Pain erupted at my lips as his teeth crashed into them, warm metallic blood filling my mouth. Another growl as it filled his, the hardness at my stomach telling me he liked it, having my blood in his mouth.
The wetness soaking my panties told me I liked it too.
The kiss was nothing I’d ever experienced before. Nothing I didn’t think anyone had experienced, because no way could anyone survive it. It was wrong. Depraved to be kissing someone moments after they’d confessed murder. While they were covered in blood.
But there was nothing on earth I could’ve been doing—breathing had never been as important to me as having Gage’s mouth moving against mine. This was breathing, truly breathing. He wasn’t giving me the kiss of life. It was the kiss of death, and all I could think of was more.
And the second I thought that, it was taken away from me, just as brutally as it was given.
I let out a little cry of protest as Gage’s hands came up to either side of his face. The cords in his neck were tight, etched with evidence of the effort it was taking him to be still in the moment after the chaos of our kiss. His eyes silenced me, the beautiful cruel desire in them stopping my heartbeat. Or at the very least controlling it.
“This is it, Lauren,” he clipped, his voice little more than a low growl. “The last moment I’m gonna give you to step away from this. The last moment I’m gonna be able to let you step away from this. Me. Us.”
He didn’t say anything else, his jaw clenched to the point of shattering.
But he didn’t need to say anything else, because his words were clear. He was giving me one last chance to escape. To gather the ruins of the life he’d blown into, pick up the pieces that were still big enough to be glued back together so one day he would be but a ghost of a time when I could’ve taken a different path.
It was tempting. Safe.
And not at all an option.
I shook my head slowly. “I’m not going anywhere,” I murmured, my voice throaty and raw.
“So be it,” he rasped.
And then his lips were on top of mine, more brutal than before, because there was no end now.
This was the end.
Gage
She tasted like peppermint.
Fucking peppermint.
He still had the rancid taste of death on his tongue, but the second his mouth invaded hers, it was gone. Replaced with that clean and fresh fucking taste.
Replaced with her.
She was clean.
Or she had been until the moment she’d opened that door.
Fuck, until the moment she’d gotten on the back of his bike that night an eternity ago.
A good man would not have knocked on a clean and innocent woman’s door at midnight. He sure as shit wouldn’t be doing it covered in the blood of a man he’d killed. And no way in fuck would a sane man admit he’d killed someone when he held the most innocent and cleanest of women in his arms. Because that was a surefire way to make sure that innocent and clean woman would run.
But Gage was not a good man. Or a sane one.
So he’d come after finally ending the fuck he’d found raping a girl chained to a bed, while another one bled out on the floor beside him, after calling in someone who would disappear the girl who’d survived—though it was a shitty word for what she had done.
Survive.
She was not a survivor. Because shit like that killed a lot of important things inside a person. Shit like that pretty much killed everything that person would need to exist in normal society.
Whatever the fuck normal was.
Whatever it was, she’d never exist within the parameters of normal again. A trauma that dark guaranteed the death of the soul.
So she was not a survivor.
A zombie was closer to what she was at that moment and would be every moment after that. Gage wasn’t one to save damsels, and even if he was, there was no saving that one. So he did all he could do, putting her in a car with a man he trusted to give her whatever life she had left, would ever have.
After that, he rode hard.
It was a dangerous and reckless thing to do, speed through the state wearing a well-known MC patch on his back and a pint of blood on his front. Blood that wasn’t his. If he’d been pulled over, he would’ve been fucked.
But he was already fucked. And staying stationary with his demons clawing at his skin, with the images of those girls ripping at the flesh inside his mind—fuck, that was suicide. Because if he’d stayed even a moment to shower, change clothes, get sleep that had been absent for days now, he wouldn’t have washed shit. Wouldn’t have gotten clean. Nor slept. He would’ve found a needle, plunged it into his favorite vein.