Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 84194 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 421(@200wpm)___ 337(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84194 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 421(@200wpm)___ 337(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
I moaned as she pressed hard on my larynx. “How did you get him to be so unhinged, huh? What makes you so damn special?”
Calico shoved Neptune aside as she grabbed my cheeks with both her hands. Her dark eyes searched mine, rifling with pickaxes and machetes. It physically hurt having her stare at me, it hurt because I saw past her envy and witnessed the panic within her. The need to be acknowledged, to be known. She was just a plaything here, nothing to the man she’d stupidly fallen for.
I pitied her because I saw a lot of myself mirroring back, but despite our similarities, I would never go to the lengths she had. I would never hurt another just because they’d been chosen and not me.
I bared my teeth, biting at Neptune’s hand. She gasped, letting me go with a squeal.
Inhaling and doing my best not to hyperventilate, I snarled, “Let me go, Calico.”
She snickered. “I don’t think you’re in the position to give orders, do you?”
“And you’re not in your right mind if you think hurting me will make him want you.”
Her gaze turned sniper sharp. “He does want me. I know he does.” She glanced at her fellow conspirators. “He wants all of us. He needs to keep us, to love us. All we need to do is get rid of you so he remembers that.”
I turned cold. “Get rid of me?”
Jupiter’s fingers tightened on my wrists. “You didn’t think we could let you stay, did you? Not after you fucked him. You’ve had your turn. It’s ours now.”
Calico pressed her fingers into my cheeks until they turned hollow and dug painfully into my teeth. “How did it feel? To have him inside you?” Her question was borderline manic. A girl who’d been traded and used for almost four years. An addict force-fed elixir and lust. A woman broken by Sully’s so-promised paradise.
I allowed my fight and retaliation to bleed from my pores, to speak from the heart. Ripping my face from her painful grip, I murmured, “I’m sorry if I hurt you. I’m sorry that you’ve been trapped here and no longer remember the outside world. I’m sorry—”
Her strike shut me up.
Blood bloomed in my mouth from where she’d hit me. My temple pounded, and a headache brewed instantly.
“Don’t you dare feel sorry for me, bitch. Feel sorry for yourself because you might have been the first to have him, but you won’t be the last. Unlike you, you greedy slut, we’ll share. We’re sisters. We know what it’s like to be a family, and Sully is our family. You’re the outsider who doesn’t belong.”
I glanced up through a black-spotted haze just as Calico nodded at Jupiter behind me. My hands were released, my imprisonment replaced by something silky and strong slipping around my throat.
A sinister garrotte ready to strangle me like Sully had.
Only difference was, his strangulation had been potent with desire and orgasms. This was buried in decay and tombstones.
I choked as Neptune disappeared behind me, adding more weight to the scarf or sash around my neck.
My nails clawed at the entrapment, scratching my own skin in desperation for purchase. My nape dug into the tree, the beads of my spine crying out in agony. My hair clung to my sweaty shoulder blades as panic roared to life.
I kicked and wriggled. I squirmed and clawed, doing my best to get free.
I croaked a scream.
I cried hot horror.
And Calico watched it all. Her face smoothed out the more mine twisted with terror for air. She lost her mania, switching into a sympathetic witch. “It’s okay, Jinx. You’ll go to sleep soon, and you’ll be free of this place. We’re doing you a favour, don’t you see? You’ll be free while the rest of us will still be here, fucking men we don’t want, begging for sex we don’t need.” She had the audacity to lean in and kiss my cheek, her breath skating over my skin as my energy quickly depleted and my lips gasped for air. “We’ll take care of Sully, don’t worry.”
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe!
My knees buckled as my body boycotted the impossible, tasting death and howling for it to wait, to not take me, to choose a different victim.
But slowly, systematically, it slipped around me.
It muted the outside world.
Amplified by chugging, failing heartbeats.
Blindness feathered around my vision.
The last thing I saw was a falsehood granted by my dying subconscious.
A final farewell to a future I’d tried so hard to claim.
Sully stood in a gap of the jungle, two parrots winging crazily around his head.
Forearms bare, shoulders braced, legs spread in savagery.
And then, I saw no more.
Chapter Ten
SKITTLES ATTACKED ME ON Serigala because she believed I hurt Eleanor when we’d been so, so close to having sex. She did the same thing as I stood on my ledge, keeping myself in place with sheer willpower as the helicopter blades slowly gathered speed and yanked Roy Slater from my island.