Total pages in book: 218
Estimated words: 209489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1047(@200wpm)___ 838(@250wpm)___ 698(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 209489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1047(@200wpm)___ 838(@250wpm)___ 698(@300wpm)
At failing him.
Failing myself.
My grandparents.
I felt the absolute terror of thinking this was going to be the end. After everything. Here. In the driveway, alone.
I had missed out on so much… and maybe that thought hurt more than the physical pain.
All I’d ever wanted was to be myself. To have a choice. To be valued. And now?
Then there was another crack, and I had to close my eyes.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
It was the pounding in my head that woke me up.
Or maybe the fact that the pain coming from my back was almost unbearable.
The terrible taste in my mouth might have also been a factor.
More than likely, it was all of it.
I felt like I had gotten my ass whooped, and it had been a long, long time since that had happened. Back then too, it had been a bunch of people ganging up on me, except in this case it wasn’t just because I was the new kid.
I wished it was that simple.
But the second I opened my eyes, the second my pupils adjusted enough to the blinding white bulbs installed in the ceiling, I realized something was wrong.
Really, really wrong.
Because daylight bulbs? I didn’t have money for that. So what…?
The shots. The men who looked like soldiers but weren’t, at least not the good kind of soldiers. The Defender sprawled on the ground in front of my trailer.
I sat up so fast my head swam, and I had to squeeze my eyes closed when everything went white.
Holy fuck, my back. My fucking everything. Oww, oww, oww. Blindly reaching backward to try and touch it, I stopped at the weight on my wrist and forced myself to look. There was a band on my hand. One single, thick, heavy cuff.
Where the fuck was I?
There were white walls. The floor was a cold, pale gray concrete. There was a door that looked to be made of some kind of metal with no window of any sort. A toilet and a sink took up one corner.
But it was the figure on the ground to my right that shocked me the most.
It was The Defender.
On his side, in the hoodie he’d borrowed and gray sweatpants that were a lot dirtier than they had been the last time I’d seen them, he was there. Just within reaching distance.
I reached out, instantly going for his throat. Pressing my fingers against a spot on it, I waited, trying to ignore the painfully sharp silence from the plain, empty room that I’d wonder later whether it was soundproofed or not. A steady, ultra-slow beat pulsed against my fingers, and I let out a relieved breath.
He was alive.
He better fucking be.
Blowing out a breath, I pulled my hand back as I crossed my legs under me and pretty much wilted over.
I was alive, and he was alive, and those were both good things, I tried to reason.
But that was about as far as the “good things” here went, and I damn well knew it.
Maybe my head was still throbbing and every survival instinct in my body was going off, but I wasn’t too out of it to not have a good idea of the situation we were in.
A fucked one, that was what.
Totally and completely fucked.
My throat suddenly squeezed in on itself, and when I tried to suck in a breath, my lungs decided otherwise. Tears filled my eyes, and everything went blurry. Panic didn’t just rise in my chest, it tried to eat the whole damn thing in one bite.
I tried to suck in another breath through my nose, and that didn’t work out either.
There was only one thing my body wanted to do, and it didn’t include calming breaths. “Oh no, no—”
“Stop that.”
I shut my mouth at the same time my eyes moved to the man who had rolled onto his back at some point over the last few seconds.
“Get yourself together,” he rumbled in that rich, low voice, stretching his arms out across the floor, giving me a view of the cuff on his wrist too.
That grumpy face stared over at me, annoyed, impassive, and dirt-smudged.
But not actually seeming at all pissed off that we were in a fucking room in God knew where after pretty much getting ambushed.
I wanted to cry.
“Do not get… hysterical. I’m not… in the mood,” The Defender grumbled.
I blinked.
He wasn’t in the mood?
Him?
I took my time pressing my lips together, thinking, then asked so, so slowly, so quietly, “Are you shitting me right now?”
He yawned.
Yawned!
“I thought they hurt you!” I hissed, sounding 1000 percent panicked. Because I was. I was scared on top of this. I was so, so scared.
“They used… beanbag rounds,” he explained like he was telling me about the weather. Like we were on the couch at my trailer and not… not here. Having this conversation about being hit by beanbag rounds.