Total pages in book: 192
Estimated words: 182641 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 913(@200wpm)___ 731(@250wpm)___ 609(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 182641 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 913(@200wpm)___ 731(@250wpm)___ 609(@300wpm)
“Bastian the badass,” she teases. “My badass.” She glances up, but only for a second before going back to following the path her fingers trace over the tattoo on my side, her thumb gliding over the eye of the monster down to its mouth. “There’s a scar here.”
“Scars all over if you look close.”
“I felt them,” she whispers, quietly wondering. “From the devil?”
That’s right, I tossed that one out there, didn’t I?
Swiping my thumb beneath her eyes to clean off the streaks of black makeup there, I find myself nodding. “My old man. He was a real piece of shit.”
Frowning, I bring my gaze to hers. I don’t talk about this shit. Not because I have issues or try to bury my past, but because no one wants to hear my shit. Why would they?
It ain’t pretty, and most have their own problems to worry about. They don’t need mine.
I expect her to look at me with prying eyes, searching for a way to fix the broken boy, but I’m not broken and there is no fixing to be done. I am who I am. Period.
So she shocks me when I get none of that, and the girl smiles up at me instead. “But did he kill people so he could take over the world?”
Chuckling, I lift her by her ribs, and she twists, wrapping her legs behind as I lower her into my lap. “Nah …” I think better of it, and I can’t help the smirk that follows. “Tried to, but nah.”
She eyes me, her gaze slicing to the perfect circle, the bullet wound on my shoulder, to the zigzagging slashes beneath the ink on my chest. She touches the tattoos on my neck, the barbed wire made to look like it’s cutting deep, tearing at the worthless skin that means nothing. Mine’s marked up in the worst way, scarred and mangled from shitty at-home stitch jobs in places. I don’t give my marred body a single thought in the day. It means shit to me.
But the ink that covers it? It all means something.
Rocklin’s quiet, but creases have formed along her brows, so I draw her gaze to mine with a tip of her chin.
I wait, and it takes her a minute, but then she says, “When you said you had no parents, what did you mean exactly?”
“Ask me the real question.”
Her submissiveness was gone the minute we were done playing, so she goes full sass on me now. “Did you lie to me?”
My eyes narrow. “What if I did?”
“I don’t like liars.”
“You like me.” I rub my palms along her thigh. “And you’ve got no clue if I am one or not.”
“Do not fuck with me, Bastian.”
“Then tell me what you think you know.”
She concedes. “Your father is dead.”
“Uh-huh …”
“Your mother isn’t.”
I flip her so fast she yelps, and I’ve got her hands pinned above her head a second later. She thinks she’s fast, slick, and she is.
I’m faster. Better. “You went digging.”
“I had to.” She lifts her chin defiantly. “You snuck into a place no one has ever snuck into before, and that was before The Game Room. I let it slide, don’t ask me why—”
“Because you want me.”
“—but I couldn’t expect my girls to do the same. We’re a unit. Three against the world, that’s how it has to be.”
“Tell me what you know,” I repeat myself.
She clamps her mouth shut, and my palms start to sweat, wondering if, just maybe, she found what I couldn’t. If she knows something I don’t.
If my little rich girl has the answer I’ve been looking for, but as I stare into her big green eyes, I realize something.
While the gleam within them is hard, it’s not from anger. Or it is, but that little bit of rage isn’t for me. At least, not yet.
All she’s trying to do is see if she trusts a man she shouldn’t, someone she had no intentions of having any faith in, and maybe she shouldn’t. Only time will tell if that was a mistake she never meant to make. Regardless, she trusts me. She never would have dropped the veil for me tonight if she didn’t. But she did.
She let me in. Showed me who she wants to be when the world’s not looking, a secret insight to the socialite no one has ever earned the privilege of seeing.
She gave me something I had no idea I wanted.
Now, she’s looking for a little reassurance, wants me to add a bit of fuel to the little flame that’s sparked in her belly, the one with my name written in the vapors, damn close to the combustion zone, where I’d brand her from the inside out.
Branding her. Now that’s an idea …
Moving her legs, I wrap my arms around her once more and fall back, taking her with me.