Page 255 of At the Edge of Surrender

“Should have ended you all the second I found out she had been in LA asking questions. But I guess I shouldn’t regret it too much since you led me back to Kane.” He hissed it at my ear.

Uncertainty spiraled. Pressing and pulsing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He barked a shock of laughter before he was back to wheezing. “Ah, so innocent. But you were, weren’t you? That’s why you were my favorite.”

With a lecherous grin, he dragged a finger down my cheek.

Bile surged, and I squeezed my eyes against his taunt.

The foul.

The depraved.

My heart raced, a desperate urging at me to do something.

I had to fight.

I had to fight.

Little Warrior.

Sunlight glinted through the leaves above, flashes across my eyes.

I stumbled on a limb and yelped when he fisted my hair tighter. “Keep moving.”

And that fear spun and spun.

Misery.

Grief.

It wound with the deafening roar of my blood. The tumultuous surging of adrenaline.

The air both dense and thin. A crawling of sensation across my flesh.

A flare of intensity.

A flame of severity.

I felt it move, the energy that stirred and incited.

And there it was, the awareness that had possessed me the first time I’d met him.

Kane.

I felt the violent, menacing presence of him rise over us from behind. The shadow of a wraith that covered and consumed.

The connection a blister of ferocity that I felt one second before Kane shouted, “Emery, get down!”

I let my weight go at the same second a thunderclap of footsteps suddenly burst from behind us.

Kane and the rest.

Oh God.

He came for me. He came.

Pain splintered across my scalp as I dropped to my knees, and the monster gripped tighter, refusing to let me go as he turned around and fired.

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