Total pages in book: 202
Estimated words: 193561 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 968(@200wpm)___ 774(@250wpm)___ 645(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193561 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 968(@200wpm)___ 774(@250wpm)___ 645(@300wpm)
She deserves happiness. She deserves to feel like she is my reward and even more… that she’s got one in me. And I’ll make sure it’s how she feels every single fucking day.
38
Stacy
We’re sitting in the rubble that used to be the office and I feel like he’s having internal aftershocks for a few minutes before he finally loosens his grip on me as our eyes meet.
“What was that?” I ask.
“Guessin’ it was my rage at feeling the shit you’ve been through,” he says, looking almost broken. And it hurts to see him looking like this, looking like he’s in pain. I see it and boy, do I feel it. It feels like my heart is being shredded at what I feel from him.
“Must be down to my new magic. Never felt anything that extreme before. I saw your trauma, babe. Don’t know if I saw it all but I saw a lot. Saw it just now inside my own head. Saw where you got this.” He fingers the scar on my calf. “Saw how many took you on all fours against your wishes, know you couldn’t fight, couldn’t even say no, because of that fucking…” His lip curls, his nostrils flare. “I want to fucking murder that fuck,” he growls. “I must have tapped into coven magic and saw what my cousin Ronnie sees when she touches you. All the pain, all the abuse, all the ugliness your fuckin’ brother has inflicted.”
I frown. When she touches me? She only did once. And now I understand why her face changed so drastically.
“I feel it, Blossom. All of it. And I want your brother’s blood. I want it spilled here in this fuckin’ hellhole he created. Then I want us walking away from it forever. I’m tellin’ Brody, Mitch, all of these people need to get the fuck out of this place. There’s too much bad here. Too. Fucking. Much. The energy here? No. It’s not good here.”
He shakes his head with disgust, driving his fingers through his hair.
If this is what the truth does to Grey, how can he expect me to willingly upset him in the future?
“No! Don’t keep shit from me, woman. If you’d told me this already, he’d already be dead and out of our goddamn hair.”
I jerk back and try to get out of his grip.
He doesn’t let go of me, so I curl into a ball.
“Stacy!” he snaps, holding me tighter, mouth right at my ear. “That’s not blame. Don’t take on a new helping of blame that’s not yours. Hear me? Things are gonna work out how they’re supposed to. We’ve gotta trust in that. Trust it, be smart, and deal with things as they come. Whether that’s the sick, the evil, having a baby, whatever it is. Yeah? All I ask is just be fuckin’ honest with me, no matter you think I’ll like what you have to say or not.”
I stop trying to pull away and instead I wrap my arms around him, sniffling.
“Okay?” he pushes.
I nod, inhaling his scent, which never fails to comfort me.
“Talk to me,” he finally requests, voice softening, fingers tangling into my hair as I burrow as close as I can get.
“I wish I could purr for you too, Grey,” I tell him. “I wish I could give you as much as you give me.”
“I don’t need you to purr, I just need you within reach. And as long as I’ve got that, babe, I’ll have everything I need.”
I sigh. How did I go from so unlucky to so very lucky?
“I want to comfort you, too, I mean…”
“Nothing will give me that until this shit is done. What’d make it worse is not leveling with me about everything. Everything, mate. Please.”
“Okay.”
“Talk to me,” he repeats.
“He raped Aphra Starling the day after he did that to me. Beat her up pretty badly. I took care of her. He’d muttered that it worked with Father twice. So that means he thinks the same as me… that my mother might have been Father’s cousin. Or… he knows it for a fact. I don’t know.”
“Fuck.”
“When he offered to pair me up with Mal and take me off the rotation, I knew I wouldn’t have to endure it from anybody but Mal and Mal was always nice to me so I thought maybe he wouldn’t have even made me do it or if he did, maybe he’d be gentler than some of the others. If Wy knew a guy liked a girl, he wouldn’t let him have her unless he paid dearly. The same if a girl liked a guy. He controlled the rotation like he controlled everything else around here – whatever way benefited him the most.”
Grey’s eyes rage with his anger as he says, “Based on what Joel says, that guy in our cell is in love with you, wife. He wanted more than an alliance with you. He wants you.”