Total pages in book: 168
Estimated words: 160578 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 803(@200wpm)___ 642(@250wpm)___ 535(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 160578 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 803(@200wpm)___ 642(@250wpm)___ 535(@300wpm)
The room melts around me, and my hand drops from the star around my thigh when I finally force my eyes away from the maniac. Glass walls encase the full circle we’re standing on, and I stare out at the audience below. Rows of seats back upward into the dark corners of the space.
“Is your life.”
“Sound of Madness” by Sundown starts pounding around us and I finally look at who’s being dragged through the only exit in the room. A young guy around my age walks through shirtless, blood splatters all over his chest and his face painted in the iconic Midnight Mayhem clown paint. That isn’t what stops me. It’s the distance in his eyes, how they peer through me. Familiar. His face paint materializes into a black mask, a suit, Riverside Elite and the gala. I squeeze my eyes to shake off the vision.
Fuck—I do have a concussion.
Matted hair with dried blood, her head bowed between her shoulders. If it wasn’t for the blinging twenty-million-dollar diamond on her finger, I wouldn’t recognize her. I rush forward, catching her body when he tosses her as if she’s a piece of meat. I move her hair out of her face, my fingers tangling in her knots.
“Shhh…god, please still be alive.” I rest my head below her nose. Nothing.
Nothing.
My throat swells and the realization of her really being dead crawls over my skin like a disease. No. No. You can’t.
Hot air evaporates over my cheek once.
I stop.
Seconds pass before it happens again. Twice.
I release a steady breath, slowly shuffling her to the corner of the room while unclipping my leather jacket. I place it over her semi-naked body, leaving me in a tight long-sleeve black sheer top.
I turn back to Corbin, my movements slow. Madison is alive. “What is this?”
“Well…you see…this is Aspen, Darling. Don’t you remember now?” I squeeze my eyes closed, my fingernails biting into the palms of my hands when anger surges through my blood.
“Why!” I don’t know if there really are people in the audience, but I don’t care. If they paid to watch, they’ll be dead soon too. “You had her. You took her and left me in there! Why!” It doesn’t make sense. I don’t remember much of my childhood since all it was was running through the tunnels on my trike and answering to a higher power.
My skin prickles as if a thousand spiders crawled all over.
“If you think they’re going to save you, they’re not…and can’t, Darling. No one exits or enters without my access. Why won’t you come back to me? Why did you make us do something so dramatic? You’ve upset the Minister, you know—” His steps are chaotic, no rhyme or reason. “We’ve not seen him in quite some time! But this—this will appease him enough to bring him back.” His eyes move over my shoulder. “Kill Madison.”
He’s using her name to taunt me, or he thinks I am Darling, and I’ve switched. If he thinks Darling could switch, he was mistaken. That bitch was as evil as they come.
“No!” I scream, putting myself between him and Madison. “No…” I soften my tone. “You’ve got me.” I need to try another tactic. This is not going to work. “You’ve got me—you don’t need to take her to prove anything, the Minister—” I pause. “Danny will not want her, you know that. He wants me, remember? Just me!”
“Hmmm…” the Top Hat muses. I can’t bear to call him Corbin. “You were awfully hard to get to. He sure made it difficult. He doesn’t much like when things are flipped around, does he?” He starts pace-walking back and forward, and the man watches him carefully, as if a ticking time bomb ready to explode. “Where is the Minister? Why is he not coming!”
“You don’t need to hurt her. You have me now…”
Priest killed her, he kept me, but we haven’t had the discussion yet.
Is Corbin confused with which one of us Priest loves? Does he mean to kill her? We still haven’t spoken in detail about what happened on that day. Is this why? Is this why he is still mad, because he hates that it wasn’t me who died?
Jesus. That question is going to haunt me forever.
Doubt fills the wires of my brain. It’s ridiculous that I’ve found this exact inconvenient moment to have this crisis, but now I’m second-guessing everything I know. I assumed he didn’t know about her. That he always thought I split like they all had for so long and that he only just figured it out the day that he killed her. He locked me away so no one could find me, but I didn’t see him. Not the entire two weeks that passed after he killed her. I am in love with a man who not only isn’t capable of love, but what little part he has inside of him, he had for her, because it all boils down to that one simple thing.