My feet pound against the old shitty floorboards as I struggle to catch my breath and move at the same time. The light from my phone jumps around my apartment with jarring movements, and as I get a few feet away from the door, the hooded figure slides in front of it.
Panic tears through me as I come to a screeching halt. “No,” I breathe, backing up from the hooded figure. He was just behind me. How did he get there?
“How … how …” I stumble out before cutting myself off, only that same sickening laugh sounds from behind me. I whip my head around to find the guy still in the opening and my stomach sinks. There’s two of them, and I’m as fucked as fucked can be.
Backing up in the opposite direction, I move into my cramped living room so that I can see them both at the same time, but my back quickly presses up against a hard body. I spin around and look up into the horrifying, scarred face of Roman DeAngelis.
A terrified gasp tears from deep within me, too fucking scared to even scream.
If this is Roman DeAngelis, then I can guarantee that the two other hooded figures in my home are his brothers Levi and Marcus, the most feared brothers in town. They’re notorious. Everyone knows of them and every fucking soul is terrified to get caught in the crosshairs of one of their twisted games. They’re the things that nightmares are made of, they’re slaughterers, executioners, and they fucking live for it.
I attempt to tear away from Roman, but his steel grip quickly encloses around my upper arms like a vice, his deadly scent wrapping around me. Trapped within his fierce grasp, I watch as his brothers slowly stalk closer, their dead eyes focused on their prey in a terrifying silence.
I shake my head, knowing that this is the fucking end. Where the DeAngelis brothers are involved, no one has ever lived to tell the story.
2
Levi and Marcus DeAngelis move in close enough so that I can see their faces beneath the shadows of their dark hoods, and the closer they get, the more my fear begins to cripple me.
These are not the kind of men a girl like me should be fucking with.
I have to get out of here, but they have me surrounded. I have no chance of survival. I was considered dead the second they broke into my apartment.
“She really is pretty,” Marcus mutters darkly, his rich tone like a dagger straight through my chest. “It’s a shame what happened to her.”
My heart thunders, as the fear pulses relentlessly through my veins. What does he mean ‘It’s a shame what happened to her?’ What are they going to do to me?
Their dark gazes flick between one another and a wicked grin pulls at the corner of Levi’s lips, dropping his chin to look at me through his thick row of lashes. “Her picture was splashed all over the national news, her mutilated body with those lifeless big blue eyes. What kind of callous monster would have left her body in a shallow grave like that? It’s a shame that bear got his claws into her fragile little body like that. There was nothing but ribbons of flesh. Nearly impossible to identify her in the morgue. If it wasn’t for those blue eyes ...”
FUCK. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The mental image is crippling.
They’re going to kill me. They’re psychopaths. Fucking monsters.
I just wish I knew why, only when it comes to the DeAngelis brothers, they don’t need a rhyme or reason, this is just who they are. All they need is a pretty face and a warm body and their Saturday night slumber party has commenced.
“They’re … they’re going to know it was you,” I stumble out, my words raw in my throat as the fear weighs me down. “They’ll come for you. The police … they’ll—”
Marcus laughs, cutting me off, and I quickly realize just how wrong I am. The news only ever tells us horror stories, shows images of victims with horrendous descriptions of how they met their end, but we never see an outcome, never see justice for the mourning families of our city. They get away with it every damn time.
The police are useless. No one can help me now.
These monsters murder for sport. It’s a little adrenaline kick to get their blood pumping. Screams are their elixir of life. They need to feel someone else’s fear just to keep themselves breathing. They should be locked up in straitjackets and denied every basic human right possible.
They are the grim reapers, and they will make sure that every last fucker who gets in their way knows it.
I’m going to be another statistic to them, another notch on their belts. Hell, maybe they’re practiced enough that it’ll be quick, but then, maybe they’re also skilled enough to make it last hours on end. Either way, I need to make peace with it real fast because I won’t be living to see another day.