Total pages in book: 192
Estimated words: 182641 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 913(@200wpm)___ 731(@250wpm)___ 609(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 182641 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 913(@200wpm)___ 731(@250wpm)___ 609(@300wpm)
Next, it’s the soft click of heels, and then Dom to the rescue, but I don’t look back. I keep fucking walking, and what do you fucking know?
Rocklin follows.
I make it two steps down when her urgent voice breaks through the air.
“Wait!” she shouts.
I don’t wait.
“Would you hold on a minute!” she screams.
I keep moving.
“Goddamn you! This is why you’re so bossy in bed, right? Because you can’t handle anyone else telling you what to do because you spend every other day taking orders from someone else!”
She’s gasping. My feet spin and face hers before the last word leaves her.
I spot Dom at the door, not far, but he doesn’t come closer.
Her mouth is clamped tight while she waits for me to speak, but I’m so fucking pissed all I can do is look at her until even the sight of her pisses me off.
“That’s right, Rich Girl. I’m a bottom feeder. Nothing but a poor punk who rides for someone else at someone else’s call. That’s the life I live ’cause that’s the hand I was dealt. No ace was slipped in my pocket at birth, but you better fucking believe when I die”—I bend so we’re at eye level and that lower lip of hers trembles—“I’ll have the entire fucking deck in the palm of my hands, including the queen, my fucking queen. So have your fake fun tonight, do Daddy’s good deeds, but watch yourself. Watch your world real fucking close, ’cause you never know who might come in and turn it upside down. And what a scandal that would be, Miss Greyson.”
Her entire body droops. “Bastian …”
I hear the plea, the silent cry only I could detect because I am the only one who knows her well enough to hear it. She’s begging me to understand, to take this at face value and assure her we’ll fight and make up later.
Instead, I stand tall, looking down my nose at her, as if she’s the leech and I’m the leopard.
“My name is Bass and don’t fucking forget it.” Shaking my head, I take backward steps away. A mocking laugh that’s bitter on my tongue and a smirk I don’t feel curve my lips. “Not that you could.”
She takes another urgent step toward me, but I give her my back, making sure to move fast ’cause no one here is going to watch it for me.
And I disappear into the shadows.
Rocklin
He walks away, disappearing into the safety of the dark gardens, not even his shadow in sight. I run down the last few steps but stop short, my chest heaving as I replay every word I had said over and over.
“You know he sent people to follow him,” Dom’s voice comes from behind me, but I don’t turn around.
I know he’s not wrong. There is no way my dad allowed Bastian to walk out of here after that.
“Should we … help him?” Damiano asks hesitantly.
His loyalty to me adds to the war of emotions already raging in my chest, but this is Bastian.
I shake my head no. “They won’t find him.”
“Rocklin …” he disagrees, tone asking me to use reason, but I am.
My world is dark and daunting, but his is too, and he adapts in ways he can. Ways that work and help him in his personal pain. Our people are vicious, but I see that same shadow in Bastian’s eyes.
He isn’t a nobody.
He’s so much more.
Forcing my shoulders straight, I shake my head again, eyes still scanning over the darkness before me. “They won’t find him, Damiano. He’s … invisible.”
I got into that little club, ma, ’cause my pops beat silence into me, and those beatings taught me how to be invisible. You can’t touch what you can’t see, and you can’t find what you can’t hear.
His words replay in my head and with them comes a throbbing sense of regret.
“You should come inside.” Damiano’s hesitant voice comes from a little closer this time.
I whip around, eyes locking with his, and he simply pauses his advance, a small nod following as he turns, heading back into the building.
Frustration I’ve never felt before forms and knots in my throat and I grip my hair, glaring up at the stupid arch above me. I spin, shoving over a giant stone pot full of pink roses. The pot shatters, dirt spilling over into the grass as loose petals filter across the cement steps. The wind picks up right then, blowing them across the tip of my shoe, and I scream, but when an airy laugh sounds behind me, I swallow it halfway, anger threatening to explode from my chest as I face the person it came from.
Chloe fucking Carpo.
My jaw clenches so tight I can’t seem to open it to yell and scream at her like I want to. Why the fuck would she bring him here? She had to know what would happen.