Shut up before I addyou to mine.
Knight Ren
“Sources,” Sebastian? You mean your family.
Bishop Seb
Sources. Mere DNA doesn’t make a family.
Bishop Seb
Cleaners are clearing the floors. Will rendezvous with Rook there.
Pawn Alek
Cleaners you got in because of me. ID swaps and all. Go big or go boom.
King Rafe
I’ll pray for you.
Queen Sofi
He doesn’t need prayers. He’s got me.
My lips twitch. I picture Rafe in his chamber, rosary in hand, praying for our clearly unredeemable souls.
This is the closest I’ve gotten to finding the name of the person who ordered my family to be slaughtered. Vasil Çela from the Albanian café was a lackey. His partner was the same.
Decades gone. Life wasted. I’ve given up my soul for revenge, and now I can almost taste it.
Will silence ever replace the screaming?
My knees ache, an old reminder of survival.
The air changes before my thoughts settle. It thrums with sudden awareness.
I stop pacing.
Roses wrap around my senses, dragging me back from the brink.
“I’m ready, Elias.”
Her voice is seduction and salvation, innocence laced with steel.
Air rushes out of me as I grit my teeth and turn around.
Lana is a vision in crimson. She can move mountains, drain oceans. She could ask me to jump off a cliff, and I’d do it without hesitation.
And you still want to say you hate her? Please.
The fact that I’m thinking this way is precisely why I made myself scarce after last week.
I exceeded my twenty-eight minutes that day.
I told myself that was for every minute I’d saved up over the years. It was lust, not anything else. After all, lines blur too easily.
Her hips sway, each step revealing her long legs through a thigh-high slit.
