Total pages in book: 161
Estimated words: 151410 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 757(@200wpm)___ 606(@250wpm)___ 505(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 151410 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 757(@200wpm)___ 606(@250wpm)___ 505(@300wpm)
Nevio Falcone is darkness. It seeps from his pores. It’s where his monster comes out to play to satisfy its cravings. Until he starts to crave something other than carnage: the one woman he shouldn’t pursue - Aurora.
What Nevio craves, he ruins. He told her to keep her distance. Now it’s too late to run away. Consequences be damned.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Hate and love are closely related.
Both can take your breath away and immobilize you with their intensity. They represent the ultimate of human emotions. They should be complete opposites, divided by a vast chasm of other less potent emotions, but they aren’t always, and where Nevio was concerned, they definitely weren’t for me. In my case, love and hate were like toxic lovers, dancing their destructive tango inside my body.
I didn’t think they could exist beside each other. Yet they did. Love and hate played tug of war with my heartstrings, draining me with the constant backlash I felt.
I loved Nevio Falcone for almost half of my childhood and teenage life until I realized that I needed to learn to hate him if I wanted to get away unscathed.
Though that wasn’t even an option anymore.
Not physically.
Not mentally.
Nevio could hurt me far worse than he already had.
I knew I needed to stop him.
But I wasn’t sure if I could.
The worst thing? A part of me didn’t even want to try. A part of me wanted to risk heartbreak and pain just to be with him. A part of me was as addicted to our roller-coaster ride of hate and love as he was to his nightly hunts.
Maybe that was Nevio’s special power, to make you long for something that could potentially destroy you.
I was in love, but I wasn’t blind.
Nevio embodied pure destruction, and somewhere along the way, I’d become collateral damage.
Sometimes I wanted to hurt everyone, but there were certain people I always wanted to save a little more than I wanted to hurt them. Save them from me. The problem was that every day, I was a little less sure who held the reins, me or the monster. A monster who reeked of blood and sought carnage.
Maybe I was delusional when I thought there was a difference between the monster and me.
Nevio 19 years old
I’m not sure who started calling Massimo, Alessio, and me the Unholy Trinity. Maybe Savio. He had a canny talent to come up with nicknames. For as long as I could remember, my twin Greta had been Dollface, and I had been PIA (pain in the ass—naturally). And that was long before I’d made good on the name and taken the first girl anally.
I suppose the name was fitting, though any comparison to anything church-related was certainly classified blasphemy, considering what the three of us were up to at night.
Music blasted from the speakers of my all-black Dodge Ram. All black like our clothes, from our steel-toed boots to black cargo pants, leather cuffs, bandannas, balaclavas to our weapons, even up to the blades.
All black like our souls. Though I loved the flash of a silver blade and how it mirrored our victims’ panic on occasion.
The inside glowed red from the dashboard and the small LEDs in the center console and doors. Even my headlights had a red tinge.
The red because of the blood that would soon stain our skin and clothes. My pulse sped up in eagerness, thinking of the scent and soft texture.
Massimo often rolled his eyes at the excessive symbolism, as he called it, something he attributed to the institutional church as a way to mesmerize the masses. Still, he’d never worn anything but black on our raids, and it certainly wasn’t because of peer pressure. He wasn’t receptive to that shit.
I turned off the asphalt road onto a long dirt driveway. Huge signs that said “No trespassing,” “Armed response,” and “Spring-Guns” welcomed us. Hell yes.
Massimo tossed his balaclava onto the back seat. His dark brown hair, several shades lighter than mine, was pressed against his forehead. He gave it a quick toss so it fell more freely. I stifled laughter. Not vain, my ass. “Out here, we won’t need to hide our faces, I reckon,” he said.
My own balaclava was pushed up on my head, keeping my hair out of my face. Unlike Massimo, I fucking hated it if I had strands in my eyes, which was why I kept it shorter than his, though we both kept our sides and back trimmed. “It’s not a matter of need but fun. People freak out when they don’t see our faces.”
“They freak out when they see your face. It screams crazy-murdering motherfucker. That doesn’t leave anyone unaffected,” Alessio said from his spot beside me. One of his legs was propped up on my headboard. His hair was as long as Massimo’s, but because of the wave in his, it always piled atop his head in a fucking surfer-boy style. As if emo boy would ever use a surfboard—except perhaps to smash in someone’s head with it. “Who is it tonight?”
Alessio had a Robin Hood complex. While he liked the hunt and kill, he needed a reason for it to make peace with his conscience. He was always wary when it was my turn to pick our targets, though I mostly made sure that they had a track record.