Another power she has. It’s a fucking curse and a blessing.
Reaching up, she runs her hand through my wet hair, her nails gently scraping my scalp, and just like that, she smothers all anger and makes a shudder run through me. I lean forward, pressing my forehead to her chest and soaking her shirt. My hands loosen from her thighs and wrap around her thin waist. She’s started putting weight on since Kellan shot her. But she’s still too small. Too far from where she was the night I found her in the cemetery. Even then, she was little, but now she teeters on breakable. Too fragile. I hate it!
“I’m right here, baby,” she assures me, kissing my wet hair. “And Kellan can’t touch us anymore.” Tightening her fingers in my hair, she rips my face from her chest and makes me look up at her. “Because of you, I’m safe now.”
I just stare at her. The porch lights are off, but the pool light casts a glow around us, making her green eyes shine. They hold concern. She thinks I’m going crazy, and she’s not wrong. I reach up and push the few strands of dark hair behind her ear, and the pad of my finger runs over all her piercings.
“Talk to me,” she says softly, cupping my face.
I hate when she does this—coddles me like a fucking child. And I hate it even more that I need it. Her hands on me. Her lips on mine. Any time I start to feel that fire brewing, she smothers it with a single touch. Reminding me that I’m only human. A human can’t protect her. I need to be invincible.
The song finishes and changes to “Into It” by Chase Atlantic. I pull back, grab her wrists, and yank her into the pool. She gasps from the cool water. Grabbing the hem of her shirt, I yank it up and over her head. After I toss the soaked fabric to the side, my lips are on hers, and my hands are in her hair. Her body shivers against mine, and I press my now hard cock into her lower stomach.
“I need you,” I pant, pulling away from her lips. Pride is no longer a concern when it comes to my love for this woman.
Her eyes search my face before they land on mine. “Whatever you want, Cole. I’m yours.”
I hate how willingly she gives herself to me. I’ve made this gorgeous woman bleed for me, and she forgives me. Just like that. See, I told you love equals madness. Because she is just as mad as I am.
I grab her right arm and slowly kiss the scar from where I took a knife to her flawless skin. She yanks it back from me and cups my face with both of her hands, forcing me to look at her. “Stop!” she demands. “Every love story demands a sacrifice.”
“Don’t say that.” My voice is pained.
She gives me a soft smile, trying to reassure me, but it’s not working. “Then let it go, Cole. I have.”
I wish it were that easy. She’ll forever have a reminder that I hurt her. That I thought of her as nothing other than a toy. Something to fuck with and destroy.
“I can’t.” My hands grip her narrow hips, and I dig my fingers into her skin. She doesn’t flinch. She’s always been able to take what I dish out. That’s one of the things I love about her.
“Kiss me.”
“Austin, I …”
“Fucking kiss me, Cole!” she growls as her hand falls beneath the water and finds its way into my shorts, seeking out my hard cock.
We’ve only made love since Kellan tried to kill her. I’ve tried to be slow and gentle with her, but I can tell she’s bored with it. She wants more. She’s been an outlet for my rage ever since I met her, and she knows it. But I’ve held back from giving it to her, wanting her to heal.
“I can take it, Cole.” She presses her lips to mine and gently kisses me. I don’t respond. “I dare you to fuck me, Cole, like I know you can.” Smiling up at me, she strokes me with her hand, but still, I do nothing. “Show me that I belong to you.” She stops stroking me long enough to push my board shorts down my legs. Then she leans in, running her tongue along my upper lip. My cock jerks in her hand, and she moans against my lips. “Like you fucking own me.”
“I can’t …”
She slaps me across the face. Hard. It surprises me and turns me on even more.
My breathing picks up, and her eyes glare into mine.
