Page 63 of Innocence
I tried to get back to her. I really did.
“Kya.”
Someone was calling me. Was it God?
“Fuck!”
I was being lifted up now.
The bright warm lights of heaven shone down on me through God’s eyes. The worry shining in his bright blue gaze was breathtaking. But wait… that wasn’t God. It was a man.
A gorgeous man, with thick, dark hair. I was wrong, someone did care about me. You only worried like that about people you cared about. A tear dripped from the corner of my eye. That was all I ever wanted.
I reached up and cupped his cheek.
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” I whispered, and fell back into darkness.
“Don’t you fucking leave me, Rose.”
Ichecked in with Jerome for the hundredth time. This shit was really starting to piss me off. Why the hell was I so worried? It was Kya’s own damn fault.
If she hadn’t gone past her limits, none of this would’ve happened. Now, I was the one haunted with the image of her twitching body.
No one used that path. It led to a cave where the hot springs sat. There was a reason we had the bathhouse. It wasn’t a very safe trek into the rocky surface.
A few years ago, one of the slaves sliced their leg open. Kya’s lucky I found her at all. It’d been a long time since anyone went down that path. How the fuck did she even find it?
I heard her before I saw her. Quiet little cries that rang through the courtyard. Her reaction was highly uncalled for. The shocks her collar delivered weren’t enough to cause any physical damage.
They just hurt. There was absolutely no reason for Kya to act like she was dying. Or for me to fret over her like a child.
I should’ve left her there. It would’ve served her right, twitching on the ground all night. My pet scared me half to death. Had me thinking I’d turned it up more than I thought I had. And what did the doctor say? She was perfectly fine. Probably passed out from fear.
I should’ve torn that collar off her neck and tanned her ass right then and there, is what I should’ve done.
“Still pissed at your new toy?” Bias chuckled.
My response came out in a deep growl, “What the fuck do you think?”
Kya Caruthers would be the death of me. Had me carrying her through the house, praying to a god I didn’t believe in that she’d be okay.
And why? Because I was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
What the fuck, Lorenzo.
It didn’t mean anything. Just a bunch of words, sputtered from a half-conscious girl. Yet I couldn’t shake it. The way she looked at me, love and gratitude shimmering in her pretty lavender eyes.
Rose used to look at me like that. As if the sun would rise and set at my command. She also thought I was beautiful. In fact, that was one of the last things she said to me…
“Found you,”I called out, parting the bush Rose was snickering behind.
She squealed and jumped up, taking off around the fountain. I muttered out a curse and chased after her. Hide and seek was never easy with her. I swear she wouldn’t be happy until I passed out from exhaustion.
Smash.
“Ouch. Enzo.”
Or died from a heart attack.
