Total pages in book: 147
Estimated words: 136048 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 680(@200wpm)___ 544(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 136048 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 680(@200wpm)___ 544(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
I stare at him, and seeing that I’m not buying his shit, he goes on. “Come on, little brother. You’re out of your element here. I’m giving you one chance to walk away,” he tells me. “You’re not cut out for what I have planned for her. You’re too weak. Too pathetic.”
“And what exactly do you think you have planned for her?”
Darkness swells in his stare, and the sick smirk that pulls across his lips makes my stomach churn. “Don’t play dumb, Knight,” he tells me, stepping in closer as though he’s about to share some big secret. “You’ve had a taste of that sweet cunt, you know how tight she is. You’ve sat across from her while she went off at her mother. You’re a Slater. The same blood that runs through my veins runs through yours, so don’t try to tell me that you don’t understand, that you don’t feel that need to break her into submission. It gets you hard, doesn’t it? That’s why you’ve been shacking up with her, right? Just waiting for your moment to crush her.”
Bile rises in my throat, and I take a calming breath, wanting to play this just right. “I hate to break it to you, Elias. But I’m nothing like you. I don’t want to break her into submission. I want to have a fucking life with her. So if you want her, if you want to take what’s mine, then you’re going to have to get through me, and we both know that you couldn’t touch me even if you tried.”
“There’s only one problem with that,” Elias boasts. “You’re too fucking weak. When it comes down to it, you wouldn’t pull the trigger. You’re too good, Knight, and that makes you weak. It’s why our father never cared for you. You’d rather see me locked behind bars than put me in the ground, and I’m telling you now, you’re going to have to put me in the ground in order for me to stop. I’m taking that girl one way or another. I’ve put in too much work for you to fuck with my plan now. She’ll be mine, Knight, and when I take her, I’m not only going to break her, I’ll fucking destroy her.”
I let out a breath, my hand balling into a tight fist, and then with the force of a fucking freight train, I snap my fist across Elias’s jaw, sending him flying back against his private bar, every expensive bottle of alcohol rattling on the shelves.
The bar breaks under his weight, and as he groans in pain, I hold my hand out and indicate with my fingers for him to stand. “Get up,” I growl, unable to stand seeing my brother look so weak and pathetic, the exact things he’d just accused me of being.
Elias gets to his feet, his hand rubbing over his jaw as his venomous stare locks onto mine. His hands ball into fists, and he comes for me, already swinging, but I beat him to the punch, my fist slamming straight into his stomach.
He sucks in a breath, his eyes going wide, but now that I’ve started, I can’t possibly stop. I hit him again and again, every brutal blow given courtesy of my girl. His nose breaks under the force, and as he crumples to the ground, taking hit after hit, I go down with him, watching as his skin turns black and blue under my knuckles.
I’m fucking relentless, proving to him once and for all that I’m not the pathetic kid he once knew. I’m never going to just step in line like I might have done before I knew any better. I’m a fucking force to be reckoned with, and now that he’s put his hands on my girl and tried to take her life, there’s one hell of a steep price to pay.
Every blow lands with Harper in mind, remembering the fear she must have felt when she was bleeding out on the cold concrete, recalling the pool of blood left in her wake, the agony of surgery, and the terror of finding him in our home and having to fight him off.
Everything he has inflicted on her comes back to him tenfold, and I don’t stop until he’s convulsing on the ground in a pool of his own blood. Only then do I pull back and tear a strip off his designer suit jacket and use it to wipe the blood off my split knuckles.
He lies motionless on the ground, his eyes swelling but still tracking me as I wander over to his destroyed bar, not even surprised to find that Mae hasn’t come to find out what’s caused all the noise. If anything, she’s probably hoping I kill him so she can cash in on the inheritance.