I give a weak shrug. “It was worth a try. And for the record, I do like that you listen to my thoughts.” Mostly. “Besides, the old Gage would rather take off his skin as if it were a sweater than have me bed you.” My lids drop a notch as my gaze penetrates his. There is something decidedly intrusive about looking straight into Marshall’s fiery red eyes, something intimate, something far more intricate than foreplay that happens to my body.
“You’re laying it on thick,” he says, and with every inflection of his voice those vibratronics quiver through me in sharp, jagged waves and my body bucks with ferocity.
“Marshall.” His name escapes my lips, lower than a whisper, as I shiver right down to the core. “You don’t play fair.”
“Was that enough foreplay?”
“Nothing is ever enough with you.” I dig my hands into his lapel and rip off his jacket in one easy move. About ten different women shriek, either with approval or disgust at my brazenness, but I don’t care which. Hell, for a blissful moment I forgot they were in the room. “Get rid of them.”
Marlena henpecks her way over, her head jutting between us, her lips moving, shouting something about a mockery.
“Oh, shut the hell up,” I hiss before hiking up on my tiptoes and crashing my mouth over Marshall’s.
Is this revenge, Ms. Messenger?
A dull laugh thumps through me.This is my emancipation and I am ringing that bell.
I’m not entirely certain I believe it, but I’ve already crawled out of my mind, leaped outside the bounds of sanity—so far outside of where I’d thought I’d be just a year ago. How I grieved for my sweet husband. I willed him back to life with the command of my love. How I regretted it with everything in my being just a few short hours ago. The deepest pit of hell has nothing on the pain that Gage inflicted upon me. He cut my people to nothing, and then he took the knife to my heart.
I launch my tongue down Marshall’s throat as if I were performing exploratory surgery, seeking an answer, an elixir, a savior.
The din of the music and the laughter become scarce, and the temperature of the room goes from hellish to heavenly. I pull back and give a few blinks, only to find the surroundings have shifted and here we are nestled in his cavernous chambers, the oversized bed covered with emerald jacquard, Marshall’s chest panting wild and dangerously so close to mine.
My fingers work the buttons on his shirt as he scalds me with his eyes. And just like that, Marshall’s mouth collapses over mine, his hands raking off my flimsy gown. The cool night air blows in from the window and licks me in the most intimate of places long before Marshall has a chance to.
His teeth grind over mine, and his fingers dig into my arms as an electric charge transfers from him to me. I’m naked. On my back, the heft of Marshall’s body lying over me so heavy I can’t catch my next breath, don’t want to. Every last inch of my skin drinks down his flesh, those pulsating vibrations electrocuting me with their ferocity, and I cry out in pain, in pleasure, everything in between.
His mouth does a revolution over my body, my knees knocked back to my chest in one forcible maneuver. His hot mouth, his prehensile tongue light a fire in me from the inside out. My hands are thrown over my head with a show of violent force as Marshall pins me like a butterfly to a wax board. He takes a sharp bite out of my neck and a howl escapes me, something primal, animalistic, that echoes through the room like night music.
In one knife-sharp jab, he’s in me, slamming against me as if he were doling out a punishment. Violent, savage thrusts that expound those feel-good vibrations and I beat him to the punch, my body seizing around his, my vocal cords testing their limit, but I transcend the sound of my voice, the feel of the bed beneath me, and detonate over and over again while Marshall makes brutal, passionate love to me.
Emancipation at its finest. I don’t belong to Gage or Logan or Marshall. I belong to me.
His body pulsates in strong spastic waves as he deposits an ocean inside of me. Those warm vibrations of his hit their zenith and the entire building rattles with the earthquake.
Marshall lets out a mighty roar, deafening like the sound of a bomb shattering a city as he gifts me with one final, urgent, impassioned blow and I eject myself from his bed, through the wall, through a curtain of fresh Paragon fog that does little to cool my body. I sit up with a jolt, only to find myself back in my bedroom, on the bed I shared so many restless nights with Gage. A dark room heated with my feverish dreams.
A luminescent body glows next to me, lying in his spot, her head over his pillow as she watches me. Rising slowly, she puts her loving arms around me and I feel those soothing vibrations once again, those of my mother.
“You had a bad dream?” Her lips curve with a malevolent smile as the moon dances across her features. That twin face to mine looks so alarmingly sinister. And I memorize it because from here on out I will be the sinister one. “Rumor has it, Sector Marshall does tell rather disturbing bedtime stories.” She glances down at my body and I’m stunned to find the gossamer gown still clinging to my flesh, still wet from the sea.
“Was it all a bad dream?” My heart stops cold, and I refuse to take my next breath.
Her glacial eyes look right into mine as her features soften, so very sorry to impart bad news.
“No, Skyla.” She gently brushes the hair from my forehead. “It wasn’t all a dream. Some of it was very real.” Her nose rises an inch. “He has done this to you, to us. The bastard you gave everything to has repaid you beauty for ashes.”
“He married Chloe.” The words come out numb, the deceit flying around our bedroom like a poltergeist too embarrassed to be here. “He’s done it, hasn’t he?”
“Yes.” It comes out low like the hiss of a snake. “He has done this.” Her anger enlivens, her entire being brightens like a flare with a crimson glow deep in her belly, and her face illuminates pink. I can hear the boys giggling from their beds, crammed into cribs they are quickly outgrowing. “And he will do far worse, my love, if you don’t cut him off at the quick right here, right now.”
I flinch when she uses Logan’s infamous words, and I wonder if they were ever his to begin with.
“I will drown him, his schemes, the evil in him, and his new wife. I vow to destroy him and all he stands for. I vow to decimate, dismantle, and eradicate him and his people.” A lone tear rolls down my cheek. The words feel like traitors as they leave my lips.
Gage took the gold of who we were and melted it down to a molten hot stew before pouring it over my head. Killing me slowly, painfully, scalding my heart, blistering me beyond recognition.
My mother nods, rocking me slowly in her arms. Her lips gently brush over my temple as she holds me as a mother should.
