Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Twelve
Knox
Ihadn’t been shot before. Because I was good at my job. Any scars I had on my body, I’d put there myself.
I’d vowed I’d die that way. Without the marks of anyone else on my skin. Not when I had gnarled and knotted scars on my inside from someone I wish I could’ve killed ten times over.
Yet some fucking ballerina had managed to not only sneak up on me but made me bleed. Shot me.
Not because of any kind of skill on her part, but because of how completely Piper consumed me. I was sucked into her world, her orbit, so that no outside forces penetrated.
Lucky had never been a word I used to describe myself, but there wasn’t anything else to explain how the bullet hadn’t penetrated my heart, or worse, gone through my flesh and into Piper’s.
I thought of her skin being punctured, marred, and my fists coiled.
Daisy was sitting across from me as Piper dug into my flesh for the foreign object, eating food I’d prepared for Piper, glaring daggers at me.
Though I didn’t revel in hurting women, innocent women—including women who looked to be as breakable as porcelain dolls and half my size—an ugly, evil part of me ached to hurt her for putting Piper in danger. Even if she had been attempting to save her.
She could’ve killed Piper. My vision tinged red at the thought.
The pain helped. It was the only thing keeping me lucid. That and Piper’s hands on my skin, her tunneling into my body, her being the source of that pain.
Depraved fuck I was, it was turning me on. I was desperate to throw Piper down on the table and fuck her until I felt like I was glued to her fucking insides.
I had been about to do just that before her sister burst in to save the day. An apt interruption as that was a terrible idea.
Still, the roaring, famished beast inside of me, usually sated by blood, longed for her. And only her.
She bit her lip as she dug deeper. She was nervous. But determined. She had toyed with the idea of leaving me to possibly bleed out and make her escape. I’d seen a shadow fall over her eyes as she considered it. That moment of indecision made me so fucking proud of her. For feeding that dark part of herself that she’d starved for years.
I knew it existed because if it didn’t, she’d hate me for the evil man I was, feel no longing for me. No compassion.
Her tongue poked out to caress her lips as she further concentrated. Pain speared through me, and pleasure mixed in. I wanted her to dig deeper. Fuck, I wanted her to wrap her palm around my heart, fingernails piercing as she squeezed with all of her might. I didn’t care if it killed me if the last beat of that ruined organ would be in her hands.
A worthy death.
“Got it!” she declared, a girlish grin lighting up her face as she pried the bullet from my flesh. Luckily it was still whole, no small shards that would be impossible for her to tweeze out and might’ve eventually killed me.
I winced, not at the sting but at the loss of her touch. She held the small metal object between her fingers, holding it up to the light, inspecting it.
“Such a small thing to have the power to create so much damage,” she mused.
I stared right at her. “I was thinking the same thing.”
Her body jerked when her eyes met mine, catching the meaning of the words I shouldn’t have even uttered in the first place. Most especially not with her sister within earshot.
Dangerous. I was walking a dangerous fucking line. Toying with a kind of disaster even I knew I couldn’t weather.
Piper’s gaze traveled to my shoulder.
“I need to stitch that,” she whispered, nodding to the wound.
I nodded back.
If only it were possible to stitch the ugly wound she’d torn inside of me.
Piper
“This is really good. Did you make it?” Daisy asked, gesturing to the couscous with her fork.
“Knox made it,” I told her before returning my attention to the needle I was threading. Not before I saw the disbelieving raise of her eyebrows.
“They teach Moroccan cuisine at psychopath school?” she asked him sweetly.
He didn’t answer her, but he did give her one of his patented chilling looks.
She didn’t so much as flinch, which both surprised and worried me. For all of her dramatics, Daisy was a delicate person, easily hurt. Yet the look from one of the most dangerous men in the world didn’t even scare her. What had she gone through since I’d been taken that gave her that shield?
“How did you even find me?” I demanded, keeping my eyes focused on the bloody hole in Knox’s shoulder. My hands were steady, even though I was absolutely freaking out inside. This was a gunshot wound. I had experience with knee scrapes and ‘boo boos’. But the first aid training I was required to keep up with didn’t go so far as to cover how to treat a gunshot wound.