Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 100493 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 502(@200wpm)___ 402(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100493 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 502(@200wpm)___ 402(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
“Later,” he mutters, pushing himself upright on the gurney.
Khloe looks between me and him. “Asher, you really should lay down.”
He bares his teeth, blood drying at the corner of his mouth. “I’m fine. Had worse in the ring with Sinead.”
Pushing off the gurney, he gets all the way up to full height, bare chest smeared red, and for a second, I hate myself for being distracted by his body.
Amazing. Death all over the place and my brain still finds time to be depraved.
“Camille!” he snaps, and Camille’s whimpers stop from somewhere behind me. “You need to come stitch me up before Punk takes you.”
I freeze.
He hasn’t looked away from me, and with every passing second, rage builds deep in my belly. I’m still pissed about him knowing Emeric was my father and keeping it from me, and now he’s throwing gas on the fire with this bitch…
Camille’s shoulders brush mine as she lifts her hand to his chest.
My hand shoots out, laying the flat edge of my blade under her chin without breaking eye contact with Asher.
That annoying fucking grin spreads over his face, and my jaw slams shut.
“If you even think of touching him, Cameltoe, I’ll have you dead beside your mother.”
“Baby…” Asher starts. “She’s gotta touch me to fix me…”
I shrug. “I know other surgeons. Ones who don’t know what you feel like inside them.”
Asher shoves Camille away, taking me by the chin with a bloody hand. “How do you feel?”
“What?” Out of everything I expected him to say, that wasn’t on the list.
“How…” His lips skim mine and my heart races. “Do…” He kisses me and I melt. “You feel?”
“I feel—” I pause, stepping back—
I stare at my hands. Blood. Asher’s blood.
I touch his chest. “Alive.”
Alive.
The word leaves me and the room slips sideways. My hand stays splayed over Asher’s chest, his heart hammering under blood and skin, and the walls inside my brain split open.
“Ivy,” he says close to my mouth. Too close.
Cold air cuts my throat. Branches slap my arms. Snow sinks under my bare feet as I run with no plan except away, away, away from the house, from his lies, from the look on that woman’s face when she—the woman.
Sharp cheekbones. Green eyes.
“I don’t understand—“ I stumble backwards, squeezing my eyes shut like it might drag me out of this nightmare.
“You see this?” Emeric said, gesturing to the same picture of the same woman. God, what was his deal with her? “When you see this face, what will you do?”
I didn’t even answer because what?
“Ivy, look at me.” Asher’s thumb presses under my jaw. The touch almost pulls me out. Almost.
It had been a month since he last pulled out her photo, but here he was again.
“Who is this woman!” Emeric yelled so loud my ears rang.
I stared at the picture, like a cloud going over my head. Blank. Void. “A trigger.”
“Who is also…” he asked, eyeing me.
I looked up at him. “My mother.”
He clicked his fingers.
Tears burn my eyes as the room around me softens.
Asher steps closer, and the night I ran from him drags me back under.
Once I’m far enough from my mother, I walk through trees. I walk down the mountain road. Ice cuts my soles open and gravel grinds into raw skin, leaving blood across snow, dirt, and pavement, and I don’t feel a damn thing. The tunnel waits at the bottom of the road.
Fluorescent lights buzz overhead, the concrete damp under my feet. My footprints smear red behind me.
I don’t look back.
I know where I’m going.
Shit. “I know where I’m going.”
A black security panel sits beside a steel door I’ve never seen, except my palm lifts to it on its own, fingers spread, hand steady. The reader flashes green.
“He put my biometrics into the—” My hands wave around the room, everyone watching me. “I don’t know when…”
The door opens, carrying bleach and metal. Beyond it, the conditioning ward.
Cuffs hang from a ceiling rail, leather worn dark at the edges, chains already lowered to the right height. I step beneath them. I lift my arms. No command. No struggle.
I slide one wrist in.
Click.
Then the other.
Click.
The chains draw tight, taking my weight until I’m hanging by the wrists, toes brushing the floor, shoulders pulling hot in their sockets. Skin splits under the cuff. I feel the facts of it without the pain, the same way I feel cold glass with a glove on.
I did this.
“Ivy.”
Asher again, somewhere past the ward and the blood, except the memory keeps going because there are footsteps outside the room. Two sets. One heavy, one quick. I know the second from the scrape in her heel before Camille says my name, and the latch starts to turn.
“Finally,” she mutters. “What an entrance, but at least the trigger finally happened, whatever it was.”
I ignore her rambling. Camille was the perfect puppet. Glad I never killed her.