Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 107652 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 538(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107652 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 538(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
He kicked me away from him, and I had just enough strength left to watch as he shot to his feet, clutched his heart with white-knuckled fingers, and twisted the black shirt as if he could tear the organ out of him.
“Mr. Ashfall?” An eager, stupidly brave woman raised her head. “If you’re unwell, I can—”
“Leave,” he snarled, panting hard as he twisted his shirt into a knot, pulling up the hem and revealing a flat, muscular stomach. His gasps were drenched in agony.
“But if you’re hurting, I—”
“LEAVE!” he roared. “All of you. SCRAM!”
The boom of his voice ricocheted off the high eaves and bounced off the mother-of-pearl walls. The pitter-patter of racing feminine feet told me more than my failing eyesight could that they’d obeyed.
And as the shadows finally came for me and as silence blanketed my stress, Lucien Ashfall looked down at me splayed on the floor.
His eyes narrowed as he studied me, then, with a sweep of his black coat, he left me dying all alone in his ballroom.
Chapter Nine
I MADE IT TO MY QUARTERS before the pain crippled me.
Her.
Why did she make the vitalsync core react?
Why did my heart spike, setting off the chain reaction that always happened if I couldn’t control my pulse?
My fingers clawed at the inserted device in my chest. Embedded in my skin, its cables wriggled through my body and were surgically attached to my heart, ensuring every secret I’d ever had, every misery, every hatred, every fucking heartbeat was captured and assessed by those holding my chains.
I staggered as whoever monitored my vitals pressed a button.
Ripping my shirt open, I snarled as the lights on the vitalsync core flashed from green to red.
I didn’t even have time to make it to the couch before the familiar haze flooded me, potent sedatives seeping directly into my bloodstream and stealing my consciousness—not because I’d been affected by a woman for the first time in my miserable life but because the pulse spike probably looked suspiciously like when I tried to kill myself.
Dropping to my knees, I clutched the silver circle stamped into my flesh, clawing at it as my lungs struggled for air and my thoughts bled away. My eyes drifted closed as the fog came for me—the sickening, syrupy smog full of demons and nightmares.
As my shoulder smacked against the ground and I slowly passed out, fragments of the day when they’d inserted this nasty device haunted me.
It’d been a few days after my ninth birthday.
A gift I definitely didn’t want.
The sharp sting of antiseptic, followed by the bitterness of anaesthesia.
They’d buckled me down even before the drugs kicked in. The man who I’d trusted stood over me with a kind, fatherly smile, his warm, firm hands on my shoulders.
They’d cut me open—
I’d come to after surgery, finding myself in this place.
A single nurse had been allowed to tend to my wound, and a technician monitored my newly installed vitalsync core—making sure it read all my bio-data correctly. Not one of them smiled at me, touched me, talked to me.
I was just a job.
And when I was healed enough, they left.
I’d been alone ever since.
Twenty long years, I’d endured unfathomable loneliness and near-constant agony.
If they weren’t harvesting my blood through the cuffs, they were administering poison directly into my heart.
I supposed it was my fault that they kept me living in total agony.
At the beginning of my incarceration, they’d left me to my own devices.
I’d grown stronger as I grew older and I learned my prison well enough to plot my escape. I came close a couple of times. I also almost died a few times.
But when I’d woken after scaling the wall for the fifth time and noticed my hands bandaged from shredding them on broken glass, a cloud of misery soaked into my heart and never left.
Every hour, the vitalsync core fed me another droplet of poison, scrambling my nervous system and adding fuel to my hate. A constant drip of agony that kept me weak and irritable, barely able to go for a walk without my heart pounding and head swimming.
They’d won.
And somehow, two decades had passed and I no longer knew what healthy felt like. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt strong and not burning alive with torment.
Until her.
Until the moment she’d touched me and something happened.
She’d interrupted whatever method they used to keep me subservient and miserable.
And maybe, just maybe, she could be the one I’d been waiting for...
Chapter Ten
I WOKE TO DARKNESS AS ABSOLUTE as the darkness of death.
Shivering so hard my teeth chattered, my soul slowly seeped back into my body, very, very reluctantly.
Where...where am I?
Lying on icy marble and staring into pitch black, I struggled to recall—
Wellness weekend.
Panther.
Him.
Sucking in a breath, I cried out at the bruises ringing my throat. I swallowed on reflex, whimpering at the throbbing agony left over from his fingers.