Page 107 of Overcast

“Another spot to hit someone—” He tips back on his beer. “—right here.” He points to the upper part of his abdomen. “Liver. Holds blood in reserve and acts as a filter.”

“Why do you keep telling me...places to stab people?”

He taps his bottle with his index finger, pulling his gaze to the forest ahead. “You never know when you might need it.”

Okay.

“I don’t think it’s in your best interest to keep telling me these things.”

“Why, are you planning an attack on me or something?”

“I’m not the one telling me the best places to shank someone.”

Slowly, he turns his head to me, hitting me with his eyes that are dark in the shade of night. “Shank?”

Squaring up my spine, I lift my chin. “I think we’ve established I’m not some weak and worthless—”

“You’re not worthless, sweetheart,” he rebuffs. “Never that. I can still feel your shanking just fine in my shoulder.”

Why do I have to feel so bad for people that don’t necessarily deserve it?

I hurt him, not as much as he did me, but regardless...it doesn’t make it better.

“And now you’re regretting it.”

“No,” I state too quickly. “I—”

“When you start thinking about things, you space out. Your eyes center on one thing, and only my voice seems to snap you out of it.”

I scoff lightly. “Anyone’s voice would bring me out of staring off into space.”

“Maybe. But the fireworks show I just put on and the band of trumpets that were just playing—” I laugh at his ridiculous, overexaggerated story, feeling my stomach muscles work out for the first time in a long time.

I place my hand on my belly and lean back in my rocking chair as it sways me back and forth.

“Damn,” Emric mutters. I slant my eyes to him, again, seeing that he shifted his whole body to align with me as his new view. “That’s what it sounds like.”

My cheeks rise in a smile as I say, “What?”

“Your laugh, I’ve always wondered what it sounds like.” My brows descend at his words because there it is again. The strange look that he gives me that I’ve never seen before on other men.

It’s not flirty or a charming smile.

It’s not his voice trying to seduce or melt you.

It’s his eyes, how they pry into you with hidden meanings of things he wants to plant there.

“Why?” I don’t bother to hold it in because I thought I remember him saying that his thing got hard when I beg and plead.

My body repositions. I’m uncomfortable at how quickly he changed his demeanor towards me. How he held a lighter under the palm of my hand and wanted to hurt me. How his vivid eyes tore me to shreds in his sister’s kitchen like he was going to kill me right there.

But then in that bedroom, when his hand covered my mouth, and he told me he wasn’t going to hurt me—that’s where and when the confusion started to form.

I’m not sure how to handle this situation. I’m at a loss of how to feel and maybe how I should be acting. Drinking a beer on the porch with your previous torturer doesn’t sound like something a person with half her brains in her head would do.

But I guess I’ve never been ordinary.

I’m the shadow on the wall that no one notices. The silent footsteps that go unheard because everyone has their nose in their phones or talking to the person at their side.

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