Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 84446 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 422(@200wpm)___ 338(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84446 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 422(@200wpm)___ 338(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
The second day, I felt a familiar ache starting that I tried to bury under hot baths and binge reading.
By the third and fourth and fifth, though, that ache had become a gaping hole. A desperation that disgusted me, but one I couldn’t seem to shake either.
But when I woke up on the sixth morning of not seeing his face, hearing his voice, even knowing he was alive save for the drying towel in the bathroom and a still warm pot of coffee downstairs, well, the sadness started to morph into anger.
Which, honestly, was better than all the trying and often failing not to cry I’d been doing.
But he’s hard, Cinna’s words came back to me on an unwanted loop. And when hard things crash into soft ones, the soft ones get crushed.
The anger made me feel a lot less soft, less crushable.
Even if I knew from a very young age that anger was just a mask that other, more tender, feelings hid beneath.
All the hard hides hurt, I remembered Nico saying of our cousin, Brio, a man whose name was spoken in whispers because he was so well known for his demonic sort of violence.
The anger got me out of the bed I’d been moping in.
It got me showered and dressed.
It got me in my shoes and jacket and out of the front door.
I walked down the street where everything reminded me of Renzo as I tried like hell to forget about him.
So I got my coffee.
I browsed the bookstore. But I couldn’t seem to decide on anything. All these books about these princes and vampires and fae and alphas and their undying love for their heroines.
It just wasn’t as appealing as it used to be.
And I was pissed at him all the more for ruining my books for me too.
Maybe I would pick up thrillers. Or horror. Full of bad people with bad intentions and often bad endings.
That sure felt a lot more realistic these days than sweet declarations and everlasting love.
I walked out of my favorite bookstore in the world with empty hands and that familiar spiderweb of cracks in my heart starting to spread.
Not wanting to go home, but also having no idea what else to do with myself, I just walked, pretending to window shop, but mostly just getting lost in my hurricane thoughts, whipping and twisting and blanketing everything in cold and wet misery.
It wasn’t long before the anger was, once again, the grief it had always been.
I blamed that for what happened.
Blamed the way my eyes were all glistening with tears once again for the reason I couldn’t see it until it was too late.
See him until it was too late.
Until I was walking down a side street significantly less crowded than the one I’d turned off of at some point.
Until a hand was grabbing my wrist, yanking it hard enough for pain to pop in my shoulder, making a small cry escape me as I furiously tried to blink past the tears to see what was going on.
“Give me your purse,” he demanded, my body suddenly flying backward, cracking against an unforgiving wall.
“I… I…” I tried to say, but found it impossible to speak past the fist of panic in my throat.
I didn’t have a purse.
That was what I wanted to say to him.
My brothers had always tried to beg me not to walk around the city with one, saying it was like a target on my back, and how there was no reason to carry one if I just tucked my cash or a small card wallet into my front pocket, where no one would be able to snatch it.
And I wasn’t in the habit of carrying a lot of stuff with me most of the time. So I’d always just done what they’d told me to.
What was left of the cash I’d brought with me to Renzo’s house was in the front pocket of the jeans I was wearing.
“Give me your fucking purse,” the man growled as slivery chains of anxiety tightened around my belly, chest, and throat at the wild, savage look in his eyes.
His hand released my arm, and my feet moved instinctively, trying to get away, go back toward people, toward the safety they provided.
“Bitch,” he snarled, and I thought, hoped, he might have been discouraged, would just walk on.
Until I felt hands slamming into my back, shoving me forward.
My belly plummeted as I threw out my hands, feeling the sidewalk burn across my palms as my weight came down on them.
This couldn’t be happening.
In broad daylight.
Just a few blocks from home.
Uselessly, another thought formed.
This wouldn’t happen in my old neighborhood.
Not because crime didn’t happen there. It did. More often than anyone wanted to admit.
But because there was a certain level of protection my family provided. Because people knew of them and my connection to them.