I could have ever imagined. You could grieve a man that you hated, you could grieve a man that you had already grieved before with everything that you thought you possessed, and you could grieve a woman that you had never even met.

  I grieved with them; the four of them. Noah and Cabe: The two boys who had unfurled inside my heart the same way smoke does beneath a closed door; and the two men who had ba
rged in after them, knocking the door clean open. But no … that wasn’t right. Silas was the one who tore the door down and invited himself inside. Quillan was different. He was just standing there, inside my chest, quietly surveying the rubble. I had no idea what he was going to do, but I didn’t have the time to pull him aside and figure it out. I had to rely on the absolutes, for now. Noah and Cabe were my absolutes. They had become my best friends, though I couldn’t call them that. It would diminish things, because they were so much more.

  Maybe Silas was an absolute, too.

  Or maybe he would change his mind. I guess that disqualified him. The only thing I knew for certain about him was that he was Silas—and at the end of the day, that didn’t mean anything reliable.

  So we grieved together while I clung to my absolutes—to the two boys who had become as necessary to me as oxygen. Not that I pulled away from the other two. That would have been impossible. We shared everything now, not just a bond. We shared our relationship—no matter how uneven or confusing it was; we shared our minds, our fear, and our grief. It was something that the people outside of our bond who weren’t paired themselves couldn’t seem to understand. That was probably because it was the bond itself morphing our individual feelings into a central fount that flowed through me. Grief was no longer a private thing. Their grief was mine, and my guilt was theirs. I wept for Weston as though he were my own, twisted father. For Tabby and Yvonne, my heart had broken clean in half.

  My first time out of the country was for Yvonne’s funeral. The grief I felt then was of a different kind. It was an empty, dusty grief. It clung to the glass of framed pictures in her ghostly house, showing in the reflected faces of dark-haired twin boys, and a stunning, dark-haired mother. It showed in the scuff marks on the floor. It hung dank in the air of an abandoned bedroom, shelves stacked with technical paraphernalia, the sheets still somehow smelling of Silas—though I was probably imagining that. It was riper in the other bedroom; in the bottles of perfume and the discarded dressing gown. Yvonne and Tabby had both passed in their sleep.

  A small mercy.

  The trip to Ukraine had lasted a day. We visited the house, attended the funeral, and were back on a plane before nightfall. I was numb to the exhaustion. Numb from the overwhelming pain that bounced into my chest from so many directions. I wanted to be grateful that Silas wasn’t spinning out, that he was keeping his promise to change, to get himself under control … but I was too focussed on trying not to spin out of control myself. The truth was, I wanted to switch places with Yvonne—a woman I had never even met. I wanted her smiling again. I wanted her to take more pictures, to hang them up on the wall beside the old ones. I wanted her to fix the emptiness that clogged the halls of her home. And I wanted … peace.

  But that was selfish.

  I had to accept what had happened. I had to move on. There were more battles to be won.

  I had to understand that grief would be a constant in my life, and that it would be different every time it returned to me: the same face hidden beneath a brand new hat. I needed to say goodbye to this chapter of my life, to the grief that had clawed at me, to the threat that had stalked me through the shadows. I had to be ready to move on, but just as ready to welcome it back.

  Because this wasn’t the end. This wasn’t even close to the end. But it could be the beginning, if I tried hard enough to make it that way.

  The first step was to move out of the main house at Le Chateau. I couldn’t stay there anymore. The walls remembered. They remembered Weston; the sound of his dress shoes on the aged marble floors, the sound of his voice echoing against the walls, the sound of his bones breaking against the foundation. I knew that Silas had been kept below, in a proper dungeon that I had never seen. He wouldn’t let me see it because it wasn’t like the beautiful prison room that Weston and Danny had been kept in. The mansion knew the taste of Silas’s blood just as it did Weston’s. Even Gerald had died somewhere in that underground darkness. Houses weren’t living things, of course, but how much blood was needed before the floors became poisoned—before new screams would find a home there, keeping company with the echo of so much death?

  I couldn’t stay there.

  “How about this one?” Cabe asked me, resting his elbow on top of my shoulder and leaning on me—not his full weight, but enough to remind me that he was there. “It has a nice door.”

