Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 142783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142783 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 714(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
I was a fool for feeling so content.
Thirty days.
Thirty days.
I hated my life was a trap.
He shifted so he could press his mouth to the crown of my head.
“I missed you.” He issued the words for the first time.
They flooded through my bloodstream like liquid.
Molten warmth.
Profound and sad and the bitter, ugly truth.
I curled in closer, and I whispered my lips across his ribs. “I missed you, too. So much.”
And after this, I was only going to miss him more.
His arm tightened farther, and he pulled me so close I was almost draped across his chest. I could see the torment carved in the lines of his face when I peeked that direction.
“Tell me what it’s been like.” His brow twisted when he asked it.
I winced. “You don’t want to go there.”
“Maybe that is exactly where we should go, Aster. Maybe it’s time.”
“And what if it hurts too much?”
What if it destroyed us? What if it sent Logan to a place he could never come back from?
He pulled my leg over his waist. Every muscle in his body twitched. Bristling with strength. Flexing with greed.
He reached out and threaded his fingers through my hair, and he tipped my chin back with his thumb. “And what if we can’t move on until we do?”
I hesitated for a moment, looking at this man who watched me as if it didn’t matter what’d happened.
A promise that he’d hold it.
The grief and the pain.
I thought maybe he was wondering if it were possible I could hold his, too.
“Do you want to know what it was like, Logan?”
It was torment.
It was sickness.
It was chains.
It was floating through a vast nothingness that had no end.
But I could boil it down to one thing.
“It was lonely. It was living through an emptiness so deep and dark. A hollow vacancy that went on forever.”
A sound of commiseration puffed from his nose as he held the side of my face. “Meaningless.”
I dipped my head in a slight nod.
Malachite eyes roamed my face, though in the darkness, they’d come alive, the gold incandescent.
“What was it like for you?” I was scared to ask it. The times I’d wondered where he’d gone and what he’d done. If he’d ever looked back. If it was worth it.
“The same but different. Focused on what didn’t matter. The money. The gambling.” He hesitated for a beat before he grated, “I fucked about anything that walked…”
I cringed with his forwardness, but he was right, I needed this, too.
His honesty when we’d had none of it.
His thumb brushed back and forth beneath my chin. “I was looking for a feeling, Aster. For one person who could spark that feeling inside me…even if it were only a mere fraction of what I’d felt with you.” He wavered, his thick throat bobbing when he swallowed. His fingers sank deeper into my hair. “And it’s not like there was anything wrong with any of them, nothing except none of them were you.”
My heart squeezed in pain, the words shards when I pressed them from my lips, “While I lay beneath Jarek numb, wishing I could just disappear.”
“I hate him.” Rage howled through his body. Barely contained.
“So do I.”
Logan ran his fingers from my shoulder and down my arm. Chills lifted, sweet, sweet dread. His hurt so thick. His voice was gravel when he spoke. “I can’t believe you don’t have his children.”
Tears sprang in my eyes, and my throat tingled with the emotion that wanted to flood out. I fought to suppress it, to hold it in, giving him at least a piece of our truth. “Our housekeeper…she has a daughter who is a nurse practitioner. I meet her in a parking lot every three months, and she gives me a shot.”
“Jarek doesn’t know.” It wasn’t phrased as a question, but there were a million of them in his eyes.
Still, I choked over the idea. “No, Logan. He would…”
I trailed off, unable to express it.
Agony screamed through my body. Fists, boots, the grip of a gun.
Each blow came harder than the last, powerful enough to shatter bone, to shatter courage, to shatter sanity.
A cry tore free, torment and pain, torment and pain. I rocked, tried to hold myself, to protect.
The vile voice whispered like it could be a balm in my ear. “Don’t cry, Aster. This is what was meant to be. You’ll see. You’ll see.”
“I will never allow it, Logan. I will never put a child in the same position my father put me and my sister in. I will die first.”
Shifting, Logan rolled us until I was on my back, and he was hovering over me. He planted his elbows on either side of my head to prop himself up, his wide chest shuddering.
Anguish.
Affliction.
Grief.
It was so heavy.
So absolute.
A chasm that was broken between us, where our hopes had fallen through and were smashed at the bottom.