Beast: Learning to Breathe (Devil's Blaze MC #5)

I shake my head and the room spins. “You think you know so much about me, don’t you, Hayden?”

“I know you’re a good man,” she tells me, and the belief in her words is so strong it resonates in her voice.

It hurts me to hear her faith in me, and I feel the need to lash out. To unleash the darkness so she sees the real me— the Beast.

“A good man?” I scoff. “You’re lying to yourself, Hayden. I dealt in death as a member of the Blaze. I didn’t even blink dealing out our form of justice.”

“Michael, I know enough about the club life to know what goes on. I also know that you’re nothing like Blade and his men. You aren’t evil. You wouldn’t murd—”

I cut her off, not wanting to listen to her defend me any longer. “I killed my own daughter, Hayden. No one else. I’m the reason my daughter isn’t alive. Me. Do you understand now? Do you finally see it? Do you realize the monster you let between your legs? I’m worse than Blade, I’m your worst fucking nightmare,” I tell her, then I lay my head back, close my eyes, and wait for the sound of her footsteps taking her away from me. Footsteps that will leave me alone.

Just like I deserve.





103





Beast





The sound of the footsteps never come. I open my eyes slowly and see her standing in front of me, her arms crossed at her chest, staring down.

“I told you to leave,” I growl like a spoiled child. Why is she still here? Why won’t she leave?

“There’s nothing you can say, Michael, that will make me believe that you killed your child. Nothing,” she answers, and I hate her. She looks so absolute in her stance, standing there, speaking down to me. I hate her.

“Because I’m such a good person,” I half-laugh, keeping contempt so thick in my voice she flinches.

“You are. You can say whatever you want, but I know it in my heart. You wouldn’t use me or my daughter. You care about us,” she whispers so innocently.

It’s time for the monster to make an appearance. “Was I such a good moral person when I grabbed the arms of your dead brother and pulled him out of the basement he’d been chained up in like a dog?” I ask, as if I am discussing the weather. I look at her with all the self-hate I have boiling inside of me.

Her gasp tells me that my aim was true. She trembles as she deals with the body blow I just delivered.

I allow a smile to contort to my face, one full of cynicism. “He’d been chained up in that fucking basement for a year. Fuck, a lot longer, really. I only knew about it for a year, and I did nothing to stop his torture, nothing to help him. I used to lay awake at night, and I’d get hard imagining the pain he was enduring.”

“Michael—”

“When Skull finally cut him down and fucking let him draw his last breath, I was disappointed. Your brother was such a sick, bloody mess, he was unrecognizable. He was a bag of fucking bones and most of those were broken.”

“You’re lying! Why are you saying this stuff? What is wrong with you? Stop it!”

“Stop? But don’t you want to know where your brother is buried?” I rub my beard.

“You…you know?”

“Know? Who do you think put him there?”

“Michael,” she cries, and she looks so small and innocent standing there, her arms hugging her body as if to ward off more pain.

I should let it go, but I don’t. I need to make sure I drive her away. “There’s no cemetery for you to visit though. There’s not a bench in sight that you could sit on and feel the breeze in your hair, while you talk with your brother. You’ll never have that, Hayden, and do you want to know why?”

“No,” she whispers, pleadingly. “Michael, stop this. You’re not this man, please…Don’t do this,” she begs, her breath and tears both coming harder and faster.

I should listen, but I don’t. “Because I threw him in the ground, in a hole big enough to bury two of him. I poured in chemical after chemical on his body. Then I watched as he literally rotted before my eyes. Want to know what I did then, Hayden?”

“No…”

“But you need to know, since you think I’m such a good person. When it was all done, I spit on him.”

“Michael…”

“And because that still wasn’t enough, I took a piss on him before we finally covered him up.”

“I can’t. I can’t hear this anymore,” she whispers, turning to leave.

“It still didn’t help, not until Skull and I decided to build an outhouse over his damn grave. I can’t tell you the times I literally took a shit on your brother, Hayden, and I loved every fucking second of it. Hell, Skull still does it. Every. Fucking. Day.”

That does it.

I hear her literally run down the stairs, the door below slamming behind her.

She’s gone.

It’s finished.

That should make me feel better.

It doesn’t.



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