Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 144760 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 724(@200wpm)___ 579(@250wpm)___ 483(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144760 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 724(@200wpm)___ 579(@250wpm)___ 483(@300wpm)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I’M NOT LONELY WHILE you’re here. That’s why you can’t go. Why you can never go. You’re mine.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Kas’s voice repeated over and over in my head, distracting me.
He was unconscious and I had a parrot inside my mind.
Focus.
Gritting my teeth, I shoved away his agonizing confession and kept my mind on urgent things. Things like getting him back into the temporary ward where I’d been treating him.
The stretcher.
I’d left the stretcher that I’d hauled Kas from the cliff almost two weeks ago intact. The ropes were still tied into a hammock, the scuffed tree trunks resting around the side of the house. Abandoned but now gratefully back in use.
It was a case of déjà vu as I rolled his unconscious form onto the stretcher, gathered power in my legs to lift, and heaved myself forward to drag him over the threshold.
He didn’t make a sound as I dragged him through the kitchen, past the lobby, and back into the library where he belonged.
Sweat rolled down my temples by the time I tucked him into the blankets, fluffed a pillow behind his head, and hauled the transporter back outside—hopefully not to be used a third time.
During the entire process of bringing him inside, tending to him, and worrying for him, I locked down my thoughts and feelings. I didn’t go over what he’d said, what he’d done, or the numerous emotions I’d read on his face.
I didn’t let myself analyze anything—not a single eyebrow quirk—until he was safe, breathing calmly, and I managed to get two painkillers past his lips when he roused a little.
“I’m not lonely while you’re here. That’s why you can’t go. Why you can never go. You’re mine.”
Gem...stop it.
I sat beside him, brushing back his hair, cursing the way my heart hadn’t figured out how to beat correctly in his company. How could a man make me livid one moment and then liquid the next? Why had I felt ashamed when he was the one who locked a cuff around my ankle?
The way he looked at his vegetable garden? Ugh, the guilt almost crippled me. I should’ve taken more care. Had more respect about the value of each edible plant.
Dusk fell.
I stayed beside him, contemplating my options. If only my PLB still worked. A convoy of helicopters could arrive to fly him to a doctor.
Seeing as he’s too pig-headed to go to them.
Stars came out, twinkling through the library window. My mind raced with his fury that I’d helped myself to his supplies, the loneliness in his voice when speaking of his family, and the twisted mess left of a boy who’d been stolen so many years ago.
“I’m not lonely while you’re here. That’s why you can’t go. Why you can never go. You’re mine.”
Enough of this.
He showed no signs of waking up, and I had to be wise. While he was asleep, I had to undo the new imprisonment he’d trapped me with. Once that unsatisfactory task was dealt with, I would figure out what to prepare for dinner. Something that wouldn’t earn his wrath.
With a final look at his slumbering face, I pushed off the floor and marched to the desk by the wall. I rifled through every drawer, looking for a key to the leather leash I currently dragged around behind me.
Come on.
It has to be here somewhere.
This room had an authority about it. I didn’t need Kas to tell me that the large throne-like chair once belonged to the man he called Storymaker. His face had screamed that loud and clear when he’d woken the first time and flinched the moment he’d seen it. He didn’t need to verbalize that this wasn’t just a library to him. It’d been the hub of all the darkness in this despicable place.
I’d wondered, on the fifth or sixth day of his unmentionable nightmares, if I should move him to a different room. It seemed the shelves with their innocuous books triggered violent memories. He stared into the past and saw things I couldn’t, witnessing his family lined up before their master, waiting for instruction, praying they wouldn’t be given to a guest that night.
Despite Kas not telling me in exact paragraphs of what’d happened to him, his face did, his body did, his every flinch and grunt did. In the midst of whatever delusions his concussion gave him, I rocked in the corner with my blanket wrapped tight around me. On the nights when he was so far gone he muttered to Nyx and Wes, Neo and Elise, I’d wiped away my silent tears and cursed my cracking heart all over again. It was no longer whole. The pieces were in pieces. And those pieces were in irreparable fragments for learning what they’d all endured.
It was because of those fragments that I was now completely messed up where Kas was concerned. The sane part of me—the business-headed millionaire and successful entrepreneur—was beside herself with scorn. But the insane part of me—the love-sick dreamer who fantasized that she could be his cure—was determinedly blind to the actual real danger of living with a deranged victim.