Page 104 of At the Edge of Surrender

I’d reach out and see if she’d let me take. Take us to that place we both were aching to go.

Press my nose to those lush locks and inhale.

Imbibe everything that she was.

Taste and touch and glut.

Sate this insane desire she created in me and send her soaring again the way her body was begging me to do.

It took every ounce of strength I possessed not to go after her. Everything I had not to chase her up those stairs and into her room. Feast on the beauty that she was. On all that courage and voracity. On all that sweetness and vulnerability.

Assuage the anger that boiled inside her, or maybe just hold her while she raged.

She had the right to it.

To shout and wail and curse the world for stealing her sister from her.

Plus, I recognized enough to know her pain went deeper than that.

Trauma was so clearly written in the depths of those toffee eyes.

The blaze of wrath that burned inside her over whatever she’d suffered so clear, all trapped by the fear that continued to keep her chained.

Fuck, how I wanted to stand in those flames for her. Hunt down whatever or whoever had inflicted the wounds that she so impetuously tried to keep buried.

Scrubbing both palms over my face, I shook myself out of the lust, over the wayward protectiveness that had me itching to possess what I could never have, and moved back through the house, heading for the stairs. I stalled a bit when I thought I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. A fluttering of movement out the window and into the distance beneath the night.

Chest tightening, I edged toward the glass and peered into the darkness that shrouded the house.

A tacky stillness resonated back. The trees gently swaying in the breeze that whispered through, the bare gusts rustling the bushes that lined the lawn and delineated the front yard from the forest that surrounded the house.

My attention swept, searching through the turbulence that I could suddenly taste. That murky intuition that warned something wasn’t right.

Insides lined with steel, I edged up to the door, worked through the locks, and stepped out onto the porch. My chest squeezed tight as I peered out through the nothingness that echoed back.

Just the faint strains of music thudding from Kane’s from a mile away and the calm call of the night.

Nothing that should incite the alarm that resounded inside me.

It had probably just been my reflection in the glass.

Paranoia brought on by the weight of knowing that I was bringing that little girl into this life.

Knowing I had to find a way to protect her against it.

Shield her from the sins and corruption.

Sure of all the ways I’d unleash my barbarity to see it through.

And I would.

I’d meant every word that I’d told Emery.

I would protect that little girl with everything I had.

I refused to fail again.

TWENTY-SIX

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