Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 62580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 250(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 250(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
With that, the little girl in my arms, the solid weight, was gone.
And there Con was, holding onto nothing.
CHAPTER 20
Sometimes there’s nothing left to do but bust a beer bottle open and fuck some people up.
-Fox to Con
CONSTANTINE
My daughter was gone. She’d moved on.
I should’ve been happy. Should’ve been excited that she finally felt secure enough in my continued existence to pass.
You finally have someone that’ll watch over you like I did.
Acadia didn’t know that she was the reason that my little girl left me. My constant companion for the last fifty years. The one I went to talk to when nothing was right in my shitty little world.
The one that was no longer there!
I hit the punching bag harder.
I’d been begging Nola to go for a very long time. I’d talked to her. Pleaded with her. Asked her nicely. Nothing had worked, and then Acadia had come into my life, and my entire existence changed.
I shouldn’t be thinking such vicious thoughts, but I couldn’t help it. If Acadia hadn’t entered my life, things would still be the same. I wouldn’t have had to intervene when she was being raped. I wouldn’t have had to save her. Chen wouldn’t be a fucking vampire when I knew he wasn’t ready to leave his old life yet.
I wouldn’t have Acadia.
Shit.
“You want to go a round?” I heard at my back.
I let the punching bag swing and caught it with my two taped fists, hugging it tightly to my body.
Looking over my shoulder, I saw Corbin standing there, watching me.
“You can’t keep up with me,” I told him bluntly.
“Want to prove it?”
I snorted.
Then, as if to prove it to him, I easily lifted the punching bag, which weighed a good three hundred pounds, up off the hook on the ceiling, brought it down, gripped it, and then tore it in half.
Sand fell to the floor like water, coating the entire ring I was standing in with the black granules.
“That was a seven-hundred-dollar bag,” he told me. “I know because I just purchased nearly the same one not even four months ago.”
I shrugged. “Money is immaterial.”
He snorted. “I have debt up to my asshole.”
I found my first smile in over two hours.
“You work for me, take the job that Render offered you, and you’ll have money up to your asshole instead of debt,” I informed him, dropping the pieces of the punching bag to the floor. “What you can’t do is go back to the old job.”
He nodded, pursing his lips. “I figured that.” He expounded, “With my sister being a vampire and all. Although, I bet she could go back to work right now and pass for a human seeing as she has super-duper iron control now. Though, you cut off that avenue for her when you traipsed her undead body in front of the entire country.”
I stepped out of the ring and walked to the thermos of blood that Chen had set there for my consumption once I finished my workout. Something he’d done for me hundreds of times before.
Corbin studied the trail of sand that I’d left out of the ring.
“Who cleans this shit up?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I think we have housekeepers.”
He looked at me like I was nuts. “You think?”
I nodded.
“How do they get here? Because I’ve not seen any housekeepers yet. I see the girls, Fox’s, cleaning the kitchen. What I don’t see, though, is any housekeepers.” He walked to the side wall where there was a wall of mirrors and stared at himself. “I’m already gaining weight. I need some sort of workout routine, and every person I’ve asked refuses to spar with me.”
“Ask your sister,” I suggested.
He looked at me.
“Have you seen my sister throw a punch?” he asked.
“No.” I shook my head. “But she’s a vampire now. One that has super-duper control, like you said, and a lot of time on her hands. Teach her how to fight.”
His mouth dropped open.
“Would you let me punch my sister?” he questioned me.
The thought of him punching Acadia in any way had my fangs descending.
“That’s what I thought.” Corbin laughed. “But I will teach her how to fight. Though, I suggest you help her with that, too. There’s only so much that the hardheaded woman listens to from me. We get more out of it if Nash is the one to teach her. When she was sixteen, the only person that was able to teach her how to drive without pulling their hair out was Nash. Not even my mother could help her.”
My mouth twitched.
“When she was in the hospital after the accident…” He cleared his throat. “It was bad. We couldn’t get her to snap out of it at all. Nash, however, figured out how to get through the wall she put up, and brought her out of that dark, bottomless pit she was in. Got her back on her feet. To school. I’ve always just been an irritation to her.”