Of Sins and Psychos (The Beautiful Monsters Series Book 1) Read online

  Of Sins and Psychos

  A.K. Koonce

  Of Sins and Psychos

  Copyright 2022 A.K. Koonce

  All Rights Reserved

  Editing by Copeland Edits

  Cover design by Fantasy Book Design

  No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without express written permission from the author. Any unauthorized use of this material is prohibited.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Of Monsters and Mania

  Of Monsters and Mania Prologue

  Also by A.K. Koonce

  About the Author

  Foreword

  Please be advised Of Sins and Psychos has reference to physical rape, and mind rape that could be triggering to some readers.

  This is the glittering, drunken vomit of a tale of Bellatrix Cuore. It’s a beautiful mess of inky words and tainted memories I’ll never be able to forget. In summary, it’s the tragedy that started my life.

  And ruined hers.

  She’s the very heart of this story. And I guess that would just make the Carnal Brothers the blood and guts strung out in between . . .

  Prologue

  Twenty-four Years Earlier

  She was born with a heart defect . . . several of them, Dr. Holland said.

  The statistics that streamed all around us for the next twelve hours after our baby girl’s birth were more than my mind could handle. Grief and fear are blinding emotions. They tend to block a lot of life out entirely.

  But I remember some of them. Seventy-five days. That’s how long it would take to get my baby a transplant. Her tiny heart had to hold on for seventy-five days. And along the way, her kidneys could shut down. Have you ever considered what a premature baby on dialysis might look like? Because the moment Dr. Holland said it, I thought it. And it’s all I’ve thought about all night.

  “Get some sleep, Brenda,” Collin whispers to me from the other side of the hospital room. The faint sound of beeping monitors and nurses walking the halls just outside our small room are suddenly heard when I look up at him.

  His emerald eyes are like hers. Except his are ringed with dark circles tonight.

  We wondered for months what she would look like. Whose features our beautiful baby would take in. We never thought for a second one of us might have a tragic genetic trait to gift to her. A weak heart. She inherited that from my side, apparently.

  “I’m just going to go check on her one more time.” I stand, and my entire body feels battered and worn. A tremor shakes through my frame from the weight my legs don’t want to hold.

  Collin doesn’t respond. He stares, lost in the dark nothingness of the room as I slip by his chair.

  The socks the hospital gave me scuff along the glossy white tile. At my side, my IV drip skirts around with a bad wheel twirling without care.

  “Should get some rest, Mrs. Cuore.” The nurse behind the counter gives me a tense smile, but I know she won’t stop me.

  New mothers are made entirely of worry. I expected to check on my sweet baby for cries, or shallow breathing, or wet diapers.

  I didn’t expect this.

  Down to the neonatal intensive care unit I shuffle. It’s farther away than the nursery. I still have to pass by the glass window of healthy babies sleeping soundly.

  I don’t look at them.

  A nurse with a clipboard is at the desk across from the NICU. Her brown eyes shine with a soft, knowing smile when she looks at me.

  I wash my hands as she gathers up a blue gown in silence. It’s a strange, stilted process. Like my baby is on loan, and I’m just a recurring customer.

  She ties the back of my sterile gown and opens the door for me. It slides closed without a sound, and she watches me for a moment through the glass of the door. I feel her watching me. I feel all of them watching me.

  Waiting for me to break.

  There’s only one carriage now. The other that was here this morning is gone. I now have privacy with my baby girl, and that only makes my emotions rise up with pain.

  “Bellatrix,” I coo to her, my voice breaking against her name as I bend down low with tears dampening my lashes.

  They try to make it feel normal. A frilly, pink cloth covers the hard metal of the cart they call a bassinet. It’s a nice touch, but it’s still just hiding the truth: my baby won’t make it seventy-five days. If by some miracle she does, a transplant heart only has a fifteen to twenty-five year life expectancy.

  And then what?

  Golden light shines down on her, warming her and providing the body heat her heart is too weak to give. At over two months early, her body is frail, skinny for an infant who should have lovely rolls and plump cheeks. The graying tone of her skin makes me want to pick her up and hold her close to my chest, apologize for giving her the worst feature I didn’t even know I possessed.

  A weak heart.

  Tears stream down my face as helplessness finally sinks into me. The nurse outside the door is turned to her desk, oblivious to me as I sink to my knees and pray. My hands hover over her little body, not wanting to disturb the tubes and wires haloing around her. All the years I went to Catholic school don’t seem sufficient for such a request. I need more than a prayer. I need more than help. I need . . .

  “Please help her,” I sob into the pink, frilly cloth. “P—Please—”

  I don’t know why I did it. I’ll never tell Collin. I’ll never tell anyone.

  Because when a calm, dark voice beneath that bassinet asked to save my baby, I gave her to him.

