Page 115 of The Prodigal

That’s no kidney video.

“You’re so beautiful,” I say on the video. “So brave.”

“If you’re trying to get me hard, love, congratulations. Now it’ll be awkward for Nurse Susan to come in and give me a sponge bath.”

“Susan,” she warns, “is the least of your worries.”

Clearly, my worries will be much worse than that if Eden keeps playing this video. Imagine explaining to Susan that the reason the sheets are sticky is that my twisted-ass girlfriend taunted me with our sex tape until I came all over myself.

“Tell me, Remington.”

Ah, hell. I know that seductive voice.

“Do you know why Eve was created from a rib on Adam’s side?”

Of course, I do.

But she knows that. She just wants to make a point I won’t appreciate.

“It’s because Eve wasn’t created to walk in front of Adam, or behind him. She was created to walkbesidehim. She was created to be his companion—his eternal partner.”

Her words settle around me like a fog as I draw the parallels in my head.

“What does that story have to do with our sex tape? I highly doubt Adam pulled out his phone, like we did, and banged Eve against the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge.”

“The point is,” she muses, dragging her finger along the base of my throat. “There’s a reason fate brought us together, Remington.”

“No.” I already know what she’s getting at, and it isn’t happening.

She presses her finger against my lips, shushing me. “You don’t get to say no. God didn’t ask Adam if he wanted a companion. He simply did what He knew was best for him and made it happen. He gave him love, Remington. He gave all of us love that will last generations.”

Leaning down, she presses her lips to mine. “If I’m going to make bad decisions, it’s prophesied that you’re to suffer the consequences with me—just like Adam did for Eve.”

Why did my dick get hard just by her using the words suffer and consequences? She may as well have passed me a cigarette with the amount of excitement she just shot through my veins.

“But, I decided that I will give you a choice, Remington, but only this once.”

She hits play on the video again.

“This footage of us is uploaded to the internet. If you answer my next question incorrectly, the entire world will watch you take me against the glass and declare your undying love as I fall apart in your arms.”

A growl climbs up my throat, and I’m immediately sitting up, pulling wires off, and making the machines go crazy. “I’ll fucking kill any man that looks at that footage,” I threaten, ignoring my breathing and all the other shit the doctors told me to watch.

“Then you better answer my question correctly.”

It’s at this moment I realize I was never the brains of this relationship. Eden Da Luca has always known how to play me.

“Are you threatening me, Eden?

She gets low in my face and shoves me back down onto the bed. “I’m not threatening you. I’m blackmailing you.”

She presses a kiss to my aching lips before breathing out the worst words I’ve ever heard. “If you love me and truly want a future with me, you will take my gift. You will take my kidney, and you will let me be your hero.”

“No.”

Her mouth turns down, and she shrugs like that’s fucking fine. “Then you’ll die with the knowledge that strangers will come looking for me. They’ll think they’ve fallen in love with the girl on the sex tape. They’ll look up where I live and find me, and I’ll be alone, because you didn’t choose to accept the gift fated to you. There was a reason I survived that hot car—a reason that you survived Tooney. A reason that your matching kidney is from Albrecht’s daughter. We were meant to survive, Remington. We were meant to save each other. But more importantly, we were meant tobetogether.”

Remington

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