Chapter 35VINCENZO POVHer clothes tore like a fucking wet paper. Her tongue hugged mine in a wet sloppy kiss, and I fucking saw stars. Her fury tasted like redemption, her fire like liberation on my tongue. Everything inside me expanded at the same time it unravelled, leaving me a panting mess as I kissed her like I wanted to kill her with my mouth. “GET OUT,” I growled deep and low before claiming her mouth, and the sound of feet shuffling on the floor filled the space before the door closed with a soft click. Kyomi clutched my shirt like it was a lifebelt, her lips reciprocating my assault with the same kind of hunger; same level of passion. Although there was nothing passionate about that moment. It was war. Fatal and dadly in all the ways one could ever think of. There was just something about her fire that lit me up; the way she burst through the damn doors like she owned the damn place before spitting venom all around the damn space. And when she hit me, that small thing
Chapter 34 KYOMI POV Hours bled into days, and Vincenzo and I fell into a little routine. He would burst through the doors in the morning with a tray of breakfast, feed me with his own hand while smoldering me with his grey eyes. The lunches were the same as well, him attending to my every need. After a few hours of him being gone to do God knows what- probably to terrorize people and demons alike- he would come back to bath me, put me in fresh clothes and tuck me in bed before shoving dinner down my throat. He touched me like he owned me, cared for me like I was his little broken toy. And all the time, I let him. I let him touch the physical shell he was utterly obsessed with, let him rule over my flesh the way he liked it. But anything beyond that was mine. I let him hear my voice when I wanted to. He would snap and break thing, punch holes in the holes because I didn’t say a word, and I would just sit back watching him go berserk. The man had stolen so much for me, it was onl
Chapter 33 KYOMI POV Consciousness came with a dull, throbbing ache. The kind that settled in my bones and lungs like cold grief. My throat was raw, my limbs a thick consistency of maple syrup. But above it all, I felt… heavy. Like my bones weight a fucking tone inside my skin. A groan fell off my lips, and I winced as the little sound scratched on my patched throat like finger nails on a chalk board. I cracked my eyes open and my surroundings came into view, blurry and unfamiliar at first. Slowly, clarity seeped back into the dry bones and torn cracks, and I saw it all. My body laying on the bed with a big pillow to prop it, an IV drip hooked into my arm, and the unmistakable presence that seemed to absorb all the air in the room. I was in Vincenzo’s bedroom. A tall silhouette stood by the window, unmoving and heavy, a soft murmur filling the space as he spoke the into his phone in hushed tones. “Ricardo needs to be dealt with.” His back was turned against me, but I was abl
Chapter 32VINCENZO POVThe day seemed both an eternity and a millisecond. I stood behind the metal chair, sleeves rolled up to my elbows, and the cold edge of my blade smeared with something warmer than regret. Blood pooled on the concrete floor beneath my feet, filling the abandoned warehouse with a coppery scent that seemed to overshadow the smell of rot and piss. The place was more than perfect; a graveyard where rats crawled to die peacefully. A place where I received answers, or sometimes invited the grim reaper to join the party I wiped a thumb underneath the bridge between my nose and mouth, then rounded the chair before stopping in front of the Armenian runner. His breaths were wet, rattled; his screaming had stopped five minutes ago. Which meant he was either unconscious or giving up the futile fight. Because come hell or high water, I was getting the information I came here for. It wasn’t hard tracing their little secret hide out, and it sure didn’t cost us an arm and
Chapter 31KYOMI POVThe ceiling had teeth.Or maybe it was just the fragments of my imagination that had enlarged, come alive, and started to form figures and shapes in front of my eyes; but I could have sworn that the corners were spinning again, curling into cold snarls every time I blinked too hard. My mouth tasted like raw cotton, my limbs slumped like syrup. The line between reality and dreams thinned and blurred on the edges, until everything was a jumbled mess in front of me. The chest dresser laughed at me as I rose from my sleeping position and pulled myself into a sitting position, the bed creaked underneath my weight, but I swear it sounded like a mocking chuckle.And that very moment, somebody decided that it was perfect time to blast music, making the sounds to thump in my head on a steady rhythm. I peeled my eyes open to find out I was alone in the bedroom, with nobody else but the entities from my thoughts that had all come to life. And that there was actually no on
Chapter 30KYOMI POVThe following day was a mishmash of aching body, confusion, and heartache as the density of my epiphany fully sank in. The third day with only my thoughts to feed from my sanity had finally blurred the edges of the world into soft, smudged black lines. The warm walls of Vincenzo Russo’s lavish mansion closed in on me like they were breathing; alive. If the experts somehow found me in that position, they would declare me legally unstable. I lay curled on top of the bed, not under it where monsters and demons lurked. Covers felt too heavy on my body, too much, with a drizzle of phantom comfort I sure as hell didn’t need. I stared at the white dot on the ceiling wondering just how that freak let it be there, desperately trying to jot everything down to another play of my imagination. A cold, manifestation of my visceral nightmares and hallucinations. I figured that hunger may have exhausted my mind so badly that I was starting to see things that were actually not