Ruthless Empire: A Dark Enemies to Lovers Romance (Royal Elite Book 6)

I don’t know how I got home. There were voices, Aiden’s and Cole’s, and they were arguing about who got to drive and who got to hold me in the back of the car. I recall wanting to open my eyes so I could see them fight.

“I’m the fiancé. It goes without saying that I should hold her. You’ll only be the doting brother after all, no?”

“If you don’t shut the fuck up and drive, I’ll call Elsa to see you acting as a doting fiancé.”

“Fuck you, Nash.”

One of them must’ve won, because strong arms carried me and then I was submerged in that cinnamon scent and warmth.

I’m half-dazed, floating, and I still smell him, feel him, secretly crave him.

What is wrong with me?

His fingers stroke my hair back, then his lips are on my nose, my temple. He’s soothing me, whispering words I can’t for the life of me make out.

And that’s probably how I surrender to the darkness all over again. I’m coming in and out of it as if I can’t stay in one place for too long.

When I come to again, there are different voices — Papa and Helen. I’m on my bed; I recognise it from the flowery scent and the texture.

Cole says something about me fainting because I didn’t eat much.

Dick.

He manages to slip out of everything whichever way he pleases. Not that I want anyone to know what happened. It’s bad enough that we were discovered by Aiden and Ronan.

“This is all because of Cynthia’s influence and all the diets.” Papa sounds enraged as if he’s about to barge into her flat and start a fight out of nowhere.

“Take it easy, Sebastian.” Helen’s quiet tone sooths him — and me — a little. She says she’ll get me something to drink and it’ll all be fine. That they should all calm down.

I don’t open my eyes, even when some of my energy pushes back in. Facing Papa and what I’ve done is the last thing I want to do.

Besides, I don’t want to see Cole’s face. Hearing that low tenor of his voice as he tells Papa I didn’t mean to starve myself and that I could be stressed is already too much to handle.

This time, I pray for unconsciousness. I want to disappear from this world and somehow wake up in one where I don’t feel as if I killed a few puppies.

Helen wipes my hands with a wet cloth that smells like jasmine. The lulling sensation makes me feel serene, at peace almost. She somehow ushers Papa and Cole out, and that’s when I surrender to the black behind my lids.

I dream of voices. At first it’s my mum’s voice telling me I’m a disappointment and that this isn’t how she raised me to become.

Deep inside, I know it’s the guilt talking, but I can’t help the tears that stream down my cheeks. I’m that eight-year-old again wearing the princess dress with butterfly ribbons and running down the street and crying.

“Papa! Mummy! I’m so sorry. Come back please.”

They don’t. They continue to walk in different directions. I stand in the middle of the street, not knowing which one to follow. My feet are frozen. My heart palpitates faster with every passing second.

“Mummy! Papa!”

They don’t turn around or acknowledge me. They just keep going, getting farther with each breath.

“You want help, my beautiful?”

My head snaps up at the suave voice. Adam. He’s big, like in real life, and he’s wearing his rugby jersey. He smiles as a trail of blood oozes from his teeth and then down his chin.

“S-stay away from me.” I step back. He steps in.

The blood is now dripping down his blue jersey and his white shorts. His smile has turned red and his eyes are camouflaged in shadows.

“You’re beautiful, a masterpiece.” His voice turns monotone like those demons from horror films. “Come with me.”

“No!” I keep walking backwards as I stare at the road my father took. “Papa!”

He stops and hope flares in my chest, but when he turns around, a scowl covers his face. “You disappointed me, Silver. You’re no longer my daughter.”

Then he evaporates into smoke.

“No! Papa!”

Adam and his shadow are getting closer. I’m taking larger steps back, my heart nearly skipping over itself.

I stare at the other road. “Mum! Come back, please.”

She does, but she’s crying. Her tears are red and her hand is wrapped around her wrist. Blood splashes from it and pools at her feet.

“Why did you do this, Babydoll?” she whispers and then drops into the pool, drowning in it.

“Muuum!”

“You only have me now.” Adam reaches a black-coated hand in my direction.

I scream.

The sound is muffled when another hand wraps around me from behind and snaps my neck.

I startle awake to be greeted by the darkness in my room.

My harsh breathing echoes in the silence and my clothes stick to my back with sweat.