  He was right. The cottage that we stood outside of had a nice door—thick and wide, made of dark, stained wood. It didn’t belong on a cottage, but many of the cottages and houses lining the twisting laneways of Le Chateau were a patchwork of missing and replaced parts. The door had probably come from the mansion above, after the cottage had started falling apart. It was the only part of the cottage that looked like it had been renovated. The rest of it was still the same as it had been decades ago, presumably. I peered to either side, where three more cottages were in a similar state of disrepair. The one on the left was more of a house, probably double the size, while the other two on the right—moving down the hill—were the same size as the cottage in front of me. That was why we had stopped here, because the houses clustered close together, whereas they were spread apart in other sections of Le Chateau’s grounds. It had been impossible to find five houses close together, or even three. Two people would have to share the bigger house, but Noah and Cabe had said that they didn’t mind sharing.

  Noah was at the door of the bigger house now, nudging it open to stick his head inside. He disappeared, and Cabe shifted, his touch winding below my elbow, swinging me around to face him.

  “You sure about this, Seph?”

  I smiled at the concern in his toffee-brown eyes, enjoying the way the sunlight hit the colour, glazing over his irises with just enough light to brighten up his whole face. I couldn’t believe that I was bonded to him—to all of them—after all this time. I couldn’t believe that we were all still alive. We could have torn each other apart in the process of becoming bonded—Silas almost had. Weston could have figured out our secret earlier, and destroyed us for it. And Danny … my brother … my twin …

  “Stop.” Cabe squeezed my arm, bringing me back to the present. He released me, but his hands quickly found their way to my face, his fingers threading together behind my neck. “Don’t float away like that; stay here, stay present, stay sane.”

  “Okay.” I swallowed, forcing the memories away.

  They had been keeping me strong these last few months, but I should have been the one keeping them strong. I was their Atmá, after all. I was supposed to be the middle pillar. The strength. The glue.

  “So—the house …” Cabe’s eyes crinkled, his smile curving. “Are you sure you want to be on your own? We’re supernaturally tied, we might as well move in together.”

  “Not going to happen,” Noah announced, moving back into view.

  His hands were shoved into the pockets of his dark jeans, his blond hair pulled away from his face. Noah always had a look of harsh perfection about him. I loved it when something was out of place—a strand of hair, an upturned collar, a missing button—but everything was in its place today. His eyes were bright blue, stormy and arresting, drilling into mine as they did whenever he fixed me with his full attention. He stopped beside us, his hand brushing against mine, our fingers twisting together. Noah and Cabe didn’t hold back their need to be close to me in the presence of each other. Not like Quillan and Silas.

  “He’s right.” I flicked my eyes between them. I felt bad, but my voice was firm. “That’s probably not a good idea right now.”

  I wasn’t going to change my mind. Things were happening too fast. The world was spinning out of control. It felt like yesterday that I had been working on a makeshift desk in my room with the broken lock, listening out for sounds in the hallway. It felt like yesterday, but it had been so much longer than that. My eighteenth birthday had been the day before Yvonne’s funeral—marking yet another experience lost to grief.

  I needed to slow down.<
br />
  “We can’t all move in together,” I continued. “I’m only eighteen. I’ve never been in a place of my own before. I want to experience this. And besides, we all know how much of a disaster it would be.”

  Noah nodded, but Cabe scowled.

  “They’ll get used to it,” he protested. “Silas is changing already. He hasn’t punched one of us in months—”

  “Oh really?” Noah returned dryly. “How about when he pushed you off a bridge and almost killed you?”

  “Bygones.” Cabe waved a hand, dismissing the accusation. “I meant apart from that. He hasn’t punched anyone since then. He’s a good boy now.”

  Noah and I both started laughing.

  “We need the space,” I insisted.

  Cabe sighed, dropping his hands from my face. “Fine. But I get a key.”

  He walked off, opening the big door of the cottage. Noah turned to me, arching a golden eyebrow. “You’re going to give him a key?”

  I mirrored his expression, making my way past him. “Maybe.”

  He grabbed my jacket before I could get away, biting back a smile. “Seraph …”

  “Fine, you can have a key too,” I relented with a laugh.

  His smile broke free, cracking through the gloomy mask that seemed to always hover over his features. “Nice save.” He curled his fingers into my jacket, grabbing the other side and using his grip of the material to drag me up against him. “But … that might be a bad idea. You shouldn't give out any keys at all.”

  I was a little preoccupied with the feel of his muscled torso pressing into me, so I didn’t fully understand what he was saying. Noah was good at scrambling my thoughts. Some part of him still felt guilty for the way he had treated me, and that tainted our bond with indecision, clouding my head when he was close by. Lately, the guilt had been fading into the background, making room for other feelings. Stronger feelings.

  “You don’t think it’ll be safe?” I asked.