Total pages in book: 55
Estimated words: 51051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 255(@200wpm)___ 204(@250wpm)___ 170(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 51051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 255(@200wpm)___ 204(@250wpm)___ 170(@300wpm)
I grabbed her wrist, and we stared at each other. Fuck, those eyes were something else. Deep pools a man could drown in. “What would you know about scars, sweetheart?”
She tugged at her arm and smiled when I wouldn’t release it. “Gotta let go so I can show you.”
Reluctantly, I deprived myself of her touch. But fuck, that pain was immediately extinguished as she used the tip of the blade to lift the hem of her black tank top, pulling it up over her sexy-as-fuck double D tits covered in black lace. She never took off her shirt when we fucked. I’d tried to remove it once, and she’d pulled her knife and held it to my wrist, telling me if I didn’t stop, I’d need a hook to replace my fingers.
My cock was fuckin’ straining like a soldier in a damn military parade. “Still not seeing any scars, baby. All I see is mountains whose peaks I want to touch.”
She laughed and turned.
My. Fucking. God.
Her back. Her entire back was covered in a crisscross pattern of healed wounds.
Chapter 11
Zeke—Age 29
Present Day
What are you supposed to do when you’re in love with three people, and one of them betrays and harms the other? It’s a frustrating and confusing situation.
Part of me sympathizes with Lev. The guy is pretty fucked up, and I can see how that wheel in his brain would think that kidnapping Mona would force Azadeh to come to the manor. But for Christ's sake, he should’ve known our girl would slice his dick off for messing with her kid sister.
Another part of me wants to fuckin’ beat his head in until a pool of blood frames his pretty little face. Mona. The motherfucker took Mona. I glance between Lev and Azadeh, trying to gauge on a scale of one to ten how homicidal she is.
Azadeh’s face is blank, which scares me more than her anger. She doesn’t hide her emotions. When we were kids, her mother worried how the neighbors would judge her, but Azadeh didn’t care. Her response to her mother was, “Did you bring me to America to worry about the chatter of pathetic gossip or so I could be free?” Her mother mumbled something under her breath and shook her head—Mrs. Baran’s version of “I’ll turn my head, and you do what you want, but if you get caught, I’ll punish you.” I discovered that way of thinking was common in Persian culture. Don’t ask and don’t tell—a whole damn cultural philosophy.
At first, I assumed it was a religious aspect, but the Barans had no fondness or affiliation with a god of any shape or form. I think that’s what attracted me to the family. I loved being around Azadeh, but her mother became important to me. Nasrin Baran had many opinions but lacked a judgmental bone in her body. Being in their company allowed me a reprieve from my psychotic preacher father and robot mother.
My affinity with the Barans Is why I have the urge to snap Lev’s neck and watch his dead body fall at my feet. I’ve never wanted to harm Lev before. If anything, I’m fiercely protective of him. What he’s gone through is far worse in many ways than the trauma Cyrus and I are burdened with. The only negative emotion I’ve ever harbored toward Lev was jealousy, and I knew that was fucked up.
It's fucked up to be jealous of someone I love, and I love Lev deeply. So much that not being with him romantically is like a razor cutting through my soul. But Lev and Azadeh have a connection I’ll never understand. Both of them were party to a systematic type of abuse that caused severe scars that hide below the surface. The world sees my and Cyrus’s damage, but Azadeh and Lev’s trauma isn’t worn on their flesh. It’s ingrained in their minds.
I touch the patch covering my eye, and my mind wanders to the night I lost it. When Azadeh, Nasrin, and Mona rushed me to the hospital after my father gouged out my eye with a soup spoon. They held my hand and told a shit-scared seventeen-year-old kid it would all be okay. Nasrin even told me I could live with them. She said she’d fight my parents. I knew that wasn’t possible because she’d never be able to go toe to toe with my dad, the great Reverend Joseph Summers. I appreciated her sentiment since she was the first adult to give a damn about me. But no one believed my father beat the shit out of me, let alone that he was capable of strapping me down as he scooped my eyeball from my socket like a child digging for treasure in their ice cream cup.
My father took out his wrath on my flesh, some fucked up ritual to cast out his demons. Dearest Dad, who couldn’t bear the world to unearth his greatest secret—his son’s attraction to men. Guess finding gay porn under his pubescent son’s mattress drove him to the edge. The man probably figured he’d beat my bisexuality out of me. God forbid his son got off on the idea of a cock up his ass while he pounded into a wet pussy.