Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 65151 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65151 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
And when her nose was warmed by the rich scent of Beta deliciousness, the tickle of his chest hair on her lips, the hard definition of his body, her straining eyes found new patterns to obsess over.
Black marks twisting over his skin, bleeding their secrets together in sharp angles and soft curves.
A blink. Another blink. A growing tick tapped the back of her brain. A click, click, click that came in bursts, then retreated. An internal demand that she rebuild her nest. Survey what was needed and what was not.
Tidy a mess she couldn’t quite pin down.
Compulsion drew her twitching gaze away from the slumbering man, to run her eyes over each corner of their sleeping place, Brenya retreating from his arms.
Myriad pillows lay scattered, the story of how he’d fucked her told in splashes of color against the monochromatic Red Room’s monotony.
Until that moment, she’d never realized how colorful the fabrics of her nest had been. How the Beta had provided a rainbow. Different textiles, different textures.
And it wasn’t just the nest coming into focus, but the Red Room she had lived in for weeks. Only yesterday had it been nothing but a room painted red with a dark story and mysteries baked into the walls.
It must have been the excess light, but now half-blind with the brightness, Brenya could see the patchwork of the floor, and the furniture, and the paneled walls changing hues of red lacquer signifying an individual enemy of the state smeared here and there. One victim’s blood tinted the bedposts deep crimson, while vermilion splattered across the adjacent wall. The inlaid wooden floor was tinged claret with vivid scarlet accenting parquet tiles in alternating patterns. Each a story of the violence committed by Bernard Dome’s founder.
It was disgusting.
Terrible.
A room that would never wash clean.
Yet beautiful. History right there.
Scared and ugly like her.
This was her room. Where she would build her nests. A room of betrayals, secrets, failures, and mistakes.
Stained.
Not three paces from the bed, Ancil had been slain. She could hear it, the echo of pulverized meat, the dirge of Jacques Bernard beating his closest friend to death—the sickening thuds, the grunts of pain, the begging as Ancil pleaded for his Commodore to stop.
What sounds had come from the other lives smeared here and there?
Wailing? The crack of bone?
If ghosts existed, Ancil was there, watching her. No doubt a snide smirk on his insufferable face. That had to be why the hairs on the back of her neck stood straight.
“Brenya?”
It was a soft call, a distant Alpha plea. Jacques Bernard, seeking space in her ticking skull. Reaching out, not with forced pleasure or disdain, but with a gentle call.
A cowed prowler pacing at some invisible line he could not easily cross. An anxious Alpha.
Jacques Bernard was apprehensive.
His loss of influence gnawed at him now that his bravado and violence had been beaten back.
“Mon chou… please.”
It seemed Jacques had learned something from his usurper. Now he knew what it was like to experience each sensation of his mate being well-fucked by another.
Now, he stroked instead of hammered, a feather-light tickle on her brain. “I love you.”
She snorted, surprised the sound had come out of her.
The tick, tick, tick in her skull grew with a vengeance. Almost loud enough to fully drown out Jacques’s plea. “You need me, Brenya. Only I can keep you safe from him.”
Pulling her knees under her chin, she began to rock, honey eyes zipping about the room, noting anything, anything that would keep her focus pinpoint and safe and make this feeling of him inexorably creeping nearer end.
There were cracks in the paneling, small areas that could use buffing… the flowers on the table, a single white petal having fallen.
That petal held her unblinking attention as if it were the lifeline.
Theoretically, she knew those flowers had been there for days; she’d cataloged them when they had arrived. But now they were there. She could pay attention to the stems, the wilting leaves, the over-bloomed camellias bursting apart, telling a story of what they had been through in their time on that table.
Compelling her to pay attention to more than information and statistics. The tick, tick, tick and Jacques Bernard shoved aside if she conceded that, if appreciated, the flowers were pretty.
And they were there, because Jules had put them there. On the table, beside her nest.
For her.
And she had never paid any attention to them. Why would she?
Why wouldn’t she?
In the overbright light, with her brain snapping in her skull and Jacques barking from his cell, she learned that she liked and disliked various details about the room.
Had opinions.
For the first time.
Which felt awkward and unnecessary. The opposite of how she’d been raised.
Sudden fascination with the wood-carved canopy overhead stole her attention next. Not because it was beautifully constructed, not because the patterns were mesmerizing, but because it was wood.