  Chapter One

  Bella

  The wind catches my dark locks while I stand on a single wobbling leg. In one clutched hand, I have my phone and purse . . . in the other: a possible disaster waiting to happen. My keys and Starbucks are in danger as I also grip an enormous glittering, pink box. The white bow atop blows in the cool night air. My right knee is trying to hoist the gift higher but failing miserably. I lean into the trunk of my old Pontiac Grand Am like it’s a dirty one night stand I’ll never remember.

  This single disastrous moment feels like a summary of my entire year. Hell, maybe my entire life.

  Then with a slow, focused breath, everything calms.

  I’ve got it. I got it. It’s fine. I won’t drop my little sister’s ridiculously heavy gift of books I snagged in the best bookstores in Chicago. I’m still the cool older sister who may or may not have ended her year-and-a-half relationship with her shitty ex-boyfriend, dropped out of U of C, and started secretly pole dancing to cover rent. Not that Ivy knows that. So yeah, I’m every thirteen-year-old girl’s aspiration in life.

  I. Fucking. Got. This.

  With the corner of my thumb, I click the little lock button on my key fob.

  Except . . .


  The panic alarm blares.

  A flickering, golden light illuminates my parent’s blissfully quiet suburbia. The neighbor, Mrs. Donnelly, flips on her entry light like her hand has been on the switch since I pulled in.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.” The coffee is the first to make its escape from being seen with me. It goes down in a splatter of cold, caramelly frappe all over my leggings.

  “Mother-fucking-over-priced-coffee-bean-addiction!”

  The shiny box teeters against my hand and knee once more. On a fumbling lack of stability, I grind into the back of my Grand Am like it’s Pete Davidson’s notorious monster coc—

  “Bella? Bella is that you? Why are you making so much noise? It’s ten o’clock at night, hunny.”

  My phone and purse drop from my other hand. Partly because I’m a mess and partly because I’m a problem solver. Now that I can finally get an actual grip on the box of bargain books, I give my mom a tense smile. Then rather unattractively, I blow my hair from my face. A look of poise filters into place. My thumb clicks over the key fob, and silence falls. I slam the trunk closed and ignore the purse, phone, and spilled coffee—only kicking the little plastic cup slightly on my way to the front door.

  “Mom!” I beam a smile. A real one. One I haven’t felt in a long, long time.

  My boots squeak when I reach the red front door, and my mother’s blue eyes are filled with concern when she looks at me. Just like she has for the last eight years. Ever since I came back . . . Ever since he took me . . .

  “Your purse, dear.” She pulls her white robe closed and I try to stop her when she rushes past me to grab my abandoned belongings in the driveway.

  I’d be worried, too, but this isn’t Chicago. Nashville, Illinois is the polar opposite of my day-to-day city life. I’d be more likely to get attacked by a rogue deer than I am to get my purse stolen on a Saturday night in the midwestern suburbs. The handbag would still be there when dawn cracked over its spilled contents and the newly shattered glass that’s surely slashed down the front of my cell phone.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks as she shuts the door softly behind her. Her small frame is just like Ivy’s. Ivy got the good genes. The petite, blonde hair, blue-eyed genes. While I took after my father. A fucking six-foot-five Viking of a man. “Why didn’t you call? Is something wrong? Did Jonathon . . . did he have another outburst? You know that’s not good for your heart, hunny.”

  Her attention flits to the strawberry birthmark that splatters across my chest, but I ignore her worry as I have since the day I was born.

  And yes. Jonathon did have another outburst. Several over the last few months. The final one left both of my arms bruised and my lip swollen for weeks.

  That was the last of Jonathon. Not because we had a bad breakup, but because men . . . they have to be careful when mistreating a woman who has friends like I do.

  “I ended things.” Perfect phrasing. Ended. Things were definitely gruesomely ended for Jonathon.

  I understand what abuse is. I saw him for what he was. I’m just an optimist. People like me always think things will get better. That it wasn’t that bad. We trudge on toward that golden horizon of a future.

  Until we fucking snap.

  “Aww, Bella Hunny. I’m so glad you’re here, no matter what the circumstances.” She pulls me in against her chest, the birthday box poking hard into my ribs as I shift around it to hug her.

  “God, Mom. No. Gross. I’m not here because of him.” I blow my hair from my face once more, pulling back to show her my prize possession. Thirteen books. Each individually wrapped in magazine and newspaper clippings, whatever had the best aesthetically written words scribed over the pages to convey the surprise hidden book inside. I ripped apart multiple arrest sections to cover the crime and thriller books. I even shredded apart many bridal magazines for the romcom novels, which was in fact really good for my mental health, because let’s face it, I’d rather join a radical, crazed cult than enter into a legal, binding contract of marriage to any man. Ever. Let those bridal pages rip!

  The inside of this sparkly, pink box really shows how much I want my baby sister to enjoy the pages she gets lost in when she reads.

