Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 70097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
One moment I was pinned beneath him, the next his crushing hands had vanished from my throat.
My mouth opened with a gasp. My body convulsed furiously with the first breath I took.
Ragged, shuddering breaths tore through my damaged windpipe like broken glass. The air hit my lungs, and I choked on it, coughing violently.
My hands flew to my neck, fingers pressing against the bruised flesh, feeling the pulse beneath. Wild and erratic, but there. Still there. Still beating.
My body curled inward as it tried to remember how to function.
Another sound filled the room.
A sound that wasn’t coming from me.
It was the resonance of violence—brutal, vicious, and utterly without mercy.
The wet, meaty impact of fist meeting bone, over and over, a rhythm so relentless it sounded almost poetic.
I heard something crack. Multiple cracks.
I heard the splatter of blood against the wall, against the carpet.
I couldn’t see.
My vision was still blurred, the darkness receding slowly, reluctantly. But I could hear. And what I heard was the… complete and absolute annihilation of a man.
The punching didn’t stop.
It went on for what felt like hours, blow after blow after blow. Each one landed with the same devastating force, the same terrible precision.
There were no words. No curses, no threats, no demands for information.
Just the sound of a fragile body being dismantled by someone who had no intention of stopping until the thing beneath him was no longer capable of being called a body.
I pressed my palms against the carpet and pushed myself backward, dragging my body across the floor until my shoulders hit the wall.
I dragged myself upright, half sitting, half slouching against the wall.
My vision cleared in fragments.
First the ceiling and then the room itself. I saw the shattered lamp and the dark spray of blood across the beige wallpaper.
And then my gaze landed on two figures.
Adrian.
My husband’s back was to me, one knee planted on the man’s chest, his shoulders heaving with each blow, his arms moving with relentless cadence as they unwinded through violence. His fists were dark, covered in blood, the knuckles split and raw. They rose and fell in that same terrible rhythm.
The man beneath him was no longer fighting.
He hadn’t been fighting for a while.
His arms lay at his sides, fingers curled loosely.
His face was unrecognizable, a ruin of broken bone and torn flesh, the features rearranged into something that bore no resemblance to a human face.
The blood pooling beneath his head had spread across the carpet in a dark, awful stain.
Still, Adrian didn’t stop.
He hit him. Again. And again. And again.
My stomach heaved.
My throat closed around the taste of vomit filling my mouth.
I couldn’t stop looking.
I should have, but I couldn’t.
The violence was almost… hypnotic.
My face itched, and I brought my hands up, feeling the wetness on my cheeks. It was his blood. My attacker’s blood that had sprayed across my skin when I’d broken his nose.
Adrian’s fist rose one final time and came down.
The impact was a dull, final sound.
Thud.
His arm hung in the air for a moment, trembling, the muscles in his forearm corded and rigid. Then it dropped to his side.
The only sound left in the room was my ragged breathing as I wheezed, each inhale a battle against the swelling in my throat.
Adrian didn’t move.
He knelt over the body, his head bowed, his shoulders rising and falling with deep, controlled breaths. His hands rested on his thighs, blood dripping from his knuckles onto the carpet in slow, deliberate drops.
Then he turned to face me.
Thud. Thud.
His face had transformed. That careful, controlled mask he wore like an armor was gone, shattered, exposing what was raw and feral beneath it. Something that had always been there, lurking beneath measured words and calculated gestures, waiting for the moment to break free.
A restrained animal. A caged monster. A shackled beast.
His eyes were wild, the dark irises locked onto me with an intensity that made my skin crawl.
Blood covered him. His hands, his forearms, the front of his shirt. It was in his hair, along his jaw, a streak of it running from his temple to the corner of his mouth like war paint.
For the first time, I wasn’t looking at the man who always had himself under control, even when he was fighting in The Pit.
Because he was always in control.
Not now. Not tonight.
I was truly looking at the monster beneath the expensive suit and arrogant smirk.
Our gazes met, and his expression cracked.
The pure, unadulterated rage remained, but I saw something else. Genuine, crippling fear. The mindless terror of a man who had arrived a little too late.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
His hand reached for me.
It moved slowly, palm up, fingers extended, carefully, gently toward me. His hand was broken and bloodied. It was the hand that had just beaten a man to death.
I flinched.
The movement was involuntary, a full-body recoil that pressed me harder against the wall, my legs drawing up toward my chest.