“You like a little pain, Cole. I do too,” she says as she drags her nails down my chest, breaking the skin. The chlorine from the water makes it sting. “Stop treating me like I’m gonna break and give me what I want.” Her lips slowly lift at the corners, giving me an evil smile that makes my heart beat faster. I love when her mind goes to a dark place. “You once told me that you wanted to make me a beautiful broken doll, Cole. All yours to play with. All yours to fuck. All yours to destroy.” She licks her lips. “Don’t go soft on me now.” She leans forward and runs her tongue along my lower lip, and I shudder. “Cole Reynolds is a fucking shark. You …”
My hands tighten in her hair, and she whimpers. “Is this what you want?” I growl, hating how right she is. That this is what we need. I hold her head in place and lower mine to where our lips almost touch. “I might hurt you.” Austin Lowes challenges my sanity and my patience. But fuck, I can’t deny that she was made for me. And I for her.
She gives me a sadistic smile as her arms wrap around my waist. “I dare you to do your best.”
“You know what those words mean to me,” I growl.
She closes her eyes. “I do.”
“You’re gonna regret that.”
Her lips part, and she begins to pant. “I hope so.”
I press my lips to hers. Within a second, I’m inside her, fucking her up against the wall of the pool as I swallow her moans and cries. Her back is up against the side of the pool, so I’m sure she’ll have marks. I can’t wait to see them while I fuck her from behind when we wake up in the morning.
I pull my lips from hers, and her head falls back, exposing her delicate neck to me as she cries out. Water splashes around us, and I hold her to me like she’s going to vanish any second.
This may be the last time you ever see her. My mind thinks of this shit every second of every day.
It’s fucking exhausting.
“Cole …” She pants.
I pick up the pace. This may be the last time she says your name. Or can touch you. I wrap my hand in her hair again and lift her head so she has to look up at me. Her eyes are now heavy, and her lips parted. She’s so close. I bury my face in her neck and nip at her skin, tasting the chlorine on her.
“Fuck, you feel so goddamn good, sweetheart,” I growl, never wanting to be without this. Without her.
Her nails dig into my sides as she pulls me into her, wanting more. Needing more. Her pussy tightens around me, and she cries out into the darkness. I follow right after her.
“I love you,” I tell her breathlessly.
“I love you too, Cole Reynolds,” she says in a soft voice.
I take her left hand in mine and look at her engagement ring. I proposed the other day here in the kitchen. Becky had come over to have breakfast with her before she went shopping with her mother and sister for the day. It wasn’t a big fancy show of affection, but that doesn’t matter to Austin. She’s not that kind of girl, and we’ve never had that type of relationship. She knows I’d kill for her, so me spouting some stupid fucking words about forever isn’t what she wants to hear.
I kiss her ring and then her lips again. When she pulls away, she gives me that smile. The one that makes me feel like the luckiest guy in the world.
“Let’s go to bed, baby. I’m tired.”
I carry her over to the steps. “Go on in. I’ll be right there.”
I watch her get out, water dripping off her body like a downpour. I’d willingly drown in it. Grabbing the towel I had for myself, she looks over her shoulder and winks at me. I smile at her. Once she is inside, the smile drops off my face, and I let out a long breath. I tilt my head back and lower myself into the water, sinking to the bottom. I sit there for as long as I can. My lungs burning for air. This isn’t the first time I’ve done this, and it won’t be the last. The need to kill is gone, but the rage is still
there. When Austin looks at my fisted hands or narrowed eyes, and she hugs me or kisses me, she makes it better for the time being. But the moment she walks out of my sight, it’s back.
I get out of the pool and wring out my shorts before putting them back on. Then I do the same with my shirt I took off her and grab my phone. Walking into the house, I make my way to the kitchen for a bottle of water. I find Deke in the kitchen with a girl he brought over from the club. He hasn’t mentioned anything about the car wreck or Becky since that night before we left Collins. And for once, I can’t tell if he’s putting on a front like everything is okay, or if he has truly forgiven me and moved on. I hate it. I want to ask him, but Deke’s like me. He’ll come to me when he wants to discuss it. And it’s not like he’ll have to go far. He ended up moving in with us when Becky decided not to.
