Chapter 51
Blood splatters out of Kendrick Walsh’s mouth. Crimson slips through my fingertips, and as much as torture excites me, I’m too worked up to care. Astin tells me to calm down because I’m killing him without answers, and Alad tells me I should leave and let them deal with it while I check on Pandora.
The thing is, I have a fucking itch to scratch, and nothing else will satisfy me. I want to sink my fist into his chest, grab his heart and twist it. The hunger won’t quench itself until otherwise.
“How did you find out about Pandora?” I say, pacing back and forth in front of him.
Kendrick Walsh, a man with more hair on his body than his head, tanned skin, red eyes and orange hair, sits on a stainless steel chair.
I bound his hands behind him, but three of his fingers hang on strings of flesh, ready to fall off.
Burn marks, sliced flesh, and swelling bruises blister over his body.
“Maya,” he seethes. “She put a hit out on her that was too irresistible to refuse.”
I twitch a smile. So it goes back to her. I wish I had killed her slowly, if I had known this would happen.
Alad hands me his handkerchief when I stand beside him. As I wipe the blood from my hands, I tell him, “Get as much information as possible from him and then kill him.”
Astin eyes me. “You don’t want to do the honours.”
I sigh. “As Alad said, I have more important matters to attend to.”
I leave the interrogation room. Senri stands outside, thanking me for my services.
Before I leave, I tell Senri, “Make sure you tell Walkyer I did my job, and I’m now leaving to head back home.”
I drive the car back to the entrance, my hands tightening on the wheel and my teeth gritting when memories come back of what I witnessed. The first time I had to take care of someone, and I couldn’t fucking do that. I should have ignored Alad, gone with her, and never left her damn sight.
“Fuck,” I hiss.
When I get to the ship, I knock on Pandora’s door. There is no answer. A grimace grips my face, and applying enough pressure, I kick the door until it swings open. Her room is dark, with the blinds closed, shutting out the night, and the bedsheets tucked in, untouched.
“Pandora?”
I open her bathroom, but it’s empty. When I open the closet, there are still clothes in the drawers, and nothing looks missing. She’s likely roaming the ship…or…my room.
Moving up to the third floor, taking the steps two at a time, I enter my room, expecting her to be there. It’s empty. A crunching pain hits my chest, and the steadiness of my heart pounds, breaking against my ribs at the thought of her fleeing, leaving me.
I pull my phone out of my pocket to call Alad when a sliver of breath hitches in the dead of night.
My focus settles on the closet. The doors creak as I open them, and I look up to the top shelf.
I step onto the dresser, push myself up and stare at the woman curled underneath a blanket.
Her brows knit together, and her body trembles as if she has the shakes.
I sigh. “What am I going to do with you?”
As cautiously as I can be, I push myself up, move my legs around her, and lie beside her. She squirms, grumbling in her sleep, but I doubt she will wake. Alad gave her pain medication for the burns on her shoulders.
What do I do now?
I stare at the back of her head and her dark hair. Her shoulder rises and falls when she breathes steadily. Soft breaths suck in and out of her mouth. Pandora’s beside me, and I don’t know how to react.
What do I do?
A shudder works through her, trembling her again until she’s shivering.
My fingers twitch, and before I know what I’m doing, my body reacts faster than my mind.
I send warmth across my hand, enough for it to feel like an electric blanket, and I place my arm over her body, moving closer to her until I’m pressed up against her.
She grumbles. “Reen…”
I smile. “I don’t know about you, little creature, but the likelihood of my hesitating has increased to fifty percent.”
Coldness bites like a spider across my cheek. My brow furrows, and when I open my eyes, Pandora’s facing me. The blankets are still tucked around her, with only her head and arm escaping the confines. Her brown eyes search, scanning my face as if she’s analysing me.
“Morning,” she says, a slight smile on her face.
I smile, too, until my gaze trails across her arm and to the redness throbbing across her shoulder. “Does it hurt? Do you need more medication?”
“It’s stinging,” Pandora agrees.
We leave the closet. I help her down when she bites her lip at another shudder of pain, clenching her shoulders.
As I stand there, I watch her pop two tablets into her mouth and swallow them dry before taking the ointment from the table.
She hisses, and the ointment clatters on the floorboards.
Pandora reaches for it, but I grab hold before she can.
“Let me,” I say.
Blush tickles her cheeks when she looks away and nods.
I squirt the thick ointment onto my hands, rub them together, and, with care, glide it across her right shoulder first. My eyes narrow at the fingerprint marks staining her from where he grabbed her.
They don’t blister and aren’t as bad as I expected, but still… it happened under my watch.
When I finish with her arms, I go to close the ointment when she touches my hands. “Can you do the rest?”
My focus lowers toward her hip. Luring her to the bed, I sit down while she stands over me. Pandora’s careful, her movements slow and frightened. But she’s not afraid of me. No, her actions suggest she fears exposing her darkest story to me.
She lifts her shirt until her upper body is bare. Her soft nipples show this isn’t for pleasure or excitement. Goose pimples prickled across the fat of her breasts, standing on edge.
My focus drops to her hip and the hand trying to conceal it. A darkness looms over me when I take her hand and slide it away from the burns. Unlike the others, these tell a story of her pain. Wrinkled, old, but still…they’re raw burn marks of a hand gripping her by the hip.
I wish they were alive so that I could torture them for the rest of their lives.
“It’s gross, isn’t it?” she says.
I touch her hips, lure her to me, and brush my lips against them.
Her breath hitches as my mouth leaves a flurry of kisses across what repulses her.
When I have kissed every inch of them, ensuring the memory of this moment burns brighter than what they have done, I lather the ointment on my hands and smooth it over the burns.
“Prince Reen…”
My eyes narrow. “Enough with the ‘prince’. Call me Reen.”
“Reen,” she begins, “I don’t want to kill you anymore.”
I breathe a laugh. “Then what do you suggest we do?”
“Can you forgive me?” Pandora’s hand laces through my hair. “I’m sorry that I killed your mother. I didn’t mean for her to die. It’s just—”
“You’re forgiven,” I say, interrupting her. “As for not killing you…it’s an urge hard for me to contain. A trigger in my brain that wants to see your life fade. I don’t know why, but it won’t go away. At least with you around me.”
“What are you suggesting, then?”
“When we get to Oceanview Harbour, I will give you a choice to make.” I kiss her moistened burns. “I want to hunt you…kill you…but I also want you to heal. So, I will break my values for you and give you a chance.”
“What’s the choice?”
I twitch a smile. “Where would the fun be if I told you now?”
“Fucking arsehole.”
And she’s back, the way I enjoy her.
“I’m horny.”
My eyes widen. She’s definitely fucking back.
“Well”,—I pinch my boxers she wears, move them down to her feet and hook my arm under her leg, letting her thigh rest against my shoulder—“I’m fucking hungry.”
Pandora gasps when I devour her. My tongue glides across her slit, tasting her wetness. The hands at her hips move around her, gripping her arse as I burrow in deeper, flicking my tongue across her clit.
But with Pandora, nothing fucking lasts long with her. She crumbles underneath my touch, and before I know it, her body gives out, and she fucking flops onto the ground, trembling with delight and spasming through her orgasm.
I didn’t even get to fucking taste it.
“I’m sorry,” she giggles. “Don’t look at me.”
Resting my arms on my knees, I stare down at her. My shoulders tremble, and as much as I want to suppress it, laughter fills the air.
Fuck me. What the fuck am I going to do with her?