Total pages in book: 192
Estimated words: 192810 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 964(@200wpm)___ 771(@250wpm)___ 643(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 192810 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 964(@200wpm)___ 771(@250wpm)___ 643(@300wpm)
My nipples peaked and I was pretty sure I made another mew.
He gaze locked on mine when he finished, “Though, we’ll have to see.”
Again…
What was happening?
He leaned toward me.
I didn’t know what to do, throw myself at him, recoil, or run.
But by heaven and hellfire, seeing him even closer, he was downright poetic.
“Laura, when I rise, you rise,” he said softly.
“Oh-okay.”
“Allain will arrange for your protocol instruction.”
“I…my…” I started blinking again. “Wait, what?”
His eyes moved over my face, and the way the light and shadows played with them, I couldn’t see their famous color.
“You aren’t what I expected,” he murmured musingly.
Before I could ask after that, he stood.
I’d learned my lesson, so I instantly set my glass to the table and stood with him.
Once I gained my feet, he swept up my hand and brushed my knuckles with his lips in a move so old-fashioned and gallant, mine parted. I stared at his glorious head bent over my hand, my phantom beast nestled and cooed, and my legs threatened to cease holding me up.
Then without another word, or even a scant glance, Prince Aleksei dropped my hand and walked away.
Chapter 4
Here
She had the male in her maw, shaking him viciously before she tossed him to the side, his body breaking grotesquely against the bricks of the wall of the alley.
She whipped her head toward the other one.
While she’d been dealing with the first, he’d produced a weapon.
It was aimed at her.
She went to attack…
No.
To defend.
To defend me.
I saw the look in his eye.
He wasn’t afraid.
He wasn’t fleeing.
The other one was a sacrifice.
This one…
He was here to do just this.
“No!” I shrieked, tucked protectively in her broad breast, powerless to stop her.
The weapon fired.
And all turned black.
I jerked awake, feeling hot, sweaty, scared.
All familiar.
Too familiar.
My bedroom was not dark. With the half-wall, continuous slant of windows that connected to the roof allowing the city lights to drift in, it was never dark, unless I activated the privacy shields.
I didn’t like to do that.
Not anymore.
The alley they’d dragged me in had been dark. Dank. Reeking.
I used to set privacy at sixty percent when I slept, so I’d have the city, but I’d still have that cocoon of night.
Not after the incident.
Not after she was gone.
I needed the light.
I fell to my back and rubbed my chest with my hand.
The phantom wasn’t there with me. It hadn’t made itself known since we left the club.
As bittersweet as it was, alone in the dark of night with memories assaulting me, I could use her.
The nightmares came too often. I was beginning to worry it wasn’t healthy.
My gals were worried too.
Gayliliel had suggested I speak to a counselor.
Catla had suggested a visit to a clinic for a memory scrub and went so far as to talk to Mr. Truelock about it, whereupon he agreed to pay for it (he really did like me…and Gayle).
I couldn’t scrub that memory though. As hideous as it was, it was the last moment we had together.
It was her doing what she did for me.
It was her taking care of me.
To her dying breath.
My own breath hitched, and I sent three cats flying as I pulled the covers off me.
I shuffled out of my bedroom into the living area.
My place was the top floor of a Pre-Unification warehouse. Spacious, with the whole back wall being that slant of windows that started at about four feet up. Occupying the entire floor under it was my studio. The floor under that, the one at ground level, was divided into two. It housed a pizzeria and a mystic sanctum run by a witch named Alchemy, who I suspected was just a human, but I didn’t think she was a scammer. Instead, she wanted to have magic so much she convinced herself she did and was able to convince other people of the same.
Bottom line with Alchemy, her sanctum rocked. There might not be any actual mystical healing happening, but I’d used her before, and she gave great vibe.
Maybe it was time for another visit.
I went to the open kitchen and got myself a glass of water.
I stood at the counter looking out the windows, where, across the road there was a broken block that contained a row of six Pre-Unification, three-story brownstones, and next to those, a Post-Crash, personality-less, five-story cube filled with micro-flats.
Over the last few years, my neighborhood had begun shifting.
Island living off the coast had almost always been out of everyone’s but the elite of the elite’s price range, this being the reason it was populated by castles, villas, mansions and a gamut of really exclusive (but excellent) shopping and eateries.
Now uptown was becoming too expensive for most as well.
So downtown they went, buying up old brownstones or blocks of micro-flats and renovating them.
I didn’t pay attention, but I suspected, instead of fifty units in that cube, there were now maybe ten, because there were always noisy construction crafts and rubbish tips lining the road, workers inside undoubtedly tearing down walls and making micro, macro.