Miscreants: Next Generation by Natalie Bennett (essential reading .txt) 📗

time, but that always reminds me how perfect you are—when you’re bloodied and covered in the filth that made you that way.”

“Are you in your right state of mind?” I asked, only partially joking.

“Have I ever been in my right state of mind?”

“True.”

I knew he wasn’t entirely bullshitting right now. He’d seen me at my best and my very worst. It had always been the hellish side of me he craved the most.

The part that was hollowed from grooves of darkness with an insatiable lust for his exclusive kind of volatile chaos.

“To answer your question, I feel fine.”

“In that case, you’re pretty too.” I continued to fix him up as we talked. The wound wasn’t bleeding all that much anymore, but the area around it had turned his usual gold skin a deep red.

“How bad does it hurt?”

“I’ll survive, but my morality will plummet if you stop taking care of me.”

He spoke as if he were being serious. How could he flirt right now? He’d just gotten shot. Granted, he didn’t cry out or complain once. It still had to hurt, and this had been completely avoidable. Speaking of…

“If you went ahead of me this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Or you’d be the one with the bullet hole.”

“I’m not someone people count on for survival. I’m also not as fragile as you treat me.”

He grabbed hold of my hand and held it in place. I looked at him questioningly.

“I don’t treat you like you’re fragile, I treat you like you’re irreplaceable. I don’t give a fuck if you like my methods or not—I will always bleed for you before you ever bleed for me.”

I swallowed, feeling my face warm beneath his heated stare. I didn’t know what to say. Of course, I wouldn’t agree with this because I felt the same—vice versa. I wasn’t sure what I did to be given his unending devotion, but it was something I was starting to cherish.

I cleared my throat and gave a soft tug of resistance so he’d let me go. “We can’t take the bullet out here, but there’s Celox and non-stick bandages until we get where we can. Those should work for now, right?”

“Yeah.”

With his consent, I got to work patching him up and finally asked something I’d wanted to know since earlier. “How did you know who was shooting at us?”

“I know a lot of things. If you play your role right, one day you will too.”

“And what is that?”

“Exactly what you promised.”

I withheld a sigh, having no reply. Everything came back to that. I couldn’t say I hated it, though. After all, it’s what I wanted too.

I was half asleep when the knock came.

I could hear the shower running, so Samael hadn’t finished yet. He’d wanted to take one together, but we needed to be careful about his wound getting wet.

Rolling off the bed, I went see who it was. A quick glance in the peephole showed Amo. After exhaling a deep breath, I pulled the door open and met with a perfect view of his chest.

“How is he?”

“He’ll be fine,” I replied, meeting his gray eyes.

I was glad someone like Amo cared so much about Mal. From the day I’d first seen him in an abandoned gym, Amo had never faltered or done something that could make you question his loyalty to his friend.

“Can I talk to you?”

“Me?” I moved back slightly.

He smiled, an actual, genuine smile, and nodded his head. “Yeah, you.”

“Sure…”

He stepped back, and I realized he wanted me to leave the room. I moved forward and cracked the door behind me so that I wouldn’t lock myself out.

“What’s up?” I asked, glancing around.

Except for some old guy a few rooms down, we were the only two outside right now.

“It’s about your brother.”

My attention immediately snapped back to him. “What about him? Wait—which brother?”

“I tried to stop him. He wouldn’t listen. There wasn’t anything I could do once he’d made that decision. The role I played didn’t allow that, and I was doing it for someone else.”

I knew who he was protecting—his baby sister. Everything he’d done as Creed was to ensure he freed her from the purgatory she’d been living in.

You can be angry at someone for a choice they made, but you don’t have the right to tell them it was the wrong one. Not when it came to your friends or family.

“I never blamed anyone for what Brax did, other than Brax. But…”

“You don’t know me well enough.”

That wasn’t what I was going to say. I’d work with it, though.

“Something like that.”

“Then I guess it’s time we changed that.” Without giving me a chance to say anything else, he walked away, heading in the direction of the diner Samael had mentioned.

I rubbed the back of my neck, kinda confused. He wasn’t wrong. If we were going to continue in proximity of each other, it was long overdue for us to change our relationship.

There were a lot of things that needed to be different.

  

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It was a small but overly cheery establishment done up in deep greens, black, and white, that served cheap and greasy food. It’d been so long since I had to touch currency, I nearly forgot it was still a thing in the civilized places that hadn’t completely lost their minds. This being attached to the Inn had clearly provided someone’s mom-and-pop faction with a decent way of living.

For this place to exist, though, there had to be someone backing it. The uncivil outweighed the civil by a huge margin.

No way could an inn be thriving without some type of protection or outside bargain.

I bounced my knee, searching for some sign of the