The Drazen World: LUST (Kindle Worlds Novella)

LUST

by

Lola Darling

Dedication

Cover:

Chapter One

Thirty-six hours down. One million left to go.

I stare dead ahead at the altar. At the generic, seen-a-million-like-it crucifix hanging over said altar, outlined in cheap gold plating. Like everything else in L.A., it hung somewhere between visually pleasing and tacky. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in an 80s cult classic film: everything single-note, one-layer. No depth to it, but for some reason, you love it all the same.

I dig my nails into the palms of my hands to ward off that familiar voice in my head. Her voice.
"L.A. is that ex who you know is an asshole but can't stop crawling back to, because damn, he's so pretty on the surface."
She told me that a week ago, at a rooftop bar we played once. We weren't there for a gig, just dinner out, two siblings enjoying a nice meal.

Now, one week later, I'm counting the hours since I woke up to a phone call from the police.

"Female body washed up on shore . . . Need you to identify . . . Next of kin . . ."

Thirty-six hours of being an only child down. The rest of my life to go.

Somewhere in the black depths of the near-empty church, singing starts. It's soft at first, growing louder. A choir rehearsing, from the sounds of it, the way they stop and start in fits.

They're not great. The soprano is flat, and the tenor can't keep pace with the rest properly. But the sound of music—any music—is enough to bring a mental image of her slamming into my skull. Her bent over the piano as a kid, Mom perched on the bench beside her, slapping the backs of her hands whenever she stumbled. Her on stage at recitals, decent in elementary school, better than anyone else in middle school, and mind-blowing by high school. But even with her talent, her dedication and her near-obsessive drive, it just . . . never happened for her. Not at the levels she dreamed of, anyway.

I close my eyes, clamp my mouth to ward off the apple-thick lump forming in the back of my throat.

That fucking incessant choral music drones on, and when I can't take it anymore, I throw the kneeler down from the pew in front of me, collapse onto it angrily, hard enough to bruise my knees. I don't give a shit. If I could, if it wouldn't get me arrested for life probably, I would tear this whole stupid church apart.

I don't know why I thought it would be a good idea to come here. I haven't been since middle school, when our parents finally stopped dragging us on the weekends. I hear they've changed the mass now. I wouldn't be able to follow along with a proper Catholic service anyway. So I decided to test the waters at an off-time, middle of the day on Friday, figuring maybe the church would be empty at this hour.

Even this wasn't as empty as I want it to be.

I clench my fists hard around each other and scowl up at the figure over the altar.

This is all bullshit. There's nobody up there. Nobody who gives a shit about me or Gabby, at least. If there was a God, what kind of God would let her lose herself this close to her big break, this close to the dream she’d worked her entire life to reach?

The lump swells in my throat, behind my Adam's apple, inching dangerously close to my mouth, threatening to cut off my oxygen supply.

Good. I would deserve it.

After all, if you want to get right down to it, it wasn't God who killed her. And it might have technically been Gabby, she might have taken the amount of pills they said, walked into the ocean where they assume she did, but that's only because I wasn't there for her. I've spent the last year of my life trailing her every move, ever since her first attempt, and the one time I slipped

up . . .

But no. I'd slipped up before. I'd slipped up a lot, honestly.

What it really boils down to is: I couldn't find a way to save her. She begged me to, every time those big, innocent blue eyes met mine, and yet, I let her fall.

I don't even realize I'm crying until the pew beside me creaks gently, and a handkerchief appears at the edge of my vision. I accept it without thinking, dab at my eyes before I even check who's offering it. It's embarrassing, to cry here, in public like this. Monica has seen me cry, the morning the police called, and again in the day and a half since. But no one else.

Not even our parents.

My parents, I suppose I should say. There's only one of us left now.

"Thanks," I mumble thickly as I hand the handkerchief back, pushing myself back onto the pew seat from the kneeler.

"Keep it," replies a low, melodic voice beside me. Baritone. Regular bedroom voice. I bet he gets all the ladies. Or gents.

"Thanks," I repeat, turning to glance at my provider. Then I quickly revise my last thought. Not getting all the ladies after all.
Or
the gents, judging by the stiff white collar around his throat and the starched black shirt of an off-duty priest that clings to the rest of his body.

Of course, I suppose you never know. Maybe Father here gets his. He's certainly got the strong jaw, chiseled cheeks and sharply angled nose for it, not to mention those sea green eyes.

Knock it off, Darren,
I scold myself. These are hardly appropriate musings in the middle of a church.

Even if it's a church I was just denouncing and cursing.

"What happened?" the priest asks, his voice still low, quiet enough that I doubt anyone could hear him from a pew away, if anyone had been sitting that close.

"What makes—" I clear my throat, embarrassed, as my voice echoes in the vast central chamber of the cathedral. I try again, softer this time, mimicking him. "What makes you think anything happened?"

"It doesn't take a genius to know that when a man like you breaks down in public, something is very wrong," he replies.

I raise an eyebrow. "Are priests supposed to talk like that?" From what I remembered, which was admittedly not much, the priests here when I was in middle school just hummed generic blessings over us at mass, murmured admonishments in the confessional booth, and shook our parents' hands after church, eyes gleaming as they fielded subtly probing questions from Mom about the sermon or Dad's about the charity of the week they were donating to.

"I find that being real helps my parishioners more than acting holier-than-thou." He shrugs one shoulder, a casual little roll of broad arms that tells me two things: he is very comfortable in his body, and he knows how to make it work for him. "But if you'd prefer, I could simply pray with you," he offers.

