The Beast by Jaden Wilkes Page B

cried again for the loss of his pet.
    His father had given young Dimitri to his friends to use like a bitch that weekend. His father never forgave him the tears and told him if he wanted to cry like a girl, he would be treated like one.
    Something had died in Dimitri that time. His father had been his first kill, the reason he’d fled his home and wound up on the streets. Dimitri had woken him from a drunken stupor enough to shove the rabbit fur in his face and stab him in the heart. He’d been just shy of his twelfth birthday.
    The thing that died that day now stirred in Dimitri’s chest. As he hunched over Columbia, beautiful perfect Columbia, he saw himself through her eyes. It wasn’t the scars on his body that made him a beast; it was the madness that rode as his constant companion that made him so. It had been there since that weekend, when he had been stripped of his own humanity by those drunken men, when he’d been passed around, crying and in pain, fearing for his own life, listening to his mother’s cries from the room next door. He had allowed the madness to grow while his humanity shrunk. In being consumed with revenge against Sergei, he had become the madness, the beast.
    He loosened his grip from around her neck and straightened himself up. He could feel her heart still beating in the walls of her chest, so he knew she wasn’t dead, just unconscious. He pulled both hands away, shook them with disgust and stared at them. He had been moments away from destroying a beautiful girl with them, ending her life and disposing of her body like trash.
    He was hit with clarity of vision, a jolt to his chest. He had planned on killing her and she was innocent. This was even outside the code of the Bratva he had once followed so religiously. He had a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach and he started to back away from her prone body. He hit a chair and collapsed into it, slumped over and watched her for signs of life.
    He reflected on the people he’d murdered over the years. None of them had been innocent, every single one of them...from his father to the last men he’d murdered during Sergei’s attack, even the women...every single one of them had deserved it. This girl did not.
    “Why did you stop?” she rasped, startling him and breaking his train of thought.
    “I can’t do this to you,” he said, his voice heavy with contempt for the man he had allowed himself to become. It was filled with the regret of a thousand acts he couldn’t take back. A thousand moments in times long passed, decisions to kill and maim and hurt, to give into the madness. He wouldn’t give in this time, this time he would let her live.
    “Please,” she begged him with a whimper. “You need to let me go now.”
    “I can’t do that, my little dove,” he said with remorse. His overwhelming clarity of vision left an almost physical emptiness where his anger had been. He hadn’t realized how much a part of him the darker parts of his nature had become over the past decades. He continued, “I can’t ever let you go and yet I can’t kill you.”
    “What do you mean you can’t let me go?” she asked as her voice broke into a sob. “Why can’t you just get up and open the door and let me go home?” she asked again.
    He took a step back from her body and examined her again. She was simply gorgeous and he clearly didn’t have it in him to kill her, but he couldn’t let her go. Perhaps he didn’t want to let her go. Letting her leave meant she would go on and live her life, have her freedom...fuck men and have a future that did not include him. He wasn’t ready to admit it to himself quite yet, but he simply could not let her go. He saw her as the reason for his self-awareness, and he wasn’t ready to let her slip away. He didn’t want to fall into that pit again, and thought she might be the one to help him stay out.
    An idea began to germinate, a plan to keep her with him and still maintain his self-control. He