Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Knox’s arms tightened around me, despite seeing the pain likely on my face, feeling it in the tension of my body. I knew he needed to feel me, grip onto me like I was his port in the storm.
“Enough, Piper,” he barked, his control fraying. “We’ll take care of Daisy later.”
I gave him a cold look. “No, you’ll send Joey to do it now.”
Knox searched my face. He was the man who knew me better than anyone else, who understood me. And I understood him. He wanted Joey there to presumably look after me while he tortured and killed the men.
He wanted to shield me from whatever he was going to unleash on them for marking me. And he was determined to get his way. He was used to that. No one challenged him. Especially not when rage was simmering in his bloodstream, seeping from him. Not now when he was a paladin with a singular goal: vengeance.
No one, that was, except me.
I watched him battle, his jaw twitching from the force he was exerting to keep himself locked down. I hadn’t looked in the mirror, but I guessed I looked bad.
“Outside,” he roared the command so brutally, it made me jump. Granted, one was bound to be a little jumpy after being kidnapped—for real this time, not whatever Knox had done to me—almost raped, beaten and handcuffed to a sink.
I didn’t look to see if Joey obeyed his command, I couldn’t take my eyes from Knox. I’d truly believed he was dead earlier, so I was afraid he was some kind of mirage. The attachment I felt to this man was nothing short of unhealthy. I didn’t want to breathe air where he didn’t exist. I didn’t want him out of my sight.
I guessed the feeling was mutual.
I heard the door shut, relief racing through me to know Joey had left.
“No one is allowed to mark you but me.” Knox’s voice was low, desperate as he ghosted his hands over every throbbing mark on my face, picking up my hands as if they were made of tissue paper before tracing the red, raw, angry marks from the handcuffs.
“The fact that I left you unprotected so they could do this…” He looked down at my wrists, rage strangling his words.
“This is not your fault,” I told him gently.
His eyes once again roved over the throbbing marks on my face, as if he was concreting them in his memory, for him to revisit when he wanted to engage in emotional self-flagellation.
“Yes, it is,” he scowled. “I left you thinking you were safe without me, but…” He trailed off again, as if he kept losing his train of thought. Very unlike Knox, who calculated and measured every one of his words before he even spoke them.
“I must make them suffer.”
The words were pulled from the very reaches of his insides, sending a cold prickle up my spine.
There had always been the background knowledge that Knox had killed. Not even background knowledge, he’d come right out and said it. Multiple times. I’d never been in the presence of a killer, unless you counted my father, and he hadn’t killed yet. Although he essentially had. He had killed my mother long before her heart stopped beating.
I abhorred violence and violent men because of my childhood and also because violent men were despicable.
Yet I’d fallen in love with Knox knowing that, not even squirming at him openly telling me he killed.
And I was there in front of him, listening to him muse about the ways he might torture those who’d hurt me. Torture. Something I also abhorred, as did most sane people.
Yet my stomach did not turn, my soul did not flinch in front of the cold certainty of what Knox was going to do.
“Making people suffer does not change anything,” I motioned to my hands, to my face, to my body.
To my immense surprise, Knox flinched as I gestured to my bruised torso.
Flinched.
As if looking upon my body hurt him.
When he opened his mouth, I gingerly pressed my fingers to his lips. They were so soft despite all the harsh declarations coming out of them.
“I know that it’s not as easy as that for you.” My gaze never left his. The fury and hunger for violence swirled within his irises, a living thing, separate from the facets of Knox I’d come to know. The Knox who put wildflowers in a vase, who painted me in pastels, who cooked me flavorful feasts, who gave me seeds to grow a garden.
Who seeded something inside of me that grew and bloomed where he’d thought he could only make things wither and die.
“I know that’s an impossible thing to ask you, to not to kill those men—” I continued.
“I will do anything you ask,” Knox interrupted me. “But not that. You will not get in the way of my revenge, Petal.”