Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 55308 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 277(@200wpm)___ 221(@250wpm)___ 184(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55308 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 277(@200wpm)___ 221(@250wpm)___ 184(@300wpm)
There was no good place. There was only survival or death.
There were only men who pushed too hard and stole pieces off the gameboard. Who broke the rules and twisted the sport. Men who were willing to subject dead women in living bodies to the trauma of pregnancy and childbirth they didn’t want.
As if humanity deserved a fresh start. As if the transgression would disappear with a smiling new generation raised by mothers locked on Level 9. Children devoid of fathers like Neil who only wanted to hold their offspring.
Neil who Eugenia knew had fathered at least one of the babies on the ship. He wouldn’t have grieved the loss of holding a baby so much if he hadn’t.
She hadn’t known him well, but he’d seemed like a good man. Yet outside the ship, good men changed. They mutilated the genitals of women for reasons Eugenia couldn’t even begin to grasp.
Even the captain’s leashed men slipped. He’d had to put them down, he’d said.
The lock clicked, the door opening… Eugenia still cleaning up pee, grieving a million different things at once.
Brooke’s mutilated mouth, her glassy-eyed stare… the reason her friend walked with so pronounced a limp. The unbearable guilt for thinking she’d find salvation in saving Brooke.
For knowing that as much as she hated it here, it was better than anything she’d ever found out there. “I’ll never love you. If you got me pregnant, I’ll find a way to not be anymore.”
Eugenia was poison.
Living in such close quarters, she had gotten to know the women on Level 15—the ship the closest thing she had to family in six years. And she couldn’t bear it. She could not bear knowing she’d fed into their desire for freedom they’d never have.
She knew the men. She’d laughed with them, mocked them, yelled at them, belittled them for her own amusement.
She’d grown dependent on Aaron for mental stimulation and a sense of normality. She’d had sex with him and given over to the act. Enjoyed it even after she grasped how he’d tricked her.
Aaron who had no pity left. “Fine. Take off your dress. Get up on the bed. All fours. Don’t look at me.”
His disappointments weighed down upon her back, as if he’d been saving it all up for that moment. The pain of it felt… familiar, because this new world hurt.
Or maybe at heart she was a masochist. Either way, Eugenia deserved what was coming. Which was why she was already lifting the two-day-old blue dress over her head. Which was why she went to the bed as if stumbling through a dream and assumed the position every Level 15 girl knew by heart.
Already up behind her, voice devoid of feeling, the captain ordered, “Spit on your hand. Rub it between your legs.”
Shifting to balance her weight so she might look at her palm, so she might try to make her dry mouth produce saliva, she obeyed. She smeared her opening.
Not that it mattered.
He was in—a solid thrust that lurched her body forward and snapped her teeth together.
Tangling his fist in her hair as if she might disobey and turn her head, he fucked her. Too hard. Too fast.
And it was awful.
But she bore it: his size, his coldness, the sting on her scalp.
How there were no comforting caresses or any type of intimacy.
And on it went, rocking her breasts forward, leaving her wrists aching so she might hold position in the onslaught.
He didn’t come.
Releasing her hair, he took her hips. Pounded faster.
And when she couldn’t take another moment of the captain punishing himself for the sins they shared, she braved a glance over her shoulder.
And found a man in abject misery.
A man who loathed every moment of friction on his cock.
Who’d screwed his eyes shut and thrown back his head as if concentration might make it end sooner.
“Aaron, stop.” Softly said, full of pain for the both of them.
The mechanical pistoning of his hips slowed, those hazel eyes opening to the world he’d created—eyes bloodshot and aged by the hollow, terrible fissure just like hers that ate him from the inside out.
“Didn’t I tell you to keep your head forward?”
She said it again, barely a whisper. “Stop.”
His dick was half hard when he pulled out, when he marched naked to where she’d left her dress on the floor next to a pile of towels covered in human piss.
Picking it up, he threw it at her. “Sleep on the couch.”
There were so many things she could have said.
I don’t understand what’s happening between us.
A lie. She knew exactly what happened. He’d offered her the best world he might create, cobbling it together despite ugly circumstances and personal loss. And she’d rejected it.
Where is the man who wooed me last night?
Gone, literally, barely having pulled up his jeans before he slammed the door.