Total pages in book: 122
Estimated words: 120475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 602(@200wpm)___ 482(@250wpm)___ 402(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 602(@200wpm)___ 482(@250wpm)___ 402(@300wpm)
To make sure he’s got the message, I slammed my fist into his face one more time.
I let him drop, watching as he curls in on himself, blood spattered down the front of his shirt.
“Say her name,” I order.
He whimpers, but I grab his jaw and force him to look at me. “Say it.”
“Moira,” he chokes out.
Only then do I let go. I stand, roll my shoulders, and step over his sorry, bloodied form to walk out the door.
And don’t look back.
The months pass, and I only become more obsessed with my wife
Wherever I go, she’s there, electric and unpredictable and completely fucking mine. At the club, sometimes we let others into our play—Gemini and Jinx, a genderqueer dom/sub pair Moira trusts. But only if I’m leading. Because even when others are involved, she is always, always mine first.
She doesn’t even realize how much it means to me that she chose me. There’s only been one other person in my life who ever chose me over money—my mother. And no, Moira isn’t some replacement for the woman I never got to know.
But it still means something deep. To know that she put me above wealth. For fuck’s sake, she even kept my father trying to buy her off a secret because she thought it would be better for me. She didn’t want to come between me and my father because, in her mind, at least I had a dad. She figured maybe, just maybe, he was looking out for me.
She’s wrong, of course. But the fact that her heart was in the right place? That she was thinking of me first? I’ve lived long enough to know how rare a person like her is.
And I’ll spend the rest of my life proving to her that she made the right choice.
Because for the first time, I’m not alone.
I didn’t even realize how fucking isolated I’d been until suddenly, she was there. Bright and wild and buzzing with energy every morning when I wake up and every night before I fall asleep. She fills every space she enters and lights up every room.
But I see what no one else does.
Sometimes, that light flickers.
She has her down days. She can be reactive, her moods shifting like a storm breaking without warning. She told me once it feels like a balloon popping; one second, she’s floating, untethered, and the next, she’s crashing hard over something as inconsequential as a commercial.
I haven’t brought it up to her yet. She’s sensitive about labels and about having been institutionalized before for her so-called sex addiction.
But it’s obvious—she’s somewhere on the bipolar spectrum. No one ever looked past her manic behaviors, past the reckless sex and the constant motion, to see what was really going on. They just saw the symptoms, not the cause.
It pisses me off. Especially when it comes to her brother.
Domhnall should have seen it. He should have realized. Instead, he just wrote her off. Treated her like a problem instead of a person. I hear the way she talks about him, the way she pretends not to care. But I know better. She does care. She loves him, despite everything.
And he doesn’t deserve it.
I do.
So I’ll keep watching. Keep learning her in all the ways no one else ever bothered to. Every new thing I learn only makes me more obsessed. More devoted. More determined to be the man she deserves. To protect her.
She chose me.
And I’ll keep choosing her every damn day.
THIRTY-NINE
MOIRA
I wake up and immediately roll over, reaching for Bane’s warm, solid chest.
But he’s not there.
I frown, curls spilling into my face as I blink at the empty sheets. Where the hell is he? He’s always here in the morning.
Then it hits me.
Oh. Right. Church.
Ever since he announced the elopement, which we just pretend happened one week earlier than it did, he keeps saying I’m welcome to come. That everyone would love to meet me.
Right. Me, in a church? That would go over great.
I let my arm flop dramatically over my face.
At least marrying me did the trick. He got to keep his job.
But good Lord, I nearly burned the place down just walking through the doors on Christmas Eve. Almost got him fired the next morning after already almost getting him fired two days before. Pretty sure, for both our sakes, I should stay far, far away.
I ruin things. That’s just what I do.
And yet… somehow, I haven’t ruined this.
I roll onto my stomach and shove my face into his pillow. It still smells like him—warm, woodsy, Bane—and I want to rub it all over me like some desperate little pervert.
Which is exactly what I did last night. Long after he said he should go to sleep because he had to be up early. Long after we should’ve gone to sleep.
But I was hungry for him.