Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 116263 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116263 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
“I hate them for you.” It was true. I’d never felt that emotion as strongly as I did right then.
Pax cracked a smirk. “Probably about as much as I hate your parents for you.”
My head shook.
But mine weren’t cruel.
My father might have made mistakes, but I knew he made them out of fear. Out of his love and hope for me.
Not because he was repulsed.
Pax’s fingers fluttered through my hair. “I finally skipped out when I was fifteen. Left home and hitchhiked across the country. No destination in mind other than getting away, because I couldn’t take living under their roof for a second longer.”
Hesitation darkened his features, and his voice grew thin, threaded with a warning. “I might have escaped them, but it’d already changed me. It carved out something ugly inside me, and it left a hole that opened me up to the depraved.”
His words were gravel, and I knew he was leading me back to the confession he’d made at the store earlier today.
A frown furrowed my brow, and my attention jumped all over his face like I might be uncovering every one of his secrets. “What exactly did you mean earlier? When you told me about the money? You . . . look for people doing wrong during the day?”
Pax exhaled a rush of heated air, and he fiddled with a lock of my hair. “I just figured if I was chosen for this life? To fight in Faydor? Why wouldn’t I be fighting the same evils during the day?”
Uncertainty barreled through me, and I was sure he read it in my expression. “So you look for evil?”
“Believe me, Aria, I don’t have to look that hard. It’s all around us.”
“How do you know?”
His fierce brow pinched, and those eyes watched me through the shadows that danced in the room. “I don’t think it’s quite like what you experience . . . the voices you hear. The desperation. The hopelessness. And I sure as hell can’t see a Kruen when I touch someone. But I can feel it . . . the pure wickedness. I can sense it when someone has fully given themselves over. I know when there’s no good left.”
A tremor rocked through my body, and I could feel the grim foreboding that radiated from his being.
“And when there’s no good left in them . . . you . . . kill them?” I tripped over the question, and my mind pitched back to the man who’d attacked us in our last motel.
A man who was dead because Pax had been protecting us.
But I knew, by the dimming in his eyes, that what he typically did was different.
“Yes.” The single word was a jagged stone. There was regret in his voice, though it lacked any true remorse. Silence curled around us like the serpent that slithered up his neck as I tried to orient myself to his confession. To the reality of who he was when he walked through the day.
“Are you scared of me?” His question whipped through the tension.
Was I?
I reached up and smoothed out the harsh, defiant dent that furrowed his brow. “Am I afraid, Pax? Yes. I’m afraid of what you do. Of the position you put yourself in. Of the risks you take. But am I afraid of you? No. We both defend this world in the way we’ve been called to do.”
“You think the blood on my hands is a calling?” The spite that ripped from his mouth wasn’t directed at me but rather at himself.
“When you do it, is it to stop them from hurting someone else?”
His jaw clenched. “Always, Aria, always. Because the only thing these monsters have in mind is destroying. Ruining. I just see to it that I ruin them first.”
I gathered the hand of the fingers that had been playing through my hair, and I brought his palm to the ravaging on my chest. Right over the spot where I’d been struck. “Then yes, I think it’s a calling.”
Pax drew me closer. The heat of his hand blazed into my flesh, his voice gruff when he murmured, “Because you’re so good you can’t see anything else.”
“You’re wrong, Pax. I see you. You’re the only person I’ve ever really known. I might not have known all the details, but I know your heart. And I know your soul.”
“Aria.” My name murmured from between his lips, and his hand wound in my hair. A shiver streaked down my spine as he plastered me against the powerful lines of his lean, packed body, his arms ruthless and steady.
Heat flamed where we were connected, and my stomach tightened into a fist, a throb that pleaded between us like our own, desperate song.
He groaned as he pulled me even closer. Every inch of his body was sealed against mine, hard and raging, keening as our spirits begged.