He’s coming for me.

He’ll catch me.

He will —

“Silver?”

The sound of Cole’s voice instantly calms me down. I don’t know how, but it does.

He hits the light switch to reveal he’s been sitting on my bed. Grabbing my hand, he slowly uncurls my stiff fingers from around my necklace. I’ve been holding it and my chest in a death grip as if that could’ve saved me from the nightmare I was seeing.

No. I didn’t only see that nightmare. I lived and felt it to my bones.

Papa and Mum left me.

Adam was coming for me, and then he or something else killed me.

No one was there for me.

A sob tears from my throat and it’s like I’ve been holding on for eternity to express whatever is lurking inside me.

“Come here, Butterfly.” Cole opens his arms.

I don’t hesitate as I dive into them, my hands wrapping around his waist and my face disappearing into the hard muscles of his chest.

Whenever I inhale, I take in his clean scent mixed with cinnamon, and it’s like my own therapy.

For long seconds, we stay there as he strokes my hair away from my forehead and rubs small circles on my back.

My breathing evens out, and just when I think I’m going back to sleep, his quiet voice surrounds me, “What happened?”

It’s like a spell has been broken. Whatever halo I’ve been trying to pretend exists shatters all around me.

He’s the reason why I had that nightmare. How the hell could I take refuge in him?

I start to push away, but Cole keeps me pinned in place by the hand on my back. Literally on my back. He has reached under my oversized T-shirt and has his palm on my bare skin.

Holy shit.

I’m suddenly fully aware that I’m completely naked under the T-shirt.

“D-did you change my clothes?” I stare up at him with horror.

“Mum did.” His lips tug in a smirk. “Not that it would be something new if I saw you naked. I can even picture you right now.”

I scowl at him, then fist my hand and hit him across the chest. He chuckles, the sound quiet and easy in the room.

“There you are.” He strokes my hair from my forehead. “I thought I lost you for a second there.”

“It was just a nightmare.” A very real one at that.

I feel like it’s the nightmare of my life. Since my parents’ divorce, I’ve had similar nightmares of them leaving. After Mum’s suicide attempt, I dreamt about blood for months.

However, this is the first time everything’s poured out at the same time.

“Nightmares are usually a manifestation of your subconscious.” Cole’s fingers are still lost in my hair, and I’d purr like a kitten if I didn’t want to stab him right now.

“Yeah, and my subconscious, just like my consciousness, hates you.”

That nightmare was a symptom of my guilt over what I let happen with Cole. The perverted pleasure I got from it. The heart-pounding sensation I keep on getting whenever he pushes my buttons or challenges me.

It’s all because of him and his damn existence that I’m spiralling out of control.

“I didn’t know you were fainting,” he says calmly.

“As if you would care?” This time I do pull away from him, inserting much-needed distance between us. “Your only goal is to get what you want. What if I faint or die or get hit by a freaking bus? It’ll all just be a part of your sick games.”

“That’s not true.”

“Not true? Give me a break, Cole. You’re only doing this to me to prove you can, to be the winner as usual, to see me shatter and lose.”

He interlaces our fingers and lays them across his stomach as he watches me with an unreadable expression. “Is that what you think?”

“That’s what it is.”

“It isn’t.”

“Are you telling me you would’ve done all this rubbish if you didn’t feel threatened by Aiden?” My voice loses strength by the end, and I curse myself for being this affected with that thought.

“Stop bringing him up when you and I are talking.” His tone lowers. “If it’s only us, then it’s going to be only about the two of us.”

“You want it about the two of us? Fine. Here’s a two-of-us talk… I want you to leave me the hell alone.”

“See, you have a problem, Silver.”

“A problem?”

“You’re a liar and you’re in denial. You can lie to yourself all you want, but you can’t lie to me. You don’t get to spy on me when I’m playing football or when I’m swimming and then pretend you don’t care about me. You don’t get to act territorial about me by chasing all the girls away, then decide you just did that for the family image. You don’t get to come all over my fingers, my tongue, and my dick, then pretend you don’t fucking want me.”

Oh, God.

I swallow the lump in my throat, staring at him as if he’s grown two heads.

