Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 148397 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 742(@200wpm)___ 594(@250wpm)___ 495(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148397 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 742(@200wpm)___ 594(@250wpm)___ 495(@300wpm)
Do it.
Lose it.
You need to break.
He couldn’t keep bottling everything in.
Gagging on his darkness.
The softness in my head arrowed straight at his discomfort. I didn’t try to second-guess. I trusted the nudges inside me. “You’ve missed her your entire life, haven’t you? There’s no difference between missing someone alive or missing them when they’re dead.”
“Fucking hell.” He glowered as if he wanted to smother me with a pillow. “Shut up—”
“Or what? You’ll hurt me?” I giggled. Even to my ears, I sounded a little—a lot—crazy. “You’ll have to wait, I’m afraid. Not sure I could handle anything else.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he snapped through clenched teeth.
I laughed again, finding everything freaking hilarious and horrible. “But you will hurt me again.” The drugs chose that moment to swarm me. “You’ll hurt me because that’s your loooove language.” I shrugged with an unbecoming snort. “Your love language is pain.” I burst into peals of giggles. “Wonder if there’s a love bible for a sadist? Lesson number one on how to show affection for your slave: whip them until they’re moaning for you, then kiss them stupid.”
I moaned with need, then laughed and laughed and laughed.
If I didn’t laugh, I’d try to seduce him.
And I wasn’t that far gone…yet.
Unfortunately, Henri did not find me the least bit funny.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
So tortured.
So beautiful.
So wrong.
“Come closer and kiss me,” I murmured.
Ily, stop it!
I didn’t care.
I wanted his lips on mine.
I needed his body filling, stretching—
“Please, kiss me.”
He shot to his feet and latched his hands behind his neck. “I can’t be around you when you’re like this.”
Poor man.
Poor tortured monster.
“I’ll kiss you and make it all better. How about that?” I drifted around on my cloud made of GHB. “You’re so hopeless, Henri.”
He staggered.
I struggled to focus on his stony face.
I frowned. “No, wait. Am I the hopeless one?” I tried to make sense of the syrupy swirls in my head. “After all, you’re the one who stole all my hope.” I sighed with a relieved, happy chuff. “Buh-bye hope.”
I waited for him to speak.
I’d grown so used to him chattering away with his confessions.
I didn’t know how much I’d miss it when faced with aching quietness.
I drifted again.
Mollie popped into my head. Behind her, Victor’s stronghold went boom, thanks to one of her bombs. Then Rachel was there, grinning and dancing, her pregnant belly almost ready to pop.
I stiffened.
“She can’t have her baby here.”
“What?” Henri dropped his arms, raw panic carving his face as if I’d lost my mind.
“Children weren’t allowed in here.” I couldn’t look at him, remembering Victor asking him to exterminate Rachel. “But now, thanks to you making Victor keep it, he’ll probably decide to breed all of us.”
Tears bloomed.
Fresh laughter bubbled.
I didn’t know which would win—sobs of horror or peals of inappropriate delirium.
In the end, they cancelled each other out, and I tried to roll onto my side to curl into a ball.
I started to crash—
Henri clamped a hand on my shoulder. “Stay on your back.”
My nervous system tried to warn me a bruise existed there, but the magic of drugs said…who cares?
My eyes tore open, locking on his. “You…you won’t expect me to have a baby too, will you?”
“Fuck, Ilyana.” His face shot ghost white. “No, of course not.” He stumbled away from me, pacing the bedroom and raking cream-smeared fingers through his hair.
I tracked him for a little while, but he made me dizzy. “Oh, good. Because if you ever got me pregnant, I’d jump off the parapet.”
His feet slammed to a stop.
Marching back to the bed, he loomed over me. He panted as if he’d run a four-day race. He looked utterly in pieces. “Y-You’d kill yourself rather than carry my child? You hate me that much?”
“I’d kill myself so our child never knew horror.”
He winced.
Another wave of numbness.
I sank into it.
The sensation of lightness promised me the ability to float right out the window and soar all the way over the sea back to Krish.
A pinch in my heart.
The only pain I could still feel.
Krish…
God, I missed my older brother.
I missed the way he used to say my name. The way he’d say it in that special wonderful way, reminding me how loved I was.
Love.
The exact opposite of hate.
Love…that was the biggest monster here.
The hulking elephant in the room.
I could never hate you, Henri…and that’s the problem.
“Ily—” His hand grabbed my chin, his fingers gripping hard. “Open your eyes.”
Ily…
Whenever he used my name, it made me feel all itchy inside. Squirrelly and snarly because he didn’t know what it meant. He mocked everything he wanted with his tone.
I had an awful feeling that each time he said my name, it only magnified the curse between us.
Oh, that’s sad.
Cursed to always say the words but never earn them in return.
My eyelashes fluttered open.