Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 101988 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 510(@200wpm)___ 408(@250wpm)___ 340(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 101988 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 510(@200wpm)___ 408(@250wpm)___ 340(@300wpm)
I’m the watcher within it.
My bones started to rattle with terror.
Don’t watch…
I flinched as Daxton put his hand on my shoulder and pushed.
He kept pushing until my knees gave out, and I crashed to the grass.
Don’t watch.
Shucking off his black trousers, he tossed them into the rain. His erection stabbed white and long in the night.
Don’t watch.
Placing his bare, dirty foot right between my breasts, he kicked me hard enough to scoot me off my knees and onto my back.
I landed with a wince and swallowed a scream as he grabbed my ankles and spread my legs.
I stared at the sky.
At the curtain of twinkling, twirling droplets falling straight from heaven.
Each one was a perfect universe.
Each one full of life to nurture the soil, the earth, the planet.
My heart hurled itself against my ribs as Daxton lowered himself onto me.
Don’t watch.
As my body was grabbed by bruising fingers and his weight crushed me into mud, the rain seemed to slow. Prismatic droplets hovered, shooting silver with lightning, then exploding into crystal snowflakes with thunder.
My eyes closed, eyelids pummelled by rain and anchored by lashes weighing as much as the world.
A sweeping, comforting undertow dragged me down and down and down.
I disconnected with my body.
I went empty.
I followed that grounding cord of light as it ushered me away to safety.
I let go.
I fell.
I didn’t watch…
Chapter Fourteen
………………………….
Henri
VISION WAS A FUNNY THING.
I’d once read—on a marathon binge about the make-up of the world and why we fucking existed—that the world was holographic. I read that within every raindrop, blooddrop, breath, and cell, we carried the entire code of the cosmos.
I hadn’t understood what the author had been jabbering on about. How the quantum realm was just energy waves until we actually looked and then it became whatever we decided it should be.
But…as I ran through rain and lightning, I began to understand.
The storm fragmented reality—twisting normal things and making them otherworldly.
The thunder rearranged the frequency of the very ground I ran over, making the earth fizzle and fry beneath my feet. The dense liquid in the air saturated my lungs with newness and power, making it hard to breathe.
All of that tried to distract me.
But something drove me.
A gnawing in my chest.
A jagged kind of needling.
Urgency I’d never felt before hurtled me through the rain in search of something…someone…her.
The girl who’d run.
The girl who’d awoken me.
The girl I had to find.
The undone weight between my legs kept me far too ferocious. The memory of her using me to chase her pleasure only ensured I chased her to relieve mine.
She owed me.
I wanted her to put me out of my misery.
To accept her place.
To respect me instead of ridicule me.
I needed her.
I needed her to need me.
I need…more.
I ran harder.
Searching.
Needing.
A plastic gemstone glittered at the base of a goddess statue, her marble hair cascading to the ground and her arms wrapped around a bowl of forbidden fruit.
I didn’t care what was inside.
The only treasure I wanted was Ily.
But I snatched it up anyway and kept running.
Where are you, little nightmare?
Hunting her was not good for my sanity.
With every step, I reverted deeper and deeper into a prehistoric animal.
I couldn’t stop images of what I’d do when I found her.
How I’d fall on her, fill her, bite her—
Christ.
“Ily!” I charged through bleeding water and flinched beneath the might of nature. “Where the fuck are you?”
I wasn’t the only animal out here.
There were others.
Too many others.
She’s not safe.
Up ahead, my eyes locked onto a scene.
A scene I couldn’t make sense of.
A crowd of blackness.
Two creatures of darkness.
And there, on the grass, a third fell onto whatever prey it’d caught.
A part of me cringed in sympathy.
Whoever had been caught would suffer.
But…I had no time.
No morals to stop them.
I have to find her.
I went to veer to my left.
To leave the predators to their kill.
But…
Something.
Unexplainable wisdom.
The harshest throttle of knowing.
My hand clutched the stupid gem, and my legs slowed.
A man’s shout rippled through the watery night.
A man high on lust.
A Master getting off on doing unspeakable things.
I waited for an answering scream.
The tears of his prey.
Only silence.
A heavy, oppressive silence that felt…different.
Silence that wasn’t just silence.
Silence that tugged me, taunted me, and cloaked me with far more energy than it should.
Energy that seemed…familiar.
My heart wrenched.
My feet stopped.
Breathing hard, I glowered at the satanic ceremony up ahead. Curtains of rain blurred the world, flicking it between reality and dreams.
That sensation of elseness.
That awareness of someone.
I’d felt that pull once before.
I’d sensed Ily’s eyes on me before I’d ever spotted her in the club.
Her energy was a tangible thing, threading with mine, binding me to her even as I fought so fucking hard to bind her to me.
You’re making it up.
You’re drunk on the hunt and—
I shivered as another buffet of sentience quaked through me.
I swiped at my eyes, trying to see, but…I knew.