Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100086 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 334(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100086 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 334(@300wpm)
I smell our spunk, but while I know the scent of mine so well, his stands out, salty as seawater on a tropical island where I could spend the rest of my life getting fucked by him.
I’m losing my mind. All because of what? A fuck? It’s like a virus overtaking every cell in my body. I grab the vial with the antidote out of the drawer and load it into a syringe with trembling fingers. I need him out of here as soon as possible.
“I appreciate the view,” he murmurs behind me like there’s still reason to flirt.
“Good, maybe that’s something to motivate you tomorrow,” I say with a little slur. I feel drunk, as if the self-control I pride myself on is slipping. As if he’s infected me with the selfishness and recklessness that landed him with life-ending debt.
A syringe. What else do I need? Needle.
I collapse into my leather chair as I open the sterile package and assemble everything needed to give Dalton the slightest chance at survival.
He’s just sitting there on the mattress, smoking as if his life isn’t coming to an end tomorrow.
At least he’s got no smartass comeback when I approach him and stick the needle into his flesh.
As I watch the antidote enter him, I can’t help but think back on how he pushed into me, how for a while, we were like one body, and I wasn’t alone. How nothing else but the two of us chasing the same orgasm mattered. Did he spread his pheromones inside me despite the condom? Because it really feels like he’s still under my skin.
One thing is clear.
I can never do this again.
Chapter 5
Corvus
I want nothing more than for Dalton to split me open again.
And I hate myself for it.
It’s Christmas morning. The hunt is scheduled to start after lunch, and all I can think of is Dalton’s face when he inhaled the smoke from the stolen cigarette, naked, smelling of our combined sweat and cum, at peace despite knowing he was to play prey in less than a day. So very alive, so hopeful that the antidote would give him a real shot at survival in the vast wilderness surrounding our family estate. I gave him hope when there was none, and it’s weighing on my heart, ever heavier.
Unbelievably, after all I put him through, my one-time-lover still tried to kiss me before I locked him back in his cell. Maybe he thought he could win himself more favors that way. After I purged the evidence of our coupling off my body, sleep just wouldn’t come, which left me to toss and turn in sweaty sheets until it was too early to get up yet too late to take sleeping pills.
What was meant as a one-time experiment to convince me that I wasn’t missing out on much now feels like treason, as though I have betrayed the family legacy I’ve sworn to protect.
What would my great-great-grandfather think if he saw me now, agonizing over the fate of a man meant to entertain our family on Christmas? He stares down at me from the large portrait in a gilded frame. He’s on a horse, crossbow in hand, and the Van der Horn manor looms in the background like a reminder of the legacy I spat at when I took Dalton out of that cell.
Charles Van der Horn was likely a product of his time. He worked hard to build his invisible empire of racketeering, bribes, and murder, and he expected all his descendants to follow the same path with pride. And I try. I live and breathe the family legacy.
My father prepared me for my role from very early on, instilling knowledge of poisons and all the ways the human body could be broken. I was to be like him—the paragon of masculine virtues that never feared anything, and never cried—and no matter how much I rebelled against it, he had won.
My father was gone, and I took over his office as the resident authority on poison and torture. Sometimes, I wonder if he knew that I liked boys all along and simply chose to never address it, to offer me glimpses of freedom in the dark.
He would have despised my conduct last night regardless.
Excited voices rise all around me as my family exchanges stories of previous Christmas hunts, but despite our underground trophy room being so vast, I feel like the carved wooden panels making up the ceiling are about to collapse over me. There are no windows here, since we’re underground, and the textured wallpaper seems to have almost too much depth. The leafy trees pictured on it hide something in their shadows, something that feeds off all the offerings my family has gathered here over the past century.
Great-great-grandfather had this room decorated in the opulent style of the grand estates from the Old World. The rugs are plush under my feet, the furniture—as pristine as the chandeliers, but the trophies on the walls are what makes this space special.