Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 74898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
He was on the edge, right along with me, and there was no way to stop from falling.
So, I let go.
I came, and I came hard.
So hard, in fact, that I ran out of breath to scream.
His grunt of completion above me was lost on me, and I didn’t even realize he’d come to a stop until long seconds later when I opened my eyes that I hadn’t even realized I had closed.
The first thing I saw were those olive green eyes staring at me intently.
“I fucking love y-y-you,” he rasped.
What did I say to that?
“I love you, too.” Then I started to sob.
Chapter 23
Once upon a time there was a twat. It was you. The end.
-Meme
Ghost
All the Dixie Wardens attended this meeting. And not just the Alabama Chapter, but the Benton Chapter, too.
This was the first time the Benton Chapter had seen me in the light of day.
A few weeks back, I’d come face to face with Sebastian for the first time since Ghost had become the new me.
Silas had been doing a great job of keeping my existence a secret, but that night, Sebastian had learned that I wasn’t dead.
Lucky for me, he’d gotten all the way home, six hours away, before he’d decided that my face needed to meet with his fist.
But as I looked at him across the table from me, I realized that his anger hadn’t lessened in all of that time.
In fact, if I was a guessing man, I’d say it’d gotten worse.
The rest of the men hadn’t realized who I was yet.
That, I could tell.
Otherwise they would all be up in arms, collectively and individually trying to beat the shit out of me.
It was the face.
Not to mention I’d put on about thirty pounds in muscle since they’d last seen me. Oh, and let’s not forget to mention that they all thought that I was dead.
I was no longer that naïve twenty-one-year-old kid. I was now a grown ass man who had the last six years of his life ripped away from him in the most savage way possible. I’d been tortured for a year of it, and the next five were spent living as half a man. I’d survived only on the promise of one day having revenge while I watched everyone else live their lives around me.
“What are we even doing here?” asked Torren. “My wife wasn’t happy about the short notice. We had to bow out of a dentist appointment for the kids because I couldn’t be there to help take them.”
Sterling looked at him like he was crazy. “You had to bow out of a dentist appointment?” he jeered. “Poor baby. I had to bow out of a fucking practice. They fined me eighteen thousand dollars.”
Sterling was a professional baseball player. Ever since he’d made it to the major leagues, he’d been on a hot streak, and I loved to watch him on TV. I’d been so fuckin’ proud of him, too. I’d always wanted to tell him that.
“You can afford it,” Kettle rumbled. “I had to call in sick.”
Sebastian grunted. “Me, too. It worked out because I threw up on our last shift.”
He did look a little green.
“Don’t you fuckin’ give that shit to us, either,” Kettle grumbled. “I do not want to take that shit home. If I catch it, then that means Adeline will catch it. Then the fucking kids will. Then they’ll give it right back to me once it’s all over and done with. I do not want to deal with throw up.”
I chuckled under my breath, drawing the attention of the one man who’d been eyeing me all night, besides Sebastian, who knew exactly who I was.
He was practically quivering in his seat, staring at me surreptitiously every chance he got.
I knew he was dying to talk to me. The only thing that’d kept him in check was Silas, and since he was in the hallway talking to Lynn, I knew that it was only a matter of time before he broke.
I looked away from Cleo’s penetrating gaze.
Though my face was different, the structure of it was not. I had scars now where I didn’t before, and my entire face looked like it’d been pieced back together after the fire.
The only real things that were left unchanged about my face were the color of my eyes and the shape of my mouth.
Everything else was different.
My pieced-back-together face, like Frankenstein’s, was hard to look at sometimes. I was no longer that same handsome man that my wife had fallen for, and it made it hard for me to understand what my wife saw in me. She’d never once commented on the change, she just traced her fingers along my scars as if she was committing each and every one to memory.
“God, I’m fucking starving.”
That was Truth.