Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75022 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 375(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75022 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 375(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
He’d fought hard.
But he never stood a chance.
It was a long-ass drive from Florida to California with an unwilling passenger stuck in the back. But thanks to shift-driving, we’d made pretty good time.
I’d debated this part for a long time.
Whether I should just take out Brent and tell Morgaine about it, or let her be around for it.
In the end, I’d decided to give her the choice.
Slash and I dragged Brent out into the mountains.
And I was going to show her the bastard, then let her decide if she needed to be around for the end or not.
“Crow,” she whispered, eyes huge as they moved from her childhood attacker back to me.
“He has it coming,” I said, shrugging.
“I… I don’t disagree,” she said, voice choked.
“You don’t have to be here. You don’t have to be a part of it, but I just wanted you to know he was done on this Earth. I also didn’t know if you might want to say something,” I said, not knowing her trauma personally, so I had no idea how she needed this to go.
“Can you take the tape off?” she asked, surprising me.
“Yeah,” I agreed, reaching for it. “You can scream if you want to, dickhead, but no one can hear you here,” I warned him before ripping it off.
He didn’t scream.
One look around the place let him know that I wasn’t lying. There was no one coming to save him. He might as well save his breath.
“Do you know who I am?” Morgaine asked, voice surprisingly strong even if I heard a slight tremor in it.
I could tell by the long pause coming from the fucker that he didn’t.
He wasn’t that old that he was getting forgetful.
And Morgaine had very distinctive features.
So the only conclusion I could come to was that he’d victimized so many women that he was struggling to place her.
“Let me refresh your memory. You were dating my mom when I was a teenager. Then you raped me in the kitchen of my own house,” she said, voice getting stronger, fiercer.
“No… no,” Brent said, shaking his head.
“Yes. Yes. And the thing was, I was really young back then. Really small. I didn’t know how to make you pay for what you did to me, what you took from me. But now? Now I do,” she said, taking several steps forward, reaching for something, and then handing it to me.
Her knife.
“No. No, you don’t have to do this!” Brent said, voice panicked. “I can pay you!”
To that, she snorted.
“Really? What was my innocence and mental health worth, Brent? A hundred-thousand? A million? There’s not enough money in the world to make up for it. And I know I’m not the only woman who deserves justice.”
She took several steps back then, looking at Brent as he cried and pleaded for a moment, letting him suffer, as he’d made her do years ago, and in all the moments since when a man made her flinch, made her wonder if it might happen to her again.
Then her gaze slid up to me, watching the demons dance around on my eyes, then giving me a nod, telling me to unleash them.
She stayed for a moment or two, watching me slice open the man who’d hurt her so much that she thought the whole world was an unsafe place.
Then she turned around and started to walk away to the sounds of Brent’s screams as I damn near flayed the motherfucker, letting my demons have free rein until I was bathed in the bastard’s blood, until his body gave up and his life drained from him.
Only then did I seem to come back to myself.
I didn’t bother to clean up the body.
The scavengers would have a good time picking him apart. Which was a fitting end to his sorry-ass life.
I tucked the knife in my pocket and followed the path Morgaine had walked in, not back to the house.
Because I found her instead at the foot of the creek where she used to gather water.
Standing there just inside the depths, naked, waiting for me.
Seeing me, a man soaked in the blood of her former attacker, her arms rose, silently calling me forward, into the water.
Where she washed the blood off of me, carefully rubbing at every inch.
“I love you, Crow,” she told me when she was done, giving me a soft smile as she looked up at me.
It was the first time she’d said it, even though she’d been showing signs of it to me for months already.
But it was a big deal for her to say it.
After all she’d been through.
After shutting herself away so she never connected with anyone.
To get to be the recipient of her love?
Fucking best feeling in the world.
“I love you too,” I said, reaching up to frame her face with my hand, then pressing my lips to hers.