Total pages in book: 108
Estimated words: 103712 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 519(@200wpm)___ 415(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103712 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 519(@200wpm)___ 415(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
She sucked in a jagged breath, then another. Her mother’s voice couldn’t penetrate her panic. “Please…” she begged. “I swear, I didn’t know. I’m not lying.”
Hunter’s tone was as cold and unbending as ice. “Not lying like you swore you were Mary Langford?”
She twisted in Ash’s arms. “Jordan is everything wrong with my family,” she sputtered. “Everything I was running from. If I’d known what he did—”
Her words cut off as his hand closed around her throat. Ash and Stone shouted for him to let go, but when they touched him, he shoved them away with merciless force.
“You’d what?” Hunter’s grip tightened as he towered over her with the presence of an avenging angel. “Turn him in? Testify against him? Make him pay for what he did?”
She tried to pry the fingers around her throat loose, desperate to make him understand. “Yes!” The word tore from her throat like a battle cry. “Yes, absolutely, whatever it took—”
“Lies!” he bellowed, shoving her into the wall. “Calders can’t be trusted. Deceit’s written into your fucking DNA.”
“Hunter!” one of the brothers snapped, but she couldn’t see past his looming presence. Lack of oxygen was making it difficult to hear.
“I’m not like him. I’m decent. That’s why I was trying to escape.” Tears burned her eyes as she sputtered for breath. “I hate him,” she rasped. “He’s the reason I’m running!”
“Why?” Hunter demanded, his fist knotting painfully in her hair. “I want the fucking truth.”
“Because I know what he is.” The confession stuttered past her lips on a narrow wheeze. “I knew about the women he brought home. I saw how they looked afterward. Hunter…please.” She clawed at his unbreakable grip and wheezed, “You’re choking me.”
“How did they look?”
She flinched when the brothers tried to pull him off of her, his unbreakable grip jerking her around by the neck like a ragdoll. Blackness bled into her periphery.
“Broken.” She gasped for air. “Empty. Wrong.”
“Hunter, you’re killing her!” Ash jumped on his back, fisting his hair.
“Your brother is a cancer,” he seethed through gritted teeth. “A poison on this earth.”
“I… know.” The words pushed painfully past bruised her larynx as her eyes closed.
He snarled then Stone shouted something in Russian and her body crupled to the floor. Air rushed into her lungs like fire. Painful coughs sputtered past her ravaged throat. Her vision tunneled into a narrow keyhole of black as tears blurred her vision.
Stone tried to help her stand, but her legs collapsed. “Goddamn it, Hunter, you could have killed her!”
“Big loss.”
Stone helped her sit up as Ash’s large hand rested on her back. She heaved for breath. Hunter might have let her go, but she still felt his grip around her throat. Her body still radiated with the fear he instilled.
“There are other ways to deal with this,” Ash snapped.
Hunter seethed but something in Ash’s voice held him back. They exchanged a look that spoke of years of shared pain and protection, decades of trauma that dated back long before Jordan slithered into their lives.
Hunter wanted to take his vengeance out on her. Marigold knew then that this man had killed. Her life meant nothing to him, and she was his next target.
Gripping Stone’s arm, she pulled herself up off the ground so as not to look weak. “If you kill me, you’d be doing Jordan a favor.”
The room silenced as her body swayed under the remaining dizziness. Clinging to Stone’s shirt, she used his body as a shield. Ash’s hand slipped into hers, offering additional support.
“Hear her out.”
They looked at her expectantly. May the truth set her free. “Jordan convinced my father to have me committed.”
Hunter glared at her with unfiltered distrust and barely contained rage.. “Committed how?”
She looked to Stone and Ash, but neither was her friend. Her protectors were not willing to risk themselves.
Fine. She was more than used to handling things on her own. And she’d learned long ago that men were always in it for themselves before anyone else.
Lifting her trembling chin, she stared into fathomless eyes. “It was a private facility. They called it behavioral modification.” The truth tasted like bitter shame, burning her mouth like acid. “They left me there for months, claiming I was hysterical, unstable, and delusional. But that wasn’t true.”
“Is anything out of your mouth true, little liar?”
“I know what my brother really is. And when I told the truth, they punished me.”
“Why didn’t they believe you?”
“They swore Jordan would never hurt anyone. They thought I was making up lies because of jealousy. They said only a sick person would make such heinous accusations about family.”
“You said he was your half-brother.”
“Yes. But to my father, he’s the first born son. I’m nothing compared to Jordan in his eyes.”
“Charming.” Ash watched her like an equation he needed to solve.
“Yes,” she agreed with a bitter cold. “Misogyny runs deep in the Calder lines.”