“But those aren’t the only lies you tell yourself,” he continues in that infuriatingly calm tone. “You pretend you’re happy for your father when you secretly hate his new marriage because you always had a fairy tale dream about your parents getting back together. You love my mum, but you feel guilty towards your mum because of it. You sometimes wish you were never born as your parents’ kid, because maybe that would make you feel wholesome like other children with non-separated parents. You feel guilty for dropping your friendship with Kimberly, but you act like a bitch to her because it’s your only defence mechanism to keep her away. You don’t want her to see the ugly parts of you or how empty you actually feel inside. You’re flawed and you hate those flaws, so you use the attitude and the looks to make everyone believe you’re a perfect human they wish they could turn into.

‘You keep Summer and Veronica as friends, because they’re disposable and so you won’t feel the pain you still do whenever you look in Kimberly’s direction and realise she also left you behind and chose Elsa over you. Truth is, you’re jealous of Elsa and it’s not because of Aiden. You’re jealous not only that she took Kim, but also that Ronan and Xander are gravitating towards her and leaving your snobbishness behind. But you can’t tell them to spend time with you, because that will make you seem weak, and you loathe that more than losing all your friends who actually matter. You let guys get close, but never close enough to see who you are, what you are. You don’t allow anyone to see your makeup-free face, because you’re self-conscious about the freckles on your nose. You’re also self-conscious about listening to rock music, and you do it in secret because you’re worried that if Cynthia or anyone finds out you do listen to it, they’ll think you don’t deserve to play the piano. You —”

“Shut up!” My voice shakes, then breaks, coming out as haunted as I feel.

It’s like I’ve listened to a distorted retelling of my life. As if someone dipped their fingers inside me and wrenched out a part of me I’ve always kept under lock and key.

No. Not someone.

Cole.

He once again took my choice and learnt things he has no business learning.

Considering how observant he is, I figured he knew a few things about me, but never in my wildest dreams would I have thought he delved too deep.

“Why?” he speaks casually, as if he didn’t just flip my world upside down. “You don’t like listening to the truth being thrown in your face? I can tell you about —”

“Stop it.” I meant it as an order, but it comes out as a plea. “Just stop, Cole.”

He drapes a hand around my nape and pulls me over so our foreheads connect. I gulp in harsh intakes of air, breathing him in with every inhale.

“Here’s the thing, Butterfly, I can’t stop.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re my chaos, and I can’t survive without chaos.”

“I’m chaos?”

“The worst of all. The most beautiful of all. And you know what? You might as well be the deadliest.”

My breathing chops off. “Are you ever going to let me go?”

“Are you?”

No.

The word stabs in my head as real and as gut-wrenching as that nightmare. There’s no need to think about it. I know for a fact that if I saw any girl near him again, I’d plot her fall and break her to unrecognisable pieces.

But I don’t say that, because truth is, I knew Cole lived for chaos. Under his calm exterior, it’s the only thing he plans for. The only thing he lives day-to-day for.

He always, without doubt, loses interest once the chaos turns boring.

That’s the same case for me. If I stop bringing chaos into his life and disrupting its flow in some way, he’ll drop me as if I never existed.

That thought pierces my heart more than the manifestation of my subconscious in that nightmare.

If I even remotely want to have him, then I need to be his chaos.

His only chaos.

And for that, I’m letting Papa, Mum, and even Helen down. I’m free-falling to sin and I have no way to stop it.

“That’s what I thought.” He grins, drops a kiss on my nose, and pulls me to him again.

He lies on his back and hugs me to the crook of his body so that I’m half-laying over him.

“Cole? What are you doing?”

His eyes are already closed. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m sleeping.”

“You can’t sleep here,” I whisper-hiss, but when I try to get up, he pins me to his side.

“Sure I can, Butterfly. In fact, I don’t like my bed. I’m going to use yours every night.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Watch and see.”

“Papa or Helen could come in.”

“It’s locked; they won’t.”

“Still —”

“Just shut your busy brain for a second,” he cuts me off, sighing. “Close your eyes and sleep.”

“You think it’s that easy?”

“It is. I’ll give you pointers to sleep better.”

“Pointers?”

“Actually it’s one. Dream of me.”

I groan as I place my hand on his chest. Now that he’s put the idea in my head, I’m so sure I will.

“I hate you,” I tell him.

He smiles as his lips brush against my temple and stay there. “Not as much as you want me, Butterfly.”