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)
He took a single step toward me.
My entire being rocked and swayed. Blown through by the power he emitted.
My pulse raced, a frantic thrum that throbbed desire through my veins.
This fierce pounding that I couldn’t understand or fathom.
One that I couldn’t evade.
He took two more steps forward.
His aura swilled around me.
A rising tide that started at my toes and swirled up my body.
“What do you think?” Kane’s voice was a hushed scrape.
“What do you mean, what do I think?” I had to ask it since I was about to do something super foolish and blurt out that I thought he was magnificent and wonderful and everything I shouldn’t want.
“About my family?” he pressed.
I blinked through what seemed like the thousand memories I’d made today, and my brow pinched in emphasis. “I think you’re right. I think they’re the best people I’ve ever met.”
I didn’t know how it could be.
Not when I could sense that he and his friends were hedged in secrets. Could see the demons that played in their eyes and danced across their skin.
Could feel the severity of it blister across my own.
And I couldn’t make any of that seem to matter.
Satisfaction tugged at the edge of his mouth, though it was dark and seductive. “Told you that you’d love them. That Maci would love them.”
“You’re all so close.” I didn’t know why I was whispering it. I was pretty sure Maci could have slept through a fire alarm right then.
But this felt like my and Kane’s own little secret.
A dirty secret.
The way those magic eyes fluttered over me as he stared down at me with his face cut in harsh lines of severity that still flickered with this undying softness.
The man straight contradiction.
A conflict that waged in the deepest, darkest place inside me.
Because my stomach tremored, my insides twisting with this foolish need I knew was going to devastate me.
“They are the ones who made me believe in humanity again when I’d come to believe there were only monsters that walked the earth.”
His confession penetrated, cutting through bone to the marrow.
It was as if his thoughts directly matched my own.
As if he saw what haunted me and grasped it in some intrinsic way.
There was also a grimness there. Like he also believed himself one of those monsters.
“Raven told me about when she was young. How she lived with all of you in an abandoned warehouse.” The words were thick and sticky. “How you welcomed them in and took care of her.”
“Yeah.”
I blinked through the disorder that raged around us. “You were homeless…living on the streets when you were a teenager?”
“Much better than living with the assholes assigned to be my foster parents.”
Another punch to my gut, my spirit grappling with the onslaught of pain that rolled out of him.
“What happened to your parents?”
He’d mentioned that he’d lost his mother, but he hadn’t given me any details.
I tried to convince myself I was only asking these things because of Maci. Because I needed to know about her father so I’d understand the person she would be raised by.
It was true in some sense, but that was only part of it. There was another part that needed to know him. The part that wanted to climb inside him the way I wanted him to climb inside of me.
Kane flinched. Old wounds cutting deep into the rugged lines of his face. “Never knew the prick who fathered me. And my mom…”
His jaw clenched, and I could feel the rush of rage that billowed out of him. “My mom was killed when I was sixteen. Her boyfriend murdered her, Emery. Right in front of me.”
A gasp of horror ripped free as an arrow of sorrow struck me.
So fierce and harrowing I was nearly bowled over by it.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry, Kane.”
I swore that I could hear his teeth grind. Could hear the battering of the storm that roiled within his soul.
Sickness spun, and my throat tightened.
My own nightmare flashed through my mind.
Ripping me back to the place where it felt like we’d lost it all.
To that time when nothing had remained the same.
Both me and Emmalee changed in an instant.
Only my throat squeezed tighter because Kane angled in closer.
His presence overpowering where he towered over me.
Energy screamed down the hall.
Bashing and belting.
Emerald eyes flashed, striking in blackened, singed flames.
“I had no power then. No way to stop it. Too fucking feeble and weak to stand up when she needed me.” Hate was seeded in every word. “But I’m not weak anymore, and I can promise you that no monster will ever get to Maci that way. I’m monster enough to protect her from that.”
I should be disturbed by the clear, vicious threat.
By what he was promising me.
By the claim that was so evident in his statement.
But I couldn’t do anything but push out the hoarse whisper, “That’s what we all need sometimes. Someone who will slay our monsters.”