Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
He should’ve just nodded and let it go, but nothing was simple with this woman who was like a dream become flesh and blood. “I feel no remorse, Lei.” It was a compulsion, to show her all of himself and see if she ran. Far better to do it now, when she was nearly a mirage, a dream he could one day forget, than to wait until she’d become part of the fabric of his very being.
Though … he had the sense that it was already too late. It had been too late the day she’d walked out of the forest, the embodiment of a promise he’d never dared imagine for himself. “I think of my targets as vermin who need to be eliminated.”
Huge eyes looking at him with care, as if she was trying to see the truth or the lie in his words … but she still didn’t run. “Tell me,” she demanded with unexpected sternness. “Tell me of the last person you targeted and why.”
Squeezing his wrist even harder, Ivan gave another short nod. He’d started this and he’d finish it. “A Psy who used his money and influence to ‘clean’ the streets around his home. He hired a group of thugs to beat homeless people and addicts to death. His thugs then incinerated their bodies in a commercial furnace.”
Breath coming faster and a golden ring around her irises, Lei said, “How did you find out?”
“Because I speak to people most don’t.” He’d left the street behind a long time ago, had never thought to return, but it got into your bones, the street. So he’d decided to use his contacts for good—though some might not see it that way.
“Tell me about another target,” she said.
So he did. Three more times. At the end of which, tears were rolling down her cheeks, and she was shaking her head. “Ivan, no. I can’t argue with you that they were evil, that the world is a better place with them gone, but it hurts you to see yourself that way. As an assassin, a killer.”
Ivan shook his head. “It doesn’t hurt me. I don’t feel anything at all—it’s a job. I do it. Then it’s over.” He didn’t dare touch her, but he refused to break their locked gazes. “I need you to tell me if any of this is a deal breaker. I need to know now, before …” Before I give you more pieces of myself.
As if she’d heard the silent coda, she said, “It’s too late.” A whisper, her fingers rising to touch his cheek again. “You’re inside me already.” Her palm flattened on his cheek, her lips soft and parted. “It should feel too fast, but it doesn’t. It feels exactly as fast as it should be.”
“There’s more,” he continued, dogged in his determination to show her the darkest recesses of his soul. “I have a psychic ability that can enslave people. It lives inside a cage in my mind but should I let it out, it’ll ensnare other minds in its web and suck them dry.”
“Yet you don’t use it, do you? Because you believe in good and evil, and you choose to be good.”
“I’m not—”
“Stop trying to chase me away.” Words that were a breath, the warmth of her soaking into his skin and through to the chilled heart of his soul. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Ivan didn’t know about intimate physical contact, not from experience. But he’d seen others kiss. And now he understood why. He wanted to taste her breath, taste her lips, know her. So he bent his head toward her, waiting, watching to see if she’d pull back.
She didn’t.
She met him halfway.
Breath on breath, lips on lips, it was too much sensation to process, but he didn’t care. Staying motionless, he let her lead the kiss. He let her teach him. By the time he put his hand on her—curving it around the side of her rib cage—his heart rate was erratic, his vision hazed.
Breathless, she pulled back, and her eyes, they weren’t in any way human. A pale kind of tawny with golden edges and a slightly elongated black pupil. Eyes full of a wild light. He could’ve run a quick PsyNet search, come up with a short list of animals who bore such eyes, but she was showing herself to him piece by piece, and now that he knew she wasn’t going to run, he could be patient, could wait until she was ready to reveal all of herself.
“That was …” She lifted trembling fingers to her lips. “I never saw you coming, Ivan.”
He went to lean in, take another kiss, but she shifted position without warning, busying herself putting away the picnic. A flush rode her cheekbones, a jitteriness to her every action.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked, not sure how things had gone awry.