  Yeah. I’m fucking proud of my gift. It’s fucking amazing, if I do say so myself.

  I shake the box enticingly at my mom, my smile growing by the second.

  “Is she still up?”

  “Who?” Mom asks, but I’m too excited to fully hear her.

  “It’s only ten. Iv! Ivy get your ass up!” I yell up the stairs, my anticipation bubbling to see my sister after months of just texts and quick video chats.

  “Shhh! Your father’s watching the news in bed,” she hisses.

  I can’t quite explain it. During my bouncing excitement, the chill of the cold frappe seeping through my leggings, and the deep line that creases my mother’s brow, realization tries tapping against my stubborn skull.

  But I ignore it.

  Just like I did the night I came home. And no one noticed I’d been missing for nearly a year. At sixteen I’d vanished from their lives, but they . . . hadn’t noticed.

  That scar on my cheek? Just ignore it? The night terrors that haunted me every. Single. Night? Just ignore it. The special diet of sleeping pills Mom and my therapist both agreed on . . .

  Ignore it. That’s what my family is good at.

  I guess it’s still what I’m doing. Right now.

  “Bella!” My dad’s cheery smile is oblivious to my twisting emotions and my mother’s panicked concern.

  He always is. Sometimes to be oblivious is the only way to keep a hold of that faltering happiness in our lives.

  But he never treated me like I was fragile. Not like my mother does. Years of missed sports and sitting on the bleachers have made me bitter at my own fragile heart.

  Which might be why I started dancing.

  “Where the hell is Iv! Is she at her friend’s house tonight? I know I’m late. She knew I was coming though. We had plans. We were going to watch SNL and TikToks until the sun came up.” Because, ya know, Pete Davidson.

  My stream of words only causes that etching line to seep deeper between her pale brows. I know that look of confused worry. It’s the one she’d give me when I spoke of monsters under my bed and Sand Man that would come back to get me.

  I wasn’t a little girl though. I was sixteen.

  That terrified look in a mother’s features never gets easier to face. Knots eat up my stomach, and it’s almost like I know before she ever speaks.

  Fuck.

  “Who are you talking about, Bell? Who’s Ivy? What’s tick tock?” she enunciates.

  I ignore her poor pronunciation of the app as the breath punches from my lungs. The gift drops to the carpet with a heavy thud. Her arms pull me in as I stand stiffly in her embrace and listen to the words she coos in my ear.

  “It’ll be alright, hunny. It’ll be alright. You’re alright.”

  But it’s not alright. Nothing is.

  Because the Sand Man did come back.

  Just not for me.

  Chapter Two

  Bella

  A storm that thunders through my heart flashes with lightening outside the painted glass windows. Shining, crimson eyes watch me from the shadows of the Great Hall. I’m at the center of the event. Their waiting attention presses down on me in a frantic feeling of breathlessness.

  I don’t want to be here.

  I don’t want to do this.

  The arching angles of the red stained glass cast a sinister color across the tile floor. The room is painted red. My white dress is painted red.

  And so are my bloody hands.

  My eyes open fast while the air in my lungs burns for a full breath. I stumble out of my bed, and the moment my feet touch the cold, familiar floorboards, I know I’m okay. I’m not in that place anymore. He can’t get me here.

  I’m home.

  The slamming of my heart doesn’t slow though. Because Ivy’
s very much not okay.

  How—how did I even get here? How did I end up in my bed?

  A migraine pounds through my skull. I think through the night and the way I sat at the kitchen table with a hot cup of coffee and both of my parents staring at me like I’d fall apart right in front of them.

  But that’s the last thing I remember . . .

  “The pills,” I whisper.

  White moonlight shines muted color into my childhood bedroom, but my gaze lands on the little medicine bottle on my night stand. My jaw grinds with pain at the memories of how often my mother watched to make sure I swallowed them down. When I turned eighteen, I refused to keep dosing myself like I had a sickness.

  The pills stopped the dreams. It didn’t stop me from remembering though.

  My hand trembles as I pick the container up. The clatter of little tablets inside turns my stomach. I can’t fucking believe my mother would drug me. She is always so distressed about any mention of nightmares or monsters or anything out of the ordinary at all.

  I remember her! Ivy was real! She was a curly-haired, blonde baby who weighed less than my school backpack when she was born! The brightest blue eyes shined out to the world with so much innocence! She had the loudest laugh, and I wanted nothing more than to make sure she never had anything happen to her to take that happiness in her voice away!

  She was real! She is real!

  My arm flings out wildly, and the cracking of plastic shatters across the wall as the pills rain down to the floor with a rattle of bittersweet destruction. They’re still rolling across the hardwood floor when I storm out of my bedroom and across the hall. The cold handle is turned with force, and the white door is flung open without a sound.