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)
Kane had a family there, friends. Good ones. I’d done the background checks on them myself to ensure they weren’t threats.
Rowan Derrick and Kip Godman were threats if they chose to be. Former SEAs. They were honorably discharged, despite some of the Black Ops shit they’d been a part of. They weren’t squeaky-clean heroes by any means, which was why I liked them. Because anyone who looked squeaky-clean, like a hero, was likely the worst villain underneath it all.
I shouldn’t have even been there, on that beach, watching my brother kiss his wife as she cooked dinner, holding their daughter. Shouldn’t have been intruding on the life he deserved, polluting it with my toxic presence, poisonous problems. It had been my job since before I could remember to protect him from everything, including myself. I’d never resented it, not once.
It seemed like he might not have needed me to protect him any longer, and the loss of that role felt unsettling, even if it was a good thing.
Though it wasn’t actually the loss of that role that unsettled me. It was the fact that I had come to him for help. Fuck, did I hate myself for it. I’d spent the entire evening on the beach for a reason, full of shame, unable to move toward the house. But I couldn’t leave either, not without some sort of guide for how to survive this.
How anyone survived this.
I couldn’t believe that people who declared themselves ‘in love’ felt the way I was feeling. How they said things like that then went about their lives as normal, as if they weren’t crippled by the sheer weight of the emotion inside them. As if they weren’t half mad with their need for her and the need to have eyes on her, hands on her at all times to ensure nothing happened to her.
What I was doing went against every single cell in my body. To be so far from her. Leaving her so vulnerable. But surely, there was no way walking around like I was could’ve been sustainable.
The reason I came there—beyond the fact that I had no one else to go to—was I’d seen it in my brother’s eyes when I’d delivered Brax to him—the fuck who had almost destroyed them, almost robbed him of his pregnant woman and then tried to kidnap his daughter.
But on that day, I’d seen it in my brother’s eyes. A darkness that hadn’t been there before. A resolution that he’d slay any and all dragons for Avery. I saw the way he looked at her, even before their daughter was born. It was a look that said his heart beat for her. His previously aimless, wild existence had become nothing to him. There was something so fierce in my brother’s eyes, I couldn’t look at them. Something that stretched the chasm between us even further. He presented to me what I’d never be capable of, and I was glad for it because there was nothing in the dedication in my brother’s eyes that was appealing to me.
To be so chained by a feeling, by another person, breakable and mortal and temporary, was beyond comprehension to me.
Until Piper.
And there I was, sitting in the sand, unravelling as nighttime cloaked the world.
There was no way I could talk to Kane at that point. That would require waiting until the sun rose. More time away from Piper. I was already at my limit, my skin prickling with unease caused by the distance between us.
Luck, for once, was on my side as I watched the door to the house open and my brother walked through it, coming to sit on the back porch.
It took a second for me to work up the nerve to make my presence known. This would forever change the dynamic between us. I’d kept as far away from Kane as I could throughout my life. So I didn’t tarnish him with my presence. Didn’t let him into my world. Nothing existed there but death.
But now there was life.
Now there was Piper, bursting from the seams, driving me fucking crazy.
Making me paint.
The thing I’d done early on, after my first kill, thinking I was done killing once my abuser was worm food. Thinking I could be done. Thinking I could do something more than kill. Be more than a killer.
And it had been proven quickly that I couldn’t. That I wasn’t normal. I was wrong. Killing was my only option.
I’d pushed away any worldly needs or wants and focused on nothing more than that.
There was no way back to my old life, only forward, so I pushed my way through the sand, up to where my brother sat.
The evidence that the demons of his past hadn’t left him showed as he heard my approach. The previously content, relaxed look on his face disappeared, replaced by a cold fury, a readiness to defend and kill that was stony and unfamiliar on my brother’s face as he stood, squinting into the shadows that still cloaked me.