Bad Company (Seven Deadly Sins #1) ✅ Completed

Chapter Seventeen: Late Night Cleaning

Late Night Cleaning 

Dante stood in the middle of his room, his own private sanctuary. It was not the only area in the building that was enchanted to alert the resident if someone dared to trespass inside, but it was the only room that could stop a person’s heart if they were stupid enough to try. It was the only thing Dante had insisted upon – his own small fortress of solitude.

But unlike the blue Boy Scout’s icy retreat, his was actually pretty awesome. Fine leather furniture decorated one half of the room, along with a seventy inch plasma TV.  Alongside the expensive couches, he also had a couple of special leather recliners that were suited for private movie screenings.

The other half of the room contained a humongous king size bed that took up the entire far wall. It was black (naturally) and had about three hundred pillows on it. If it was one thing he enjoyed more than breathing and eating, it was the comforts of a great bed. Its large size also came in handy – he stored his first aid kit under it.

Lining all the available walls were embedded shelves that could no longer fit another book, movie, vinyl record or music CD. It was an eclectic mix of both old and new, classics and modern, great works and some crap. Dante didn’t care though, it was all good. A large wardrobe and small desk with a sleek black laptop sat in the last corner, completing the room.

This part of the building definitely had a man-vibe to it but considering who the occupant was, that was to be expected. The only thing his room lacked was a mirror, but that was just the way Dante liked it. Plenty of things could spy from the inside of mirrors, and this place was private.

Now he stood in the middle of his man cave and watched the latest scene in Celeste’s continuing drama unfold in front of him. He didn’t need a mirror to see things like she did. He could will it to play out in front of him like a movie, without the aid of an actual screen or digital projector. He watched unmoving, as the latest domino in her precisely prepared arrangement toppled, sending the others falling down in a sadistic domino effect. It was the perfect set-up, each piece aligned and adjusted to masterful perfection.

Wrath was the only sin he ever bothered to watch play out all the way. He had little interest in sins like greed, envy or even lust – they were all so patently boring. Just a bunch of self-centered, ego maniacs trying to hold onto something that was never theirs in the first place: riches, beauty, love. It was all so uniformly trite. But wrath was a whole different ball of wax as the old saying went (though he was much older than any saying still in use or now long forgotten).

Wrath was pure, almost uncontrollable and hold-no-bars rage. It was hate, anger, and fury all rolled into one, multiplied to the nth degree, peppered with (usually extreme) violence before it consumed everything in its wake.  

It was also one of the only sins he could really relate to.

He watched now as the pretty young fool, the one who Celeste called the ‘beauty queen,’ slammed out of a car and marched up to a big house in the best part of town. She was quickly followed by a boy who could only be the centerpiece for the sin about to play itself out. When it came to teenage girls, everything was almost always about a boy. The particular boy in this case attempted to grab the beauty queen, but she was quicker and made it to the door before he could stop her. She rang the doorbell, holding down the button to make sure whoever was inside would come running.

Dante didn’t bother listening in – he didn’t even need to. Years of watching Celeste’s handiwork had pretty much given him an entire internal dialogue he could access at this point.