Total pages in book: 193
Estimated words: 184001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 920(@200wpm)___ 736(@250wpm)___ 613(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 184001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 920(@200wpm)___ 736(@250wpm)___ 613(@300wpm)
“No?” he echoes, his voice thick with need but his eyes full of resentment for it.
It hits me then—why this feels wrong.
“Zeke… I can’t imagine what you went through in that place, and I’m sorry for it.” I gently place a hand over his heart and keep my gaze pinned there. I’m not surprised to find his heart racing, but the rhythm is unsteady, as if the war in his head is also being waged in his heart. “You have no idea how sorry I am that you’re hurting.” Inhaling, I drop my hand but cowardly keep my gaze on his chest as I take a reluctant step back. His hold shifts from my arms to my waist so I don’t go far, but the absence of his hard body pressed against mine is enough to strengthen my resolve. “I wish to God that I could take away your pain, but I won’t be your punching bag. I won’t pay for what Tatum did. It doesn’t matter what you feel for me if it isn’t intentional. I’m not a side effect or an experiment. I’m a woman who deserves to be loved.” Finally, I let my blurry gaze meet his, only to find it blank. The resentment is gone, but so is everything else. “You can kiss me when you mean it.”
I go to pull away when his hands tighten on my waist, and I gasp as something dark, possessive, and very much intentional swims across his features—until he doesn’t look like Zeke anymore. He looks like a nightmare and a dream wrapped up into one. It raises the hairs on my arms. The chilling sense that I’m in danger skates down my spine, but when I try to pull away again, he growls and I feel his fingers bite into my spine.
“Z-zeke?”
His gaze narrows at the name, making the harsh planes of his visage that much more frightening.
A terrified whimper tears from my throat.
The sound snaps him out of it, and I watch without breathing as Zeke visibly sheds the violent reaction.
It shouldn’t be possible the way his eyes seem to brighten from seafoam on a stormy night to their usual spring green, but the more his expression relaxes and returns to normal, the more his eyes do too.
“Fair enough,” he says as if he didn’t just scare the shit out of me. His tone is casual but cool, leaving me to wonder if I just imagined the whole fucking thing or if Zeke is wholly unaware of what the fuck just happened. Clearing his throat, he avoids my gaze as he drops his hands from my waist and steps around me. “Come on. We should get back.”
KHALIL
I do one last coat of wood polish over the newly carved headboard before I drop the oily cloth in the bucket with the other supplies and take a step back to admire my handiwork. On the large headboard is a scene depicting a meadow. A bird with its beak open in mid-song sits on a tree branch in bloom while a she-wolf lounges underneath surrounded by flowers and her three pups dancing around her as she stares at the blazing sun. On the opposite end of the headboard is another tree with a thick trunk and a large bear with its back to it mid-scratch while another slumbers on one of the branches and a third sniffs a flower.
In the middle of the scene, like she’s the center of this alternate universe, is a faceless girl in a dress with a riotous set of curls.
The rest of the bed was easy to construct, but this part had taken me weeks. I’ve never attempted anything as intricate. My own headboard was simple compared to this one.
“All done?” Thorin asks from across the room where he’s applying the top coat on the freshly painted wall that Seth and Bane destroyed. Zeke dragged in the trunk where we kept extra weapons and was currently kneeling in front of it as he neatly folded her clothes and placed them inside.
It isn’t much, but it was all we could give her.
Zeke unsurprisingly hadn’t cared much about losing his bedroom to Aurelia, but Thorin and I knew better than to call him out on the reason why.
Sounds drift down the stairs from the first floor, telling me that Aurelia is finally awake. After she came back from her run with Zeke a couple of days ago, she’s been spending the night in her loft and lost in her head during the day. I know she hasn’t been sleeping either because I could hear her up there pacing when she was supposed to be sleeping.
Something had spooked her, and for whatever reason she and Zeke had been hush-hush about it.
“The mattress should have been delivered by now,” I announce as I head for the door. The plastic protecting the floor rustles beneath my feet as I maneuver around all the equipment. “I’m going to take the truck into town and pick it up.”