Total pages in book: 36
Estimated words: 33526 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 168(@200wpm)___ 134(@250wpm)___ 112(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 33526 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 168(@200wpm)___ 134(@250wpm)___ 112(@300wpm)
His back is to me as he faces Celeste. His voice is calm, but the tightness of his shoulders makes it apparent he’s having a Zen moment. “I’ll take care of it, Mother. You can leave us and carry on with anything of importance you need to preoccupy yourself with.”
Celeste’s eyes narrow as if she wants to talk back to Alaric. To stomp her feet and demand she get her way. She lifts her hand and pats his cheek, placating him with one condescending action.
Celeste peers around him and her eyes pierce mine, silently warning me that she pulls all the strings and will eventually get her way. “All right, dear.” Her gaze remains on me as she addresses Alaric. “I hope you have a better time with her ungrateful nature than I have. It seems Ella is in need of a rude awakening. She needs to learn what it requires to be a member of this family.”
Celeste walks around Alaric, giving me a final scathing look before she exits the room.
Alaric doesn’t say a word, marching to the door and locking it before turning to rest his back on the wood. “Fucking told you to stay away, Ella. I didn’t want you involved in any of this.” His hands fly to his head, and he pulls at the slicked-back strands of his hair with a groan. “Why the fuck can’t you do what you’re told?”
I nervously put one foot in front of the other as I approach him. Most people would be frightened of Alaric—a tall, brooding man who demands obedience from those around him with every fiber of his being. That and his disturbing and nonsensical Norman Bates relationship with his mother.
Our bodies line up closely, yet I sense an ocean between us. I don’t understand his anger or why he says I need to stay away when he keeps trying to get closer. Persuading me. He was the first person to drag me into this world and make me care about him, Asher, and River when I had no desire to do so.
I tilt my chin. “It looks like I’m crap at listening to you, so I think it’s time you told me what’s going on.”
Chapter Six
Alaric
Fuck. She’s so damn beautiful. It’s not just an external beauty; it’s what’s in her heart. Ella sees past the bullshit exteriors people use to cloak themselves from the world. She’s aware of what exists deep down. She has the tenacity to look past the outer layer, peeling it back until the center is revealed. A virtue both noble and inspiring but also her Achilles heel, allowing others the power to fucking ruin her.
The heat of her body close to mine undoes me in ways I never believed possible. What I feel for her consumes every part of me. I think about this woman more than I have any right to. As much as I wish our circumstances were different, they’re not. I want to drive off into the sunset and have the four of us live a life we deserve, away from all the bullshit we’ve put up with for years. But fairytales are only found in storybooks. This is real life.
That night doesn’t feel like a mistake. It opened something buried deep within all of us, and now there seems to be no way to shut those emotions away.
I loved hide and seek when I was a kid. My dad had played with me for hours. I’d hidden, and he’d pretended he couldn’t find me while I’d giggled like a maniac. My dad had been a good man, an honest man. He’d worked sixteen-hour days but still found energy within his broken and bruised body to play with his son. Mother had never done that. She’d thrown me in front of the television while she had her gentleman friend over. I could never go into the room when she had company. She hadn’t even the decency to spring for a soundproof headset to hide the slam of the headboard against the wall or the slaps of a hand on flesh.
I’d never dared say a word about it to my father. I’d wanted to, but Celeste had told me that if he knew, he’d leave me, and I’d never see him again. But it didn’t matter because he'd fallen to his knees, gripping his chest while searching for me during our favorite game.
The mind was a fascinating and complicated organ. I was the perfect example of how the brain became jumbled in chaotic and disastrous ways. Brain damage caused by an overload of emotion and trauma. A fond childhood memory was twisted into the single most impressionable moment of my young life and was now a twisted kink that fueled me like nothing else.
That’s why now, as River and Asher caught Ella as she jumped from the tree, disappointment rushed through me like an uncontrollable wave from a ferocious ocean.