“Late night swim?” he asks, looking over my wet shorts with a chuckle. My wet shirt hangs from my right hand.
I nod. “Like every night.”
He slaps the ass of the redhead who stands next to him while they both snack on cookies that Austin and Lilly made yesterday.
“Have fun tonight?” I ask.
He nods. “There’s this club downtown. You need to go with me next weekend. It’s badass.”
I’m not really into clubs. I was never really even into parties after the death of our three friends. I would throw them at Liam’s house, but I mostly stayed locked up in the game room. But I say, “Sure.” I feel like I need to spend as much time as I can with him now. He needs me. Just like Becky needs Austin. They’re both hurting for different reasons.
“Bennett is coming down next weekend. He already said he would go.”
“Sounds like a plan.” I slap him on the shoulder and head back upstairs. I enter our bedroom to find it empty. “Austin?” I call out, closing the door behind me.
No response. My fear that something has happened to her rises. The covers are pulled back, but I don’t see my towel anywhere. My heart begins to pound. “Austin?”
I enter our master bath and see her through the stained-glass shower door. Letting out the breath I was holding, I run a hand through my wet hair, then strip out of my shorts and join her. She has her head back, the water falling down over her face before rolling down over her perfect fucking tits and flat stomach. Any sign that Kellan ever laid his hands on her has disappeared except for the scar from her surgery, but even that’s fading.
“Cole …”
Her voice pulls me out of my thoughts, and I wrap my arms around her, pushing her into the wall. She laughs, opening her beautiful eyes, and looks up at me. I cup her warm cheek, and she blinks. Waterdrops fall off her long, dark lashes and run down her face. She licks her wet lips.
“I hope you didn’t think I was done with you tonight.” My voice comes out rough, letting her know what’s on my mind. I hope she thinks it’s lust and not the memory of her death.
I lower my head into her neck, and my right hand grips her thigh and brings it up to wrap around my waist.
“No,” she breathes, her hands digging into my hair. She leans her head to the side, giving me better access to her neck. “I expected more from you.”
I pull back and look down at her. I expected you to fight for me. She didn’t disappoint. I didn’t save her. She saved herself. She did exactly what I told her to do that day I chased her out of her father’s house and up to the cemetery. When I challenged her to fight.
She gives me a playful smile. “After all, I’m still standing.”
I lift my left hand and wrap it around her neck, holding her to the wall. She arches up on her tiptoes. The warm water rains down from the shower head, splashing the sides of our bodies. “You’ll be crawling when I’m done with you.”
There’s a glint in her green eyes when she whispers, “Promise?”
“Oh, I promise you, sweetheart.”
EPILOGUE TWO
BENNETT
I UNLOCK THE door to the clubhouse and step inside. First thing I do is take my shirt off. It smells like her. Then I undo my pants and kick my shoes off followed by my jeans. They, too, smell like her.
It’s too much.
After we made love tonight, she dumped me. It’s better this way, she had cried. I didn’t want to look pathetic, but I begged her to reconsider. To give me a chance to fix whatever she thought was wrong. But I have no fucking clue what that could be.
It fell on deaf ears. She had made up her mind, and that was that. After all this time, the woman I fell in love with no longer wanted me. After all the lies and sneaking around, she just ended it like I was some fling. But I know the truth. I was more than that, and it scared her.
I go to walk up the stairs to the loft so I can go to bed but come to a stop when I see the glass bowl that we have always drawn our dares from sitting on the table to the right. Why is it out? We only get it out of the cabinet when we meet up.
My heart starts to beat faster. It has a folded piece of paper in it.
I look around the silent clubhouse, and an eerie feeling creeps up my spine.
Swallowing, I walk over to the table and pick it up with shaking hands. I unfold the note, and my breath gets stuck in my throat when I read the words typed out on it.
This glass bowl can break just as easily as your promise. What would you do to keep them both intact?
