Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 101872 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 509(@200wpm)___ 407(@250wpm)___ 340(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 101872 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 509(@200wpm)___ 407(@250wpm)___ 340(@300wpm)
There’s someone in the room with you!
Opal. Wake. Up.
Opal sat up with a small scream.
Her heart was racing and sweat covered her skin as she glanced around.
Why was she still waking up like this?
Shouldn’t her nightmares be over now that Stefan was gone? She’d had plenty of nightmares while he’d been alive.
Most of those nightmares had been acted out while she was awake, though.
Then after they’d escaped his hold . . . well, her nightmares had been filled with him catching them.
With him . . . punishing her.
She shuddered. She’d always known that if he caught them that she’d come off worst of all. Because she’d meant the least to him.
Ryleigh had been his fiancée. Lilac, his sister.
She’d just been his whore.
And now she was going to vomit.
Opal forced herself to breathe as she glanced around the room.
She was safe.
Stefan was dead.
In the weeks after his death, the nightmares had returned. She’d kept dreaming about him coming back from the dead.
But the nightmares had eventually started to fade and she’d thought that she was finally going to be able to sleep.
Only now she was having dreams about someone being in her room.
It was fucking insane!
She was so over it.
“Stupid, stupid brain,” she muttered to herself.
She checked the clock and groaned as she saw it was one-thirty in the morning. She’d only been asleep an hour. Devon had dropped her off just after midnight, following her set.
At least she didn’t have to work today. But that didn’t help her right now. She got out of bed, feeling restless.
Maybe you should read a book? Watch TV? Drink some tea?
Nope, nope, and nope.
Now that she was awake, she was wired.
Head thumping, she walked into the kitchen before looking through into the living room.
It was a disaster.
All of the furniture from her spare bedroom was piled up in here. She hadn’t had time to remove the carpet.
Well.
No time like the present.
After getting dressed and grabbing her mask, pliers, and knife which she’d managed to get back to the hardware store to buy, she started to pull up the carpet.
God.
What an awful job.
Opal was really starting to wonder why she’d decided to do this herself. Especially when the Malones seemed to be chomping at the bit to help her.
Why not take them up on it?
Because you’re an idiot, that’s why.
She managed to roll the carpet up as much as she could, then, sweating and heaving for breath, she stared down at it.
“Well, hell.”
She needed to get it out of the bedroom at least. And she’d been hoping to get it outside. Maybe she’d be able to lift it onto her shoulder.
Two attempts proved that that wasn’t going to happen.
So she grabbed hold and started to drag it. Tugging and swearing, she got it out of the front door, then stood there in the darkness since it was still early in the morning, with her hands on her hips as she panted heavily.
“Crap.”
Why wasn’t her brain working? What was she going to do with it now? Garbage day wasn’t until Thursday and she wasn’t even sure if they would take this.
And she didn’t own a vehicle to get it to the dump. She couldn’t leave a roll of carpet on her front porch indefinitely.
Looked like it was going into the shed at the end of the driveway. Grabbing one end, she strained as she pulled the roll of carpet off the porch and around the corner of the house.
Yeah, her brain had definitely left her body. She could have taken it out the back door and saved herself having to drag this so far.
Heaving for breath, she got to the shed and unlocked the padlock with the key she kept under a rock. Then reaching down, she grabbed hold again. Only as she stood, something pinged in her back.
Agony shot through her.
Shit. Shit.
Leaning over, she panted heavily as she tried to breathe through the pain.
What the hell? With a groan that was part-whimper, she managed to stand.
Gradually, the pain started to subside.
“Fuck,” she muttered. “Fuckity fuck. This ain’t no good.”
She wanted to hobble inside, but she still had to get the carpet into the shed. Bending over once more, she moved it inch by agonizing inch into the shed as pain shot through her back.
Once it was in and the door shut, she headed inside and moved to her bed.
Why her?
If she could sleep like a normal person, then she wouldn’t have been moving heavy carpet around in the middle of the night!
And hurting her back.
Sometimes, it felt like she’d been born with bad luck. And that her luck only went from bad to worse.
She really had to learn to ask for help.
Renard sat on the sofa in his apartment.
His lonely, cold apartment.
Fuck. Since when did he think like this? He got up. He went to work. He came home.