Page 27 of Psycho Beasts

Everything was too bright.

“Sadie?” Ascher moaned loudly as he struggled to move. He violently shook from his rope.

I groaned back, “Present.”

The pain in my arms was too much, and my head swirled with darkness. I was thirty seconds from passing out.

“Is everyone okay?” Jax asked softly, his smooth voice rough and mangled, similar to my own.

A chorus of weak grunts sounded.

Was I alive? Yes.

Was I okay? Hard. Fucking. No.

Okay people didn’t feel like they’d been flung off a mountain, then had the mountain fall over on top of them.

I turned my head and took in Xerxes’s awful state.

He was so bloody that he was no longer blond. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he was a ginger.

I winced at his mangled face.

Then I winced because wincing made my face pound with pain in rhythm to my heartbeat.

Things were not well.

I whispered to Xerxes, “Are you okay?”

His lush lips were swollen and distorted, and he tried to speak, but only made a harsh wheezing sound as his mouth gaped hopelessly.

After a long, awkward moment where he gasped, and I grimaced at him, he stopped trying to speak.

Instead, Xerxes stared at me with swollen purple eyes.

Intensity seeped from them, and even in my pain-stricken state, it made me squirm.

The pain must have been making me delirious, because he stared at me like he could see through my corporeal form. He devoured me like he was peering into my soul, into another astral plane of existence.

Like I was his savior and damnation.

His obsession.

Clearly, torture had addled my brain and made me weirdly poetic.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I said as my bound arms were slowly ripped from their sockets.

If I didn’t get let down from the rope in the next second, I was going to cause a scene.

“Kitten?” Cobra asked in a slurred whisper from across the room.

I bit down on my tongue and screamed into my mouth.

My mood boomeranged in time with the pounding agony ripping my cells to shreds.

The next person to call me a pathetic nickname was getting stabbed.

The big alpha fuckface, aka Spike, smiled and interrupted my mental breakdown. “Well, now that you’re all awake, I just have one thing to say…”

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