Page 116 of A Taste Of Darkness

Did I look like I was alright?

I fell to my knees, pain surged through every inch of me like I never felt before. My hands were shaking, my heart still hammering in an unsteady rhythm.

“Did you find—” I couldn’t manage to voice the rest of my sentence.

It felt like an anchor was pulling on my heart, sinking further with every second that passed. A lump formed in my throat, keeping me from speaking.

Cruel images and thoughts I’d never had before flooded my mind, causing my eyes to sting.

The thought of losing Sterlie was unbearable, but something my mind told me was exactly what just happened.

She was gone.

Gone.

I fucking knew it. I knew I shouldn’t have left her. I knew something was off.

Now she was gone from the planet, I was sure.

If Adriana got her… oh, God.

And it was all my fault.

I lost her.

My first love.

My future wife.

My reason to keep on breathing.

I just got her and now she was gone.

My eyes fell to my phone that now lay on the floor, a crack in the screen from when I dropped it a moment ago.

No new messages.

No news.

No call.

Gone.

“I need her to be okay,” I mumbled to myself as my face lifted toward the ceiling. “Please, be okay.”

Michael should’ve called a fucking ambulance because I was about to have a heart attack. Then again, if Sterlie was gone… I wanted to be dead as well.

A phone rang, and my head snapped down in record time, groaning when it was stupid Kai calling.

He never called.

I snatched the phone off the ground. “What?”

“Woah, there, Marucci. How about a Hello, Kai, how are you?” Kai chuckled into the phone, causing my eyebrows to draw together.

I’d never heard that man chuckle before. It was one of the only things I liked about him.

“The fuck do you want, Kai?” I wasn’t up for stupid games, especially with him. I had far more important things to do, like finding my girlfriend and making sure she was alive. Then finding my half-sister and chopping her god-awful head off.

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