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)
Those purple eyes glowed on and off instantly as he scowled. “You can only blame yourself for that shit.”
“That’s debatable,” I whispered.
He glared for a moment.
I glared back at him.
That sneaky corner of his mouth curved, and he held the bottle out.
I reached over and took it, taking a long drink of what tasted like… what was that? Raspberry? I passed it back over to him.
I was sharing a bottle of beer with The Defender. In his house. I was on his couch.
While my life was falling apart.
“You’re really going to sleep in here?” he asked as he took a sip.
I froze. “If it’s okay?” I debated whether or not to tell him the truth for a second but then remembered all the shit we’d been through. We were past that. Weren’t we? “I don’t really want to be alone, and that room is beautiful, but….”
He’d understand. I knew he would.
Or not.
There was another long moment of silence, and I wondered if I should have just sucked it up and gone somewhere else in this big-ass house. There was a living room downstairs. I could hang out on the steps outside.
“I can go somewhere else.”
I was the stranger here after all.
His silence had me sitting back up and grabbing the blanket, but a big hand landed on my shoulder and pushed me down toward the couch.
“Lie down,” he huffed. “You can be wherever you want.”
I rubbed at my throat and asked, dead serious, “Are there ghosts?”
The son of a bitch didn’t even blink. “Only Myrtle.”
I rose up on an elbow. “Seriously, is that a no, or do I need to make a salt circle around the bed?”
“What’s a salt circle supposed to do?”
“Repel ghosts, everyone knows that.” It was Selene who answered.
I looked at her and smiled. She looked at me and smiled right back. Right then and there, I decided I liked her. I got a good feeling about her.
“Everyone knows,” I agreed.
He just looked at me.
“Except you, I guess.” I couldn’t help it, I laughed. Selene did too. My throat hurt, but I couldn’t stop. Closing my eyes, I settled in, wanting to give them some space before they regretted letting me hang out with them.
But to my surprise, they didn’t wait for me to fall asleep before they started talking again.
It was Selene who spoke first. “Did you make a decision then?”
“No,” Alex replied, “especially not after this shit.”
“I can’t believe it, Lexi. You think Mom knows? Do you remember how pissed she was when she did it to Achilles? I thought there was going to be an earthquake that day.”
His huff wasn’t a normal one; it was an irritated one. “Who the fuck knows, Selene.”
Who was “she” and what had she done?
I tried to keep my eyelids loose so that it wasn’t totally obvious that I was forcing them closed.
“I bet she didn’t tell Grandpa.”
So they were related somehow. Was it just her grandpa? Did they share a grandpa?
Had she said “Mom” earlier?
“Doubt it. I’ve done everything else they’ve ever told me to do. She crossed the fucking line, and she knows it,” Alexander said in a voice so controlled I knew he was actually really pissed off. “What she did doesn’t make up for it.”
“I get it. You know I get it.”
I wished one of them would drop a clue or three.
“I haven’t talked to Mom yet, but I will. You might as well let her deal with it,” Selene kept going with a little cackle at the end. “I’m going to get my popcorn ready.”
Alex’s answering grunt was low, maybe irritated too, the sound of glass on glass clinking through the room.
“Speaking of…,” she whispered, “why did you wait so long to call?”
It sounded like the leather of the chair he was sitting in creaked. He didn’t say anything.
Did the son of a bitch know ASL?
Before I managed to open my eye to see if he was signing, Selene spoke up again. “She’s pretty, Lexi,” she said in soft French.
He made a low sound in his throat. “She laid down on top of me to protect me from the people who took her.”
I froze. My written and spoken French were atrocious, but I could understand a decent amount. Not that they knew that. Suckers.
“Why would she do that?” he asked, his tone tight.
“I don’t know. I would’ve let you get beat up,” she said seriously.
Alex huffed. “She’s not what I was expecting.” There was another pause and another clink of glass. “She didn’t complain once when we were going through the forest. Her teeth were chattering, I could hear her gagging, I felt her crying from how bad she felt, and she didn’t say anything.”
“Is that why you’re letting her stay here? We could have dropped her off at Mom’s or even Alana’s. You know they would keep her safe.”