Total pages in book: 158
Estimated words: 144908 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 725(@200wpm)___ 580(@250wpm)___ 483(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144908 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 725(@200wpm)___ 580(@250wpm)___ 483(@300wpm)
Savage wrapped his arms around her from behind and bit down on her shoulder, making her yelp in the middle of her laughter.
“Blythe, show me one of these ‘thirst traps,’ ” Czar demanded.
“Blythe’s in trouble now,” Anya, Reaper’s woman, whispered to Seychelle.
Blythe nonchalantly handed Czar her cell phone. Czar glared at the screen. “You watch this shit when I’m not around?”
“Honey, I have to keep up with the latest trends on the internet. We have children.” She looked wide-eyed and innocent.
Again, everyone erupted into laughter. Ambrie couldn’t help looking at Master. He wasn’t laughing huge the way some of the others were, but he was watching her and smiling. She knew he was enjoying himself because she was.
“Let’s do this,” Master said. “I’m still on my honeymoon.”
“And after you get the song recorded, we have to get it in Jackson’s truck,” Mechanic said. “That has to be done tonight. They’ll have his truck painted by tomorrow.”
“How will it work?” Adam asked.
“It isn’t going to go through his radio, so he can’t just turn it on or off. When he hits different speeds going through town, say, around five miles an hour, it will start playing and get louder as he picks up speed. So if he’s going ten miles an hour it will get louder. At fifteen miles an hour it will start to get softer and at twenty shut off. If he’s idling, once he starts it, it will continue to play. So at a stop sign, it will just keep looping, playing for everyone outside his vehicle to hear,” Transporter explained.
“He’ll never find it,” Mechanic said with complete confidence. “He’ll look in all the wrong places.”
“How in the world can you put it in his truck to play like that and not go through his radio?” Rashad asked.
Mechanic and Transporter exchanged a small grin. “We have our ways. He’ll have to come asking for help.”
“He might come to lock you all up,” Blythe warned. “But I get to help sing the chorus.”
TWELVE
Master stood to make his way up to the small stage again, where the instruments were. Ambrielle rose as well, her hand tucked in the back of his jacket the way she seemed to like to do whenever she walked behind him. He paused and turned to her, wrapping his arm around her and bringing his head close to hers.
The tingle of unease that had been with him had grown. He felt eyes on them, knew others watched them. Her friends. His. He didn’t look to Czar, the one man he’d depended on his entire life. Ambrie was his to care for, and the realization that she was in trouble may have come slow and with a sinking heart, but he got it. For as long as he had her, he would do his best for her.
He kept what he had to say between the two of them, sheltering her from the others with his much larger body. His Torpedo Ink brothers had his back, keeping the conversations and the laughter going to add to the noise, so no one could hear what he had to say to his woman.
“Now might be a good time to have a talk with your friend, Amanda. Let her know she’s off the hook and you two are good. She’s miserable and hurting, and there’s no need for that.”
Ambrielle peeked under his arm at her friend but made no move to let go of him. “She would have let them kill you, Master. She was trading your life for Adam’s.” There was a note of venom creeping into her voice.
He caught her chin, forcing her head up so her blue-violet gaze had to meet his. The pad of his thumb slid across her lips. “I lived for years down in that basement, Ambrie. Everything down there was blood and death. It was all compromise. We had a code we tried to live by, but we couldn’t save everyone, and we knew it.”
“I don’t understand what that has to do with Amanda.”
“Torpedo Ink was born down there. We became woven together tight through blood and the sacrifices we made for one another. The terrible choices we had to make, often daily. Princess, we had to make those decisions; we used our bodies, our souls, giving up everything to keep each other alive. Did we sometimes know by doing that, others died? Yes. Absolutely. Did that suck? Did we feel guilt? Yes. But it came down to survival.”
Her eyes moved over his face, not comprehending. Not putting it together. He couldn’t help but brush his lips over hers. He had thought he was incapable of feeling for anyone anymore. This little firecracker had turned him inside out without even trying. She was slicing his soul into tiny pieces when he hadn’t known it was intact. It would be one of those slow deaths, bleeding from the inside, where no one ever saw the leak until it was too late. He’d take it—for her.