Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 155900 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 780(@200wpm)___ 624(@250wpm)___ 520(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 155900 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 780(@200wpm)___ 624(@250wpm)___ 520(@300wpm)
I’d reach out and see if she’d let me take. Take us to that place we both were aching to go.
Press my nose to those lush locks and inhale.
Imbibe everything that she was.
Taste and touch and glut.
Sate this insane desire she created in me and send her soaring again the way her body was begging me to do.
It took every ounce of strength I possessed not to go after her. Everything I had not to chase her up those stairs and into her room. Feast on the beauty that she was. On all that courage and voracity. On all that sweetness and vulnerability.
Assuage the anger that boiled inside her, or maybe just hold her while she raged.
She had the right to it.
To shout and wail and curse the world for stealing her sister from her.
Plus, I recognized enough to know her pain went deeper than that.
Trauma was so clearly written in the depths of those toffee eyes.
The blaze of wrath that burned inside her over whatever she’d suffered so clear, all trapped by the fear that continued to keep her chained.
Fuck, how I wanted to stand in those flames for her. Hunt down whatever or whoever had inflicted the wounds that she so impetuously tried to keep buried.
Scrubbing both palms over my face, I shook myself out of the lust, over the wayward protectiveness that had me itching to possess what I could never have, and moved back through the house, heading for the stairs. I stalled a bit when I thought I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. A fluttering of movement out the window and into the distance beneath the night.
Chest tightening, I edged toward the glass and peered into the darkness that shrouded the house.
A tacky stillness resonated back. The trees gently swaying in the breeze that whispered through, the bare gusts rustling the bushes that lined the lawn and delineated the front yard from the forest that surrounded the house.
My attention swept, searching through the turbulence that I could suddenly taste. That murky intuition that warned something wasn’t right.
Insides lined with steel, I edged up to the door, worked through the locks, and stepped out onto the porch. My chest squeezed tight as I peered out through the nothingness that echoed back.
Just the faint strains of music thudding from Kane’s from a mile away and the calm call of the night.
Nothing that should incite the alarm that resounded inside me.
It had probably just been my reflection in the glass.
Paranoia brought on by the weight of knowing that I was bringing that little girl into this life.
Knowing I had to find a way to protect her against it.
Shield her from the sins and corruption.
Sure of all the ways I’d unleash my barbarity to see it through.
And I would.
I’d meant every word that I’d told Emery.
I would protect that little girl with everything I had.
I refused to fail again.
TWENTY-SIX
KANE
Fifteen Years Old
Roses wilted and then bloomed again.
He’d always believed it, but he’d come to hate the vicious cycle of it. The way his mother would grow strong and emboldened, standing up for herself and for him, and then she’d be sucked into the warped world of another man.
They were all the same.
Every time.
Coming off as good guys in the beginning, but it never took long for their depravity to be uncovered.
Kane had developed an instinct to it. Could feel it the first time they met.
There was something filthy lining their underbelly. A trap that she forever fell into.
Kane ached to stop it. To silence the shouts and the banging of doors and the gutting cries that inevitably fell from his mother’s mouth.
To stop the pain. To stop the torment.
To help her. Stand for her the way he’d always wanted to.
To be the kind of man none of these assholes she brought home ever amounted to.
He tried. He tried and he tried.
But she always ended up in the exact same place, the same kind of bastard, only with a different face and different name.
So, he begged her when he found her crumpled on the floor, “Please, Mom. You have to stop this. You have to stop letting these men do this to you. You deserve so much better.”
He choked over the plea, then his heart felt like it was going to split in half when she lifted her head. Her left eye was swollen shut and blood was smeared across her face from a gash near her temple.
Horror and anger vied for dominance, his chest feeling as if it were a cavern.
He’d kill him.
He’d kill him.
“Maybe it’s just always gonna be winter.”
“No,” he gritted. “No. You’re going to shine. It’s time. I can’t sit aside and watch this any longer. I won’t. You have to make a change. And if you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for me.”