To be continued …
PLAYLIST
Deadset Society – “Like A Nightmare”
Starset – “My Demons”
No Resolve – “What You Deserve”
My Darkest Day – “Nature of The Beast”
Valerie Broussand – “Trouble”
Seven Day Sleep – “Down”
Memory of A Melody – “Things That Make You Scream”
Adelitas Way – “Invincible”
Sin Shake Sin – “Can’t Go to Hell”
Memory of A Melody – “Darkest Hour”
TheUnder – “Ready to Die”
Zero – “Left Alone”
MISSIOS – “I Don’t Even Care About You”
Halsey – “Nightmare”
Nina Nesbitt – “The Best you Had”
Redlight King – “Boneshaker”
The Score – “Legend”
Yungblud & Halsey – “I Will Follow You into the Dark”
PROLOGUE
DEKE
DEATH IS A debt we are all born owing.
It’s something that money can’t buy nor can it be traded.
You can’t bargain for more time. When it’s up, you accept it like a fucking man.
I’ve never been afraid to die. Or to love, for that matter.
Aren’t they the same?
You surrender to a fate you have no control over. You don’t get to choose when or how you die, just as you can’t choose when and who you fall in love with.
Some couples get a happily ever after while others are toxic for one another.
My love was like that.
She lied; I believed every word.
I hurt her; she forgave too easily.
It was a vicious circle of deceit and sex wrapped in a pretty black bow. Neither one of us could quit.
I wrapped my hand around her throat, and she begged me to breathe.
She stabbed me in the heart and demanded I bleed.
She might as well have been fucking poison, but I would have drunk her anyway.
That was the kind of obsession I had for her.
I knew how it would end—total devastation.
A war zone of broken bones and bleeding souls.
I should have hated her, but that’s the funny thing about love—it’s out of your control. And even when it leaves you with two black eyes, you beg for more.
People are afraid of the unknown, but I never feared death, and love was no different.
She was going to destroy me, and I was going to let her.
It was a game that could only end one way—a slow and torturous death.
; CHAPTER ONE
DEKE
I dare you
A LITTLE GAME my friends and I have played since we were kids. Every Sunday, we get together and write a dare, and the lucky son of a bitch whose turn it is gets to pluck one from the glass bowl and fulfill it. You have a month to complete it; once your time is up, you must face the consequence if you haven’t. Each dare has one, but none of us has ever refused the dare. Some are harmless. Others illegal. Just depends on whose dare you get and what their mood is at the time.
My best friend Eli dared our friend Cole to ride a skateboard down a hill. He did it, of course, but ended up with bruised elbows, scraped knees, and bloody hands. After we all ran down the hill to help him stand, we found him sitting on the ground with a smile on his face. It was as though he enjoyed the pain and the sight of the blood. And from then on, we found ourselves daring one another to do something that could either get us killed or thrown in jail. We didn’t care. Nothing scared any of us, for that matter. But as we got older, the dares got more dangerous and then turned illegal. Girls got involved and … well, let’s just say the game went from eight boys fucking around to five friends trying to figure out how we ended up haunted by our past.
We fucked up along the way. Some of us fell in love with the wrong girl. And some of us would die at the hands of others. It was a sick game we were going to end. And finish it is exactly what we had to do. Even if that meant killing one of our own. We were sharks and not all sharks can swim with others.
Sixteen years old
For the second night in a row, I find myself standing in Bennett’s parents’ basement. We threw a party here last night that ended in several fights. My best friend Cole got his dick sucked by Trenten’s girlfriend in the closet, and Kellan somehow started a fight between Cole and Trenten. It ended in Cole throwing some punches and me getting jumped from behind. Some fucker hit me in the back of the head with a glass cross. Once shit settled down, Cole took me to my sister’s to get it stitched up even though I assured him I’d be fine.
Now here we are. It’s Sunday, and we’re back to draw a dare. It’s my turn.
DARE SERIES COLLECTION Page 54