Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 134057 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 670(@200wpm)___ 536(@250wpm)___ 447(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 134057 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 670(@200wpm)___ 536(@250wpm)___ 447(@300wpm)
Jagger cut him off with a bullet to the skull.
It was impulsive. He should’ve waited for more info. Hansen would ride him for that. But his fury, his fucking pain got the better of him. And that thirst, that need for the kill could no longer be held down. In the midst of that, he’d fucked up.
Bad.
Because the man in front of him didn’t fall to the ground. He fell on top of the woman who’d been standing directly behind him. Who had been staring at Jagger like she’d seen a ghost.
And a glimpse at those almost amber eyes told him she had.
Him.
Caroline
It didn’t happen fast.
When people experienced trauma, and they said ‘it happened so fast I can barely remember,’ they’re usually lying through their teeth. Mostly to themselves. Because if you convince yourself that all those horrible things happened too fast to see, they’d be too hard to remember. You could pretend that they didn’t sear into your bones, becoming mangled scar tissue.
I didn’t pretend.
So it didn’t happen fast.
Not the second I entered the alley and watched a man in a Sons of Templar cut haul a bleeding and bound man to his feet and shoot him in the face.
I didn’t know if the man was too focused on the killing to see me until he pulled the trigger or if the shadows afforded me enough concealment that it wasn’t until the corpse he created literally knocked me off my feet that I became impossible to ignore.
But I knew he recognized me. After I recognized him. Because I recognized him immediately. Even before I saw him. Even with my rational mind telling me that the owner of the voice that brought me to the alley couldn’t be him. That dead men didn’t talk.
It turned out they did.
And they killed too.
Without hesitation.
I saw that in his eyes when time slowed down. Time may stop for no one, but it slowed sufficiently for death.
And he was death. This man with cold, striking eyes. Chiseled jaw. A jagged and ugly scar marring a classically handsome face. The face of a boy I used to know.
A boy I used to love.
The boy I buried fourteen years ago.
Though that wasn’t even true, we’d buried an empty coffin then and I’d just thought that his real grave was unmarked, covered over by countless other skeletons, flesh decomposed until his bones were nothing but dust.
I’d thought about it a lot over the years, taunted myself with the details, searched for him in every rotting dead body I encountered over my career. I’d known I wouldn’t find him in the place he died, wouldn’t see him in the face of a decomposing corpse, but never did I expect to find him in a dirty alley wearing a different face and a Sons of Templar cut.
Bile filled my mouth as the body thudded into me with the power of a bullet ripping through its skull.
Funny, how I thought of this person as an it, less than a second after the bullet left the gun. There was most likely still brainwave activity, but I was already dehumanizing him in my mind. Because that was the only way to survive seeing death on a regular basis. This wasn’t someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s father. No, this was an ‘it’ with gray matter instead of brains.
Gray matter that hit my face, along with a warm splatter of blood.
I was knocked down more out of shock than anything else.
Not shock at the gunshot, nor the mere proximity of death.
I was used to that.
But it was the proximity of life.
The ground came hard and fast, without sympathy for my plight. My teeth cracked together as my head thwacked against the concrete.
The pain was intense, or at least it should have been.
It was exactly three seconds before the body was hauled from me and strong hands settled on my skin.
I was no longer numb.
“Peaches?”
The voice was rough, gravelly, deeper, more tortured than I remembered.
The voice, the single word hit me likely with the same impact of the bullet that had ended a man’s life. It didn’t open my skull so gray matter spilled out, though. It opened the heart I’d patched up and protected with other people’s suffering. It tore that open and my soul poured out, mixing with the blood and brains at his feet.
I was in his arms and up before I thought more on it, before I could respond, but not before I cataloged every inch of this man’s face.
Liam’s face.
Though there was barely anything of Liam left there. Not just because of the scar that cut through his features, marring his mouth into what looked like a permanent grimace. That was the least of it. It wasn’t the lines at the edges of his eyes, the sharpening of his features or bulky muscles, the beard that the terrible scar cut through. Not even the tattoos that covered every inch of skin visible from the neck down.