Page 226 of Poison Aches

Heat flushes in my veins.

“I was drugged!”

“I had those drugs flushed out of your system.”

Out of my element.

I always feel like I’m severely out of my element whenever I’m around Emmett Easton, but this moment is so much different.

It’s like everything has come to a head.

The secrets, the past, the lies, the deception… us.

“Let’s get back on track here,” I say, forcefully shaking my head to clear it. “Whatever you think my brother and I did, it’s not true.”

Emmett watches me, then he grabs an iPad from somewhere, taps on it, and then he throws it to the edge of the bed closest to me.

“So, that’s not you?”

Immediately, I spot a very familiar code matrix.

A code I’m pretty sure I’ve spent years building, molding, knocking down… That code is staring right back at me.

And it’s on Emmett’s iPad…

My stomach drops.

“No, this is…” The very code Samuel asked me to create and each time he ran tests on it, he came back with notes on what needed to be perfected, fixed, and worked upon.

The very code I asked him about and he just waved me off.

He was weirdly secretive about where he ended up using the make-up of the code, and I had a sinking feeling…

“Emmett…”

“Is that not you?” he demands, his voice brooking no argument.

The certainty in his eyes is clear, piercing me like a sharp, hard icicle.

“Where did you find that?”

“Pandora,”Emmett says gently as he rises from the bed, repeating the signature I always add to my work.

A chain reaction that starts in shock and ends in utter fear slams through me.

I scramble to get away from him, my heart now pounding in my throat.

Fear unlike anything I’ve ever felt freezes the blood in my veins but Emmett isn’t even chasing me.

With stilted breaths, I face him.

As silently as before, like a beast, a monster, or exactly what he is, a god, he’s standing upright, tall, well-built, shirtless, muscles flexing involuntarily.

Someone with congenital heart defects shouldn’t look the way he looks… like a primal, hard machine, and yet he does look every inch the only man that shatters me.

His facial features are schooled perfectly into an impassive, indifferent mask, regarding me like an insect that he’ll swat to death when he decides to move.

I take several steps away from the bed.

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