I crack my knuckles. "Pass." Then I feel a little guilty for being so curt, when he's only trying to be nice. "But I appreciate the offer. Just don't think it'll do me any good."

"Sometimes that's when it does the most good." He shrugs again, and I swear that even through his black shirt I can see the muscles rolling across his chest.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

Shock, probably. Mentally, I know this is not the time to be eying up the local man candy. Let alone my family's old church's
priest
. But I'm all amped up, running on who knows what cocktail of chemicals in my system. I haven't been paying much attention to the labels on the bottles of things I've been popping. Just whatever Mom says her doctor says will help.

None of it does.

"Yeah, well," I mutter. "Nothing really helps when it comes to death, I find. No one comes back from that one."

The lump in my throat is practically choking me now. Maybe it will finish me off. I'd be okay with that, at this point. One less fuck-up isn't going to change the world a lot, but it might make it slightly better off.

The priest's eyes dart to the altar in front of us, then back to search out mine again. He has one of those penetrating gazes, the kind that make you feel totally, unnervingly
seen
, all the way down to your core. "I'll refrain from pointing out the obvious outlier," he says.

"Jesus," I swear, yet I'm almost laughing at the same time. It's an edgy, borderline hysterical laugh, but a laugh nonetheless.

"That's who I was thinking, yes," he answers, nonplussed by me casually taking the Lord's name in vain.

"Okay, Father, so tell me this." I swing toward him, my voice loud enough to echo around the church again, though this time, I find myself not really caring. "He got to come back, because he was saving all our souls or whatever, right?"

"That's the short version, I'd say." He nods in agreement.

"So did he just stop giving a fuck about our human lives, then? He saved our souls and he figured, doesn't matter how shitty our lives down here on this plane get, doesn't matter how much unfair shit the world throws at us, doesn't matter how broken we get, because he saved the pieces of us that'll be left at the end of it all? What's the point, if we're so mangled by the time that we die we won't have much of a soul left?"

"You know I can't tell you the point of life. Nobody can, not definitively."

"Then what good are you?" I spit, more forcefully than I mean to.

We let that hang between us in silence for a minute.

"I'm sorry," I say after a long, painful moment. "That was uncalled for."

Another shrug. He really loves doing that. "It's a fair question. I'm here to do what little I can. To try to ease the burden of, as you put it, 'all the unfair shit thrown at us.' But at the end of the day, I know no more and no less about his plans than the least of God's creations, or the best of them. I've got theories, but somehow I don't think that's what you're looking for today."

"Damn right." I wince. Now I'm just straight-up cursing in church. At least Gabby would laugh, if she could hear me.

The lump hardens.

Suddenly, warm, rough skin touches mine. He's resting his hand over mine, where I left it pressed against the pew in front of us. "Do me a favor?" he asks, and I'm caught in those eyes again. Distracted by the sharp, sinewy planes of his neck, leading down to muscular shoulders, a thick Adam's apple hovering just above his collar. A collar I wish I could see beneath.

Fuck, Darren, you are seriously off your rocker. Think about your sister. Think about Adam.
But part of me doesn't care. Part of me figures, if I'm going to pick any day to unravel, this one is fucking fair enough.

"What?" I ask, when I manage to clear my throat.

"Pray with me."

His eyes won't let me go. Not even if I wanted them to. Which, I suddenly realize, I don't. I like losing myself in that sea green gaze. I like forgetting who and where I am, if only for a second.

"Okay," I hear myself say, even though it's the last thing I ever expected to be doing. Praying with the church priest. I figured I'd come in here and cry and curse and storm out. Yet here I am, actually trying.

For what?
asks the reckless, angry part of me.

For him,
answers the semi-sane half. After all, he asked nicely.

I bow my head, and slide onto the kneeler beside him. He keeps his grip on my hand. Tightens it, actually. Not tight enough to hurt, but tight enough that I can feel every muscle in his fingers. I can tell exactly how strong this man is. He gets what he wants, I'm sure, whenever he wants it.

Something about that kind of power is alluring.

Sexy.

I'm always the one in charge. The one making the decisions, calling the shots. With Gabby growing up, and even in adulthood, when her depression gets—
got
—bad. With Monica, way back when we were dating. With Adam, now that we're doing whatever the noncommittal hooking up we're doing can be called. I've never felt the desire to change that, to let someone else take control. I
like
having the control in the situation—any situation—no matter what.

But right now, as I watch this priest bow his head, and I feel his powerful, commanding grip on my hand, not to mention watching his full, distracting lips as he intones the beginning of a prayer . . . Right now, I can suddenly understand why Monica is dating that fucking asshole Jonathan.

Sometimes we all need to relinquish our control, if only for a moment. So I close my eyes and I let him lead.

I don't hear the words. Some are Latin, some are familiar, English versions of prayers I once whispered in catechism on Sundays. Others are English but totally unfamiliar. The words themselves do nothing for me. The 'Amen's and the 'Praise be unto you's, nada. But the sound of his voice, deep and commanding and steady in the dark cathedral, with my eyes shut tight against the whole world? That, I could pray to. Swear to. That voice catches me the way Monica's used to, only with a firmer hold. It carries me on a wave, past the ocean of sorrow in my heart, onto a beach where I can almost glimpse something that resembles happiness again. Or, if not happiness, at least an absence of constant, drowning pain.