Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 65151 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65151 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Warned that there would be no more sneaking glances through her hair. No more pretending not to obsess over patterns on his skin.
And as Jules slipped up her shores, Jacques scrambled to recapture her attention, thrashing wildly in their link as he felt her drift away to a place he could not reach. “Mon chou, do not trust him!”
The relentless pull of one and the overpowering gravity of another. Yet where the Alpha roared, Jules whispered. Where Jacques demanded, Jules invited.
The cunning Beta who’d stolen an Alpha’s power, his pride, and his mate, cupped her face in his hands, met her eyes, and said again, “Choose me, Brenya.”
The hidden monster licking its lips in excited anticipation.
“Yes.” Soft as breath on bare skin.
The second her affirmation took shape, his presence surged in the bond, and she was caught. Dragged under the surface, swallowed whole. It wasn’t calm waters that rushed like inky poison into her mouth, her lungs, her ears, eyes. Filling everything with creeping, inexorable carnage. But a crawling personal hellscape full of unnamable, hideous thoughts. Writhing corpses scrambling over one another to seize the shores of her island as if she were the haven.
A little flickering candle flame, a single light in the dark.
And it was terrifying to be so coveted.
Yet the very hand of death itself caressed Brenya inside and out. The void’s infinite tar-black eyes fixated, starved for every last crumb of her attention.
Drinking her down.
Openly plotting how to get more of her, how to steal her from the Alpha fool.
Gruesome. And somehow… beautiful.
The honest heart of a very bad man.
Who scared the absolute shit out of her… because there was something there she very much didn’t want to see. Something she knew not to look upon.
Something reaching for her.
Mentally flailing away from his sucking pull, Brenya fought to be free of his riptide, to escape before Jules made her look. But there was no surface to swim to. No up or down. Only endless, consuming hunger in which his thoughts flowed through hers—not violently like Jacques’s invasion, but with precision as they worked between the cracks of her thinking. Until she couldn’t distinguish where she ended and Jules began.
“Jacques was right…” Hot tears rolling down her cheek, Brenya wavered on her feet, black spots in her vision, as she panted, “…you are deceitful.”
With a fleeting look of pity, Jules held her closer. “I have been gentle with you, Brenya. Even in this, I am being gentle.”
But it was agony the way he settled inside her. Just as painful as Jacques’s phantom knot twisted up her empty, drooling cunt.
Dark delight filled Jules’s expression as he cradled her head against his shoulder when she slumped, tenderly brushing tangled hair from her tear-streaked face. “I gave you freedom while he slept, Brenya. Autonomy to come or go as you wished. I taught you how to build a nest. I healed your body.”
Achingly intimate, tender, he kissed her flushed cheek. Yet nothing was kind about the piercing intensity in those burning eyes as he spoke. “You think you’ve been manipulated, that I would stoop to forcing your submission with mental tricks and theatrical orchestrations because I am what I am. But I don’t need to force anything. I could easily take whatever I want from you in any sick way I might imagine. But have I? No.”
Jules dragged his gaze slowly over her claiming mark. His fingertips followed, the touch possessive and deliberate as he traced each jagged edge of her disfigurement. “I could do to you what he is doing right now, with a simple, uncontained thought. I could touch myself and make you wild with the need to come… and deny you. As I have denied myself in all these months we’ve been bonded. I could make you beg. The Alpha fool will not extend such courtesy, now that he’s awake. And he must be awake for you to thrive.”
“No!” Jacques would never be necessary! She hated him. Hated! And the fact that the Beta who took such care of her would allow Alpha influence to touch her short-circuited her crumbling restraint.
Gods… the scent of him was killing her. His touch burning.
She needed a knot. Needed to be filled.
Imagined there would be hours more of this pain while there was nothing to be done but bear it. And Jules only made it worse. His cum-drenched scent tickling her tongue, moving through each deep breath. His touch hovered over her skin, exacting, designed. He mapped the nerves he could exploit, brushed the ones that would tingle, but never touched the places she needed relief. Driving her mad with desire.
Like estrous, but worse. A sick parody, where every humiliating convulsion came with full, conscious awareness of how used and insane her body had become as his black sea of death slithered over her thoughts.