Page 51 of Dark Knight (Knight's Ridge Empire 10)

DAEMON

My body is heavy, my brain hazy as I come to once again, confused as fuck.

Thankfully, when I open my eyes, I find I’m in my bedroom. Although that doesn’t explain why I slept like the fucking dead when I usually struggle to get more than a couple of hours a night.

I roll over. It takes every ounce of energy I possess to move my stiff muscles, and I fall onto the other pillow.

Everything is calm for three seconds, then the sweet scent of her fills my nose and everything crashes into me with the force of a breeze block fucking wall.

“Calli?” I call, some stupid, pitiful hope still burning within me that she might still be here despite the reality that I don’t want to believe hovering on the periphery of my thoughts. “Calli?” I shout louder, but there’s nothing. “FUUUUCK.”

Anger, desperation, and panic all collide inside me in a maelstrom that I have no power over.

Despite my lingering exhaustion and brain fog, my body moves on instinct.

I can barely hold myself up as I stumble into the bathroom. I catch myself on the towel rail, damn near burning the skin off my palm in the process.

“Shit,” I hiss, wrapping my hands around the basin and hanging my head as it spins as if I’ve drunk every single bottle of vodka in the world.

My head pounds, my heart aches, and my entire body trembles in anger with my need to find her, to drag her back here, to find a way to fucking prove to her that everything I told her was true.

But she’s where she’s meant to be.

Out there, living a life without me.

A roar I barely recognise rips from my lips as pain tears through my chest. Desperation, loss, that normal feeling of just not being good enough rages within me as my fingers tighten on the basin.

I suck in deep, calming breaths, trying to get myself under control before I risk looking up and finding myself in the mirror.

I gasp at the unfamiliar face that’s staring back at me.

Despite hours of sleep, my eyes are dark and shadowed. My lips are still swollen from her kiss, but it’s the bright red scratch across my cheek that makes the pain worse.

Running my fingertip over the scab, I let my mind drift back to her freaking out in the back of my car. She was vicious, brutal, and beautiful. I’ve never seen fire in her, and fuck if it didn’t bring me to my knees, even if I was the focus of all her hatred.

If we were anywhere else, I wouldn’t have gone to the extremes I did. But I needed to get her out of there. I needed both of us away from the others.

I knew it was my chance to keep her to myself for a little bit. Not to convince her to be with me, or to try to make her fall for me. Just to have her here, with me, by my side for just a small amount of time.

I’ve fought it. I’ve done everything I can to convince myself that she’s not the one my black and tattered heart beats for, but it’s pointless.

She’s it.

She’s all I see. All I crave.

But just look at what it’s done to me.

Opening the cabinet in front of me, I stare at the little bottle with the lid barely on.

I didn’t need evidence to know what she’d done. I’ve felt like this before, and I know the reason for it.

It’s just always been my fault in the past when I’ve doubled up in a desperate need to get some rest.

I never thought anyone—Calli—would use them against me.

Does she really hate me that much?

Did she need to get away from me so desperately that the only way she thought she could achieve it was to drug me?