Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 130924 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 655(@200wpm)___ 524(@250wpm)___ 436(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130924 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 655(@200wpm)___ 524(@250wpm)___ 436(@300wpm)
“I want to save you,” Crane whispers against my neck, his lips moving with deliberation, his breath hot and making me shiver. “I want to save you, Brom.”
Fuck.
“And what if you can’t?” I ask. My voice comes out breathless and weak and worried but I don’t care. Because Crane still has a way of wanting to put every part of me into his hands.
“I can’t fail if I have your trust, the way you used to trust me,” he says, his lips now brushing over the rim of my ear as he speaks. “Will you trust me?”
“Is this how you earn it? Tying me up?”
He pulls his face away from my neck and the air that rushes in there is cold. The absence of his warmth cuts deep. “You know it’s for your own good.”
Then he makes a fist in hair and yanks my head back. I gasp at the pain, such familiar pain, my eyes watering. My cock hardens underneath me, trapped between my body and the floor. “But while I’ll save you, I also want to make you pay. I want to make you hurt,” he rasps, a rumble to his voice.
Crane has always been rough with me but I’ve never seen him angry. I don’t know why I want to provoke him. I want to see that façade crack. I’ve always been hanging on by a thread, feeling seconds from snapping loose and succumbing to the chaos of my soul, while he’s always been even and in control and I want to know what he’s like when he lets go.
“Hurt me then,” I manage to say, my words tight in my throat as my head remains pulled back. My shoulder screams with pain. I think I feel the wound starting to bleed again.
“You know you have to ask for it nicely,” he says, his fist growing tighter, making my scalp sing.
“Hurt me, please.” My breath shakes.
“Such a good boy,” he comments and I hate how my heart blooms at the praise. “But this won’t be a pain you’d enjoy.”
He brings his mouth to my ear again. “If I licked your dick right now, would you taste like her?” he asks and I’m immediately flooded with the image of him on his knees.
Fuck.
“Did you force yourself on her?” he goes on now and his voice is low, so low, and it trembles with rage and I feel it now. All of this for Kat. All this anger and jealousy over her. “How much of your fucking was you and how much of it was the horseman?”
“I didn’t force myself on her,” I protest, wincing as he pulls my hair so tight I see stars. “I didn’t. She wanted it. She wanted it, she wanted me” that cloudy darkness starts to rise within me, “and I fucked her so good Crane, better than you ever could, but I didn’t force myself. I just made her forget who you were.”
He stills at that, a sharp inhale, and the room seems to pause with him.
Then he takes my head and slams it into the floor.
White suns explode behind my eyes and the world spins and before I can cry out his large hand slips under my face and over my mouth, holding back my garbled scream. My eyes water mercilessly.
“Shut up,” he grunts, giving my mouth a painful squeeze, and then he’s getting up, the pressure lifting from my back but I can’t talk, I can’t think. I feel darkness coming for me. Is it a concussion? Is it the horseman? Should I warn him if it is?
I decide to not.
Let the horseman fight him back.
But that doesn’t matter because the darkness fades as Crane hauls me to my feet and my vision rights itself just as he’s pushing me back against the wall, his forearm against my windpipe. Blood trickles down my face from the corner of my hairline and with the deepest remorse I realize he did to me exactly what I did to Kat.
I deserve it.
I deserve so much more than this.
“Were you inside her when you did this to her?” he growls at me, nodding at the wound, this violence that vibrates through his whole body, flowing onto me. I feel like he’s transferring his rage onto me and he doesn’t even realize it. “Was your cock inside her when you switched, when you caused her pain?”
“She likes the pain,” I manage to say against his arm.
I watch as his eyes flash, the grey turning black. “I am torn, pretty boy. So very torn between wanting to fuck you and wanting to kill you and I fear if I do one I’ll end up doing the other.”
“I’d rather you kill me first,” I say, my throat throbbing as I try to speak. “You wouldn’t even know the difference between fucking me and a corpse, would you?”