Total pages in book: 119
Estimated words: 111435 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 557(@200wpm)___ 446(@250wpm)___ 371(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111435 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 557(@200wpm)___ 446(@250wpm)___ 371(@300wpm)
Except her.
And she was really fucking pissed at me, if the knife in my stomach was anything to go by. I hadn’t even been fucking prepared for a fight. The setting of a strip club parking lot in the middle of the night hadn’t even given me any clues. Sure, it might’ve been a weird locale and time for a civilian, but neither of us were civilians, and we didn’t keep traditional hours. I figured she was blowing through town and needed some kind of favor. After what I’d done to her, I was prepared to give it to her. For old time’s sake. Then we’d have a discussion about how this was the last time we were going to see each other.
Turned out we didn’t need to have that discussion. She’d been planning on no one seeing me again. Ever.
“As much as I’d like to stay and watch you die, it’s going to be a long and painful process,” she’d said after wiping my blood off her knife on the thighs of her leather pants. “And I’ve got somewhere to be,” she continued. I watched her eyes flicker over me under the harsh overhead lights, red-painted lips stretching out into a satisfied smile. “But it’s okay. I win.”
Then she’d turned on her stiletto heel and walked to her car. Not looking back once.
Fuck, I’d thought I’d turned into a cold and evil motherfucker, but she definitely won that contest. I could leave someone to die a long and painful death, that was for sure. Man or woman. If they deserved it. If the club needed me to do it.
Usually, if the club needed me to do it, they were guilty of something, deserved it in some way. Other times they didn’t. I did it anyway. Didn’t lose a wink of sleep over it. But there were a handful of people who I couldn’t kill, couldn’t hurt. She was on that list. Or at least she had been, up until stabbing me and leaving me to die.
She hadn’t severed my spinal cord; I had the use of my arms and legs, though I didn’t think I could stand up. Fuck, maybe I could’ve. My phone was in the pocket of my cut, and I definitely could’ve reached into my cut to call someone from the club. They’d have been there in less than ten minutes, Sarah in tow. They’d be able to save my life. She’d been aiming for my liver, but I’d moved at the last moment, and I was pretty sure she’d missed. Some part of me must’ve wanted to live, the unconscious part of me, at least. But now I was bleeding on the cold concrete, staring up at a very bright fucking light and contemplating my life. It was very likely that even if I did survive, I’d die in a very fucking similar way at some point in the future.
A future that consisted of a lot of death, violence, and not much else.
I don’t know if it was a conscious or unconscious decision, but I didn’t reach for my phone. I just stared at that bright fucking light, knowing that eventually, it wouldn’t be so bright anymore, and it would eventually get really fucking dark. If I was lucky. If I wasn’t, and if a bunch of bible thumpers were to be believed, it would then get all bright, hot, fire and brimstone.
But it didn’t get any darker. Or any hotter.
Because she found me.
And she made it very fucking clear that she wasn’t going to let me die.
FREYA
Somehow, I managed to get him into my backseat. I struggled getting my groceries out of the car, so I had no fucking clue how I managed to move his mountainous frame. I figured it was a combination of adrenaline and the fact that I’d recently started taking Pilates classes.
He was slipping in and out of consciousness, which surely was due to all the blood he was losing, blood that almost made me slip out of consciousness. I realized whoever stabbed him could come back, and I really didn’t need to faint and get myself stabbed, so I held fast.
Thankfully, he’d managed to stay conscious while I helped him to my car and was able to help me get him into the back seat before I scrambled to snatch a blanket from the trunk, covering his bleeding torso with it. “Don’t die,” I commanded once I’d tucked him in the best I could.
His eyes seemed to glow in the dim overhead light of my car with a glint in them that penetrated me to my very bones. “Don’t worry, I ain’t fuckin’ dying,” he declared with a surety that a man with a serious stab wound shouldn’t have. Nonetheless, as crazy as it was, I believed him.
That did not stop me from driving like a maniac the ten minutes it took me to get home, though. And it was a fifteen-minute drive under normal circumstances, normal circumstances being me driving ten over. Later, I would wonder why I hadn’t just driven to the Sons of Templar compound. Though I’d never been there, I knew where it was, and it was even closer than my place out in the middle of the desert. But I wasn’t thinking straight. My mind was scrambled and panicked and, as mentioned before, I did not work well under pressure.