Chapter 48 ZAGHAN #2
I was just at the right place at the wrong time, I guess.
All I did was kill the detectives that came into my home, threatened me and took away my bride.
I just appeared at Takahashi’s to take my woman back home.
But of course, my darling wife already had this preconceived idea that if anything ever happened to her friend, it was me.
I agreed, I often made a lot of threats. I do intentionally push her buttons sometimes…then apologise for my actions between her quivering legs. Most times, it was just to see the flicker of rage in her eyes.
I wouldn’t have killed her best friend. I was uncomfortable with her loyalty to him. But I would have given him a lot of grace for her sake. I wouldn’t have killed him…just yet, and if I was, my death would have been…kinder.
I wanted to break her.
But not like this.
“Where to, Marshal?” The soldier behind the wheel asked, snapping me from the war within me.
“Home.” Was my curt reply.
I wondered what my grieving wife had been up to. I wondered what she would press against my throat today. Another dagger? A gun? Maybe poison. God, she was so hot when trying to kill me.
???
The room was quiet when I walked in, thick with something unsaid.
I looked around, and she was there, exactly where I was sure I left her earlier this morning; the window side. She was always there.
My gaze lingered on her for a moment, a faint flicker of curiosity threading through my exhaustion.
What exactly did she see out there that seemed to have her eyes so glued all the time?
The mountains that wrap around the manor like a fortress were the same every single day.
They were unchanging and eternal. Yet every day and every minute, she would stare as if expecting something, as if something beyond these walls called to her in a language only she understood.
Exhaling, I moved further into the room and dropped onto the black leather couch. I said nothing. Neither did she.
For a moment, I considered fucking the silence out of her; face buried in the mattress, red hair tangled in my grip as her hips snapped back on my cock.
At the very least, she would moan my name.
I would make her. It was always a drug–my name on her lips.
Sharp and immediate, something I could sink my teeth into.
But she was empty.
A shell.
A fucking zombie.
And I hated that. I hated this.
I preferred her feral, raging and bleeding. I had the most fun when she would act like a wounded bull, lowering her horns and charging at me even as she lost.
I wanted her resistance, that fury in her pretty eyes. The way she fought and cursed and burned. That was when she was most alive. That was when taking her felt earned.
But this. This grief was just…wrong.
I wondered when this stage would end. I didn’t want her like this another day. I didn’t want to touch something already dead. I didn’t want to fuck a corpse that could still breathe.
Breaking my eyes away from her before I would follow my instinct and slice a part of her skin just to get a reaction, I rested my gaze on the bottle of whiskey instead. A drink. I needed a drink. Whiskey always cleared my mind and burned away the tension like fire licking through my veins.
So without hesitation, my hand reached for the bottle, but I stilled.
Something was different. The color. There was something off about the color.
Most wouldn’t notice it. But that was the problem.
I wasn’t like most. The world I lived in was built on details, the smallest of shifts, the tiniest of tells.
And I happened to know my whiskey like the weight of a gun in my palm.
This whiskey was not quite right.
Yet, I lifted the wine glass to my hand, bent the bottle, and poured. The liquid swirled into the glass, releasing its scent into the air; smoke and oak, but something else lurked beneath. Faint. Wrong.
My fingers tightened around the glass, lifting it to my nose, slow and deliberate. I inhaled.
Yes. Definitely, something wasn’t quite right. My eyes flickered to her. She was watching me now. Fear had tightened her features, and her breathing had gone shallow.
I saw the way her hand twitched as if she wanted to reach for me, to stop me, but she didn’t.
She watched me move the glass to my lips, and it wasn’t until I took a sip that she lurched forward, hand thrusting to snatch the glass.
“No!” she shrieked, her fingers merely brushing the glass as I swallowed.
This girl had no idea how obsessive I had become. I would even take her poison just to prove a point. That not even death would set her free from me.
“No.” Her voice trembled.
Well, too late.
The burn of whiskey coated my throat. But there was suddenly something else, something bitter. Something that sank its claws into my stomach the moment it hit.
The pain was slow at first, curling low in my gut like an ember waiting to catch flame.
Then it began to spread, twisting, writhing, clawing through my veins like a living thing, like a thousand tiny knives slicing through me from the inside.
My breath hitched, her words doubling over and distorted, the image of her blurring.
The fire erupted, my stomach knotting violently, a sharp, tearing agony that had me doubling over. My fingers spasmed and a distorted shattering sound echoed when I hit the floor.
My blood turned molten, burning, breaking me from the inside. Then came the choking. A cough wrenched from my throat, pressing, as a splatter of blood dribbled down my chin.
Like a mighty king finally falling, my knees hit the floor, my body rebelling against me, every muscle seizing, twisting a pain so consuming it almost ripped a laugh from my lips.
Almost.
Through the haze of agony, the suffocating fog closing in, I felt her arms wrapped around me, pressing me against her body, laying my head on her lap.
My blurry gaze lifted to catch what she looked like when she finally succeeded in pushing me to kneel before her.
And there it was.
Wide-eyed.
Frozen.
Beautiful.
So fucking beautiful.
And mine.
TO BE CONTINUED…