Page 34 of Wicked Enemy

Around me, the three dark mages laughed.

Karim poked me in the side with the broken rod from the bedframe. “That’s what you get for trying to—”

Wood cracked and a bang tore through the room as the front door was kicked open.

I jerked my head up as another tidal wave of fear slammed into me.

Christian White had returned to torture me to death after realizing that Levi wasn’t coming.

But my heart stopped as my gaze landed on someone else entirely.

Fury and insanity roared like hellfire in a pair of sharp gray eyes as they locked on me.

For a moment, everything was unnaturally still. As if time itself had stopped moving.

Then every shred of humanity evaporated from Levi Arden’s eyes, and he slammed his hands together.

Chapter15

When I snuck up to the cabin, I’d had a plan. I had planned to set up a massive stream of metal underneath the floor before I even attempted to get inside. But then a scream tore through the air, shattering the world around me like brittle glass. And then another. Those horrifying, blood-curdling screams that I knew belonged to Eve ripped at my very soul and stirred the monster inside.

Sprinting up to the door, I kicked the whole thing down instead. It crashed against the wall inside with a bang that made all four people in the cabin whip towards me. But all I could see was Eve.

She was bent over a table and trapped there by a pair of stiff handcuffs. Her beautiful face was covered in both old and new bruises, her lip was split, and blood ran down around her eye from a wound to her forehead. From this angle, I could only see her shins and knees from under the table, but it was enough to reveal one other fact. The man standing behind her had pulled her pants down, and they were bunched around her knees.

Everything in my head went silent. Unnaturally, eerily silent.

The terrible storm of emotions inside my soul disappeared, and this time, I didn’t even try to fight it. Instead, I gave myself to it. Threw my whole mind and heart and soul into that utter madness that surged up inside me.

The last thing I saw was Eve’s shocked eyes as she stared at me.

Then the insanity swallowed me whole.

* * *

Blood. The first thought that trickled through my mind was that everything around me smelled like blood. Again.

I blinked.

As my vision at last cleared, I once again understood why.

All the walls around me were splattered with blood, and there were pools of it on the floor. I glanced down at my hands. At some point, I must have drawn my sword, because I was holding it in my right palm. My hands, and arms all the way up to my elbows, looked like they had been dipped in red. And I could feel sticky warm liquid running down my face too.

“Levi?”

The sound of Eve’s voice shattered the last of my trance, and I came crashing back into reality. Flicking my gaze down to the floor, I found all three dark mages lying dead on the bloodstained floorboards. Though,deadwas a bit too peaceful a word. They looked like they had been hacked apart.

Exhaustