Page 1 of The Last Time You Break Me

Prologue

Lara

Heartless - Rains

Another storm brewed just beyond the window within my ivory tower. A hue of the darkest colors known to man flashed behind the veil of the drapes that hung heavy and brushed against the gray carpet, swaying in the wind as the window remained cracked open. A chilled breeze caressed my body while I laid there, staring at the ceiling above me, subdued.

The princess to a wicked, wicked criminal empire with little to no escape.

Not that I was sure I wanted one. The more I began to age with the days, the more that darkness I kept at bay crept back in.

I was losing the battle to be any kind of princess at all.

The sound that bellowed on the wind screeched, and the raw and untamable voice of a tortured man rioted within the air while it swirled around me like a dying banshee. I sighed and slammed my hands down against the mattress as I hissed infrustration and kicked out my legs in annoyance. I forced the covers to become dispelled from my thighs.

As I rolled to my side, I glared at the door and contemplated who I was ready to slaughter tonight.

I knew what they were doing. Even if the Wyelli family thought their princess was lost to her slumber. Something hot coiled in my core as the screams grew louder—built around me like symphonies of the sick and the twisted. It was slick in the sheen of sweat layered to my skin as the anticipation rose to new heights. It made me restless, and uneasy as I struggled to relax in my own skin. My bones quivered, and expectancy boiled in my veins while I crawled from the bed, to come to stand up on delicate feet.

I tiptoed toward the door, the hellfire lightning flashed at my back, which forced my ominous shadow to sneer back at me with encouragement.

The thunder roared, clapping through the earth as a brutal hand that ushered me toward the one place I knew I should never go. The one place I longed to see deep within the crimson-soaked walls of our mansion.

The dungeons underground were off-limits. Tunneled out and sealed away.

A chamber our enemies had night terrors about.

Only the men within my father’s reign and my father himself stomped down those frozen steps and into the void of an eternal abyss you never returned from the same.

It’s the place I knew he’d always be…

Bones.

My father’s best friend and savage right hand. They called him that because he had a habit of ripping the bones from the bodies of his victims.

While they were still alive.

Psychological torture as he broke them again and again right before their very eyes.

The madman always went for the ribs…

They didn’t know I knew that either.

One. By. One.

He pulled them as he scattered them across the dungeon floor. It was a sick game. The way he forced the enemies of my family to watch as they suffered unimaginable pain, knowing they were going to die. Knowing that one by one, as their bones laid so careless beside them, that the next breath they were to take, would most possibly be their last.

It was demented and something about that made me clench my thighs together.

It was a warped kind of art.

Now, he ventured up those steps bloody and worn. The cruelness stalked me as it glared back. Fury shone brightly in those wicked and chilled gray eyes as he prowled closer.

When I stared at him, I stared at the soulless.

A reaper without remorse.

He had caught me once, long ago when I was only fifteen.

---