Total pages in book: 196
Estimated words: 180438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 902(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 601(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 180438 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 902(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 601(@300wpm)
“Now that you mention it, we did talk about that as well, but it’s one of the things that I’m still confused about, so I didn’t want to mention it until I got it straight in my mind. The thing is, apparently, Mary had wanted you to marry Nicole at some point, but she changed her mind, and no one knows why. Knowing her greed and predatory instincts, it seems rather odd, don’t you think? That she’d give you to Janie instead of one of her own daughters.”
Now she was getting too close to things I didn’t want her in the middle of, not that Nicole was more than an animal lover, but the whole trafficking thing that they were trying so hard to keep hidden, which those questions would no doubt lead to, so I had no choice but to change the course of the conversation. “Who knows what goes on in that old woman’s head? Maybe she thought it would be taboo to marry me off to one of her daughters after she seduced me herself years earlier.”
I wanted to throw up just saying that, and the look on Elena’s face showed how angry and upset she still was about that whole thing, so it really was time to drop it. “Let’s put this aside for now, baby; let’s get some dinner in you; you shouldn’t go this long without eating.”
Too late, I remembered how they’d trashed her online about her size, something I knew from her doctor was a side effect of the medicine she has to take whenever her illness flares up. Right now, she is a little thicker than she used to be when we were together, but I don’t know what they’re talking about because I actually like this look.
She’s a woman now and not a teenage girl and truth be known, I prefer her natural blooming curves to the dry-ass women who starve themselves or do other unearthly shit to their bodies in the name of staying thin. Her natural beauty is the type that nothing can fade; those eyes, her eyes, are like my windows to the world; I can see everything I want in them.
“Thank you, baby.” I stopped with my hand on her back on our way downstairs to have dinner.
“For what?”
“For not changing, for staying true to who you are. I’m so damn happy that they didn’t get to change you and that you remained strong even when I didn’t. Thank you.”
She didn’t look as if she knew what I was trying to say, and I couldn’t explain it any better; I just knew what I felt, and what I felt was immense gratitude that of the two of us, I was the one who took the fall. Had they done this shit to her and not me, Lyon wouldn’t have had to send his people here because there would be nothing left of Mary and her ilk to find.
The world has always seen me as a hotheaded kid who was always getting into shit. But even I didn’t know that my heart could become this enraged to the point of murder. I want to kill every last one of them.
Everyone who had a hand in this, but since there were innocent lives at stake, I couldn’t go off the rails and commit such an act, not until the people who lost their freedom were found. After that, I’ll do everything within my power to destroy our enemies.
We ate a quiet dinner together for the first time in years, and all the old feelings came rushing back as if there had been no interruption in our lives. We talked about things we’d missed in each other’s lives; she teased me about threatening her through music, and I told her how her song had woken me up from whatever stupor I had been in.
We tried to avoid it, or at least I did, but there was no way to ignore the elephant in the room. “So, this spell thing, what exactly did she do?”
“I don’t know the how of it; the way it was explained to me is that she and someone she knows, someone close to her, started working some kind of magic against me to get to you. And it started when she was very young, even before we knew who she was.”
“But why me? I don’t understand that part of it. There were so many other teen idols when I came on the scene; why did she pick me in particular?”
“Well, Char seems to have a few ideas about that, which are very confusing to me as well.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for one, she seems to want to be me. I’m not sure if that’s me professionally or just me, and I don’t think Char knows either way. She just said there’s a sense of Janie wanting to take over my life. And this has been going on long before you two got married.”