Total pages in book: 218
Estimated words: 209489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1047(@200wpm)___ 838(@250wpm)___ 698(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 209489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1047(@200wpm)___ 838(@250wpm)___ 698(@300wpm)
I was rambling. I was fucking rambling, but I couldn’t stop. It was a curse; it always had been. There was a reason I didn’t initiate talking to strangers. I had no self-control.
I had a big mouth.
Once you got me going, it was almost impossible to stop me. Everything just started coming out. What I’d watched on TV, what I liked eating for dinner, how bad the flies were. And then under pressure? I was scared and fascinated, and my body didn’t know how to handle either. It wasn’t just my brain in shock; it was every part of me.
The Defender—The fucking Defender—stared at me with glowing purple eyes, and I was pretty sure they were watering from pain. His chest rose and fell in small gasps that were terrifying. Those eyes moved to a spot just behind my head, locked there for a moment, before they fluttered closed. His mouth moved, but nothing came out.
Was he dying?
I choked. “Please tell me what to do,” I begged, desperate.
“No hospitals,” the being gritted out. Bright white teeth flashed in a bared expression that wasn’t a smile, making me gulp. “My… back…,” he confirmed in a hiss I barely heard, the muscles at his cheeks flexing on and off as he let out a rattling, weak exhale. “Weak….” His throat bobbed roughly.
I stopped breathing.
Pale lavender lids framed with pure black eyelashes fluttered over those unreal eyes as another savage groan ripped its way up his throat.
“You need help. The hospital, something, someone,” I whispered, scared. He couldn’t be dying. He couldn’t. He was invincible, wasn’t he? What in the hell could hurt him this badly?
His head barely moved, but I took it to be him shaking it, telling me no. Then he confirmed it. “No. Tell… no one.”
He wanted to stay here? In… in secret?
I already knew this was a shitty idea, and part of me knew damn well I was going to regret it, but….
So much of my life had been determined by the choices of others. Literally, almost every aspect of it had. All I had to do was look around to see the signs of it.
But I had made my own decision a long time ago. It was a small one, but it was mine. It lived in the back of my head every day with every beat of my heart and most of the thoughts in my brain. I knew exactly who I wanted to be. Who I should be, even if it battled against every paranoid, protective instinct that had been built up in my body over the years.
This man wasn’t just a man. He had helped millions. He was an icon. A hero. What kind of person would I be if I didn’t help him?
I knew that kind of person, and I fucking refused to be it.
The Defender didn’t want help, didn’t want a hospital, didn’t want… anything, it seemed, other than secrecy. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know how this had happened or what danger we might possibly be in.
It couldn’t matter. I’d worry about it later.
If there was a later.
Because I couldn’t tell him no. I couldn’t have left him out there. Not even for my grandma.
Even though he couldn’t see me, I nodded at the man who had been made into little action figures that graced countless little people’s bedrooms. The man who had inspired characters in television shows and movie after movie. A champion of the earth, he’d been called.
There was a giant statue of him in São Paulo in gratitude for his help after a massive earthquake.
And the same son of a bitch was in a wheelchair in my kitchen, injured and asking me for help.
“I’ll help you,” I promised him. Promised myself. “Tell me what to do. What do you need?”
A shake rattled through his body, his fingers twitched, and he whispered, “Time… food….”
“That’s it?” No unicorn tears or some healing herb that could only be found on a remote island in the Pacific?
He grunted, and I wanted to cry. I had to strain to hear him grit out, “Don’t… betray me.”
Like I hadn’t just dislocated my arms and given myself a bulging disc pushing him into my house while trying to help him.
This weird, weird feeling suddenly filled my stomach, but it was totally different from the one earlier. It wasn’t dread…
But it made me really, really wary. “I won’t. I promise.”
The Defender slightly opened those glowing eyes and stared at me through the crack of them for a moment, and I was pretty sure I felt hot all of a sudden. The Centurion could shoot lasers from his eyes, but I’d never heard of The Defender being able to. Could he?
But before I could wonder over it any longer, his lids lowered again and he was out.
His head dropped back against the pillow as another shake rattled through that athletic frame.