Total pages in book: 45
Estimated words: 40901 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40901 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
“The last day,” she whispers to me.
I hate that she seems to know more than I do. But I did not hunt down and claim just any angelic waif. No. I captured myself a mature angel, one who has suffered and one who has learned. She will never be as easy to handle as one of the immature angels kept by the Blood Brotherhood priests at Direview.
Katie knows herself, and she knows the world. She holds and hides all manner of secrets, many of which I may never wrest from her. I may be able to pin her down, but I have the feeling I will never truly control her. That feeling both frustrates and excites me. It is like taming a wild mustang, knowing that the creature is more powerful than I am, but knowing too that I can shape its behavior, make it occasionally compliant, if not ever entirely domesticated.
“How do you know?”
“I have been here three days,” she says. “After keeping me in the dark for thirty days in your cruel captivity, you have had three days with me. It wasn’t enough, was it, Starlight? It won’t ever be enough.”
She’s speaking cryptically at a time when directness would be helpful.
“Just tell me what you’re trying to say.”
“You’ll see soon enough.”
I kiss her neck, breathing in deeply, taking in her scent. If she’s right and some cataclysm is soon to be upon us, I want to be buried deep inside her when it happens.
She shivers beneath me, her hips rolling against me. My kiss moves to her mouth and deepens, my tongue playing with hers, tasting that little bit of divinity that inhabits every bit of her.
My affection for this woman is beginning to grow to uncontrollable, uncontainable extremes. During transport I kept my distance. I wanted to wait until we were here in my purpose built facility to take full control of her. What a mistake that was. I should have been fucking her from the beginning, breaking her down, making her mine on the ship.
“Katie,” I drawl.
“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t say it.”
“If you can tell me not to say it, then you know what it is. I have to say it, Katie. I have to let you know how I feel.”
“You really don’t,” she says, sounding cold. Her words are one thing, but I see the light in her eyes, and I feel it in her kiss. She loves me. I love her. Where that leaves us, I do not know, but we can’t hide from it and pretend it isn’t real.
“I love you,” I say. “I love you deeply.”
Her eyes narrow with impatience and annoyance. “Do you ever listen to anything anybody else says absolutely ever? Are you capable of good sense?”
It’s not the romantic response I expected, but it is very on brand for Katie. Before I can respond, the earth starts to shake, and I do mean rock and roll and roar. The bed dances across the floor as everything that was one place suddenly finds itself another place.
“Earthquake! I grab Katie in my arms and run to the nearest door frame.
“It’s not an earthquake,” she says. “It’s the consequences of your actions.”
I don’t have time to listen to her philosophical musings. The building is starting to come down around us. I know what I have to do. I grip the stone collar that I sealed around her neck and I crack it between my hands. Once broken, it crumbles into dust.
“Really?” Katie complains. “It was that easy to take off all along?”
“Use your powers to shield us,” I tell her.
Katie looks at me with an expression of incredulous horror. “What? What do you think I am? I’m not a fucking Pokemon. I’m an angel. I can fly. I can’t protect you from the big fucking building you constructed falling down on your own head. Run, you idiot. Run!”
We run.
When we stop running, we are in the yard. The prison has collapsed. The walls have crumbled. The building has fallen in on itself like an amateur’s attempt at a soufflé. In the middle of it all is the man in black, emerging from what appears to be some kind of sinkhole in the very center of the yard.
“All good things must come to an end,” he announces, his arms spread wide, a pleased smile on his face, though I don’t see why. This building cost the better part of ten million to build and now it is nothing but rubble.
“I don’t understand…” I say.
“Of course you don’t,” Katie sighs. “You brought me all the way here to contain me. You gave up everything in your life that was not the pursuit of me to take me, and now you are as much a prisoner in this place as I am.”
“Have you forgotten that you’re hardly without sin yourself? You abduct people. You use people. You have committed one or two atrocities in your time.”