Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 148238 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 741(@200wpm)___ 593(@250wpm)___ 494(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148238 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 741(@200wpm)___ 593(@250wpm)___ 494(@300wpm)
Why can’t I remember anything?
The question blurted loud and fierce—cutting through my wavering ignorance.
What happened to make me like this?
Or maybe not what but who?
My left hand cupped the singed skin of my right forearm. I winced in pain from the moderate burn.
What happened to me?
Green-eyed man froze as his gaze landed unwillingly on mine. His attention dropped to where I cupped my arm. His feral energy seemed to reach between us, drawing me deeper into his spell.
I tingled with a desire so powerful, it overrode my current situation and the fear dancing on the outskirts of my brain.
Who are you?
Almost as if he heard my question, his eyes locked onto my mine once again, glowing with pent-up emotion. Recognition flickered, love smoldered, and a heartbreaking sorrow only those who have loved and lost can know etched his eyes.
He clenched his jaw, shoulders seizing with tension the longer we stared. Regardless of what happened, or what would become of me, I knew he was a clue.
A vital clue.
The linchpin that would be the catalyst to my undoing.
My heart pumped and tricked beneath his careful scrutiny. My lips parted as fingers of magnetic awareness drew us tighter and tighter and tighter together.
His nostrils flared as if he tasted the air—unraveling my secrets by scent alone.
I waited for him to speak. I willed him to touch me again—to hold my face and dive into my locked thoughts. But he stayed frozen, bristling with rage and hate.
Please, let him have answers.
Even if he did, he’d probably never tell me. I might not suffer a debilitating level of terror, but I wasn’t an idiot. I didn’t need to know my history to guess the likely scenario of my new future wouldn’t end well.
I’ll find a way to run before that happens.
My mind raced, eyes locked with his. A silent duel ensued, each wielding sharp-edged questions, trying to decipher the other without a spoken word. He was as remote as the peak of Everest with his height and unreadable icy gaze.
The shock and passion he’d shown when we first met was absent. Gone. Never existed.
The longer I stared, the more the sense of familiarity stuttered, pushed further inside as the green fire in his eyes scorched my thoughts. There was no denying he was handsome, scary, and throbbing with power—despite his injury—but there was something else there… something he hid so well… too well.
The way he so effortlessly cut me out, left me floundering with fear worse than any I’d felt up till now. The severance of any connection made me throb as if he’d cut out a piece of me.
My hands fisted.
To be denied the tiny piece of home I’d found in him reinforced my conviction that I would do anything—absolutely anything—to get the answers I desired.
I didn’t care what I had to do.
I didn’t care who I had to tolerate.
I would find out the truth.
I will.
The men behind him shuffled uncomfortably. Black Mohawk cleared his throat. “Eh, Prez?”
Earthquake Man stiffened, balling his hands. Instead of looking away, our connection lashed tighter—tentacles crisscrossing the space until we’d somehow knitted an intense cognizance.
It grew deeper, firmer—more demanding than ever.
The chill down my back evolved to a tremor, an aftershock rippling down my spine to my legs.
Something threaded blistering hot between us. A dangerous combination of competition, attraction, and threats.
You know me.
He gritted his jaw, almost as if he’d heard my thought.
I didn’t know if I should be overjoyed at the unswerving intuition that we were linked, or petrified that someone from my past could treat me like this.
Tell me.
Are you my lover?
My brother?
My nemesis or friend?
I hated wallowing in nothingness, where even reality wasn’t believable without the documentation of a past I could no longer recall.
The connection reached a fever pitch, turning the burn on my arm into an inferno.
Then… he blinked.
Smashing the awareness into smithereens and tearing his gaze from mine, he broke the web. Whatever I thought I felt or knew disappeared in a flash. The tremor left, dissolving into the ground, leaving me empty and more alone than before.
Any remembrance or realization in his gaze vanished, replaced with livid anger.
He was no longer intrigued or enticed by me but furious and hate-filled.
What changed?
How had he cut me out so successfully?
And how had he done it so completely that he made me doubt I’d even seen the hint of something deeper?
Is it all in my head?
Running a large hand through his hair, he paced in front of the lineup. His bloody and bruised hand opened and closed by his thighs, violence wisping around him like an aura.
Slamming to a halt facing us, he sniffed loudly. “Suppose it’s now my job to welcome you.” He kicked at nothing, grinding his large black boot into the floorboards. “Excuse the disorganization. And ignore the fight you saw.” His eyes landed on each of us, pinning us to the concrete. “My name is Arthur Killian, but you and everyone else, address me as Kill. You’re a transaction—nothing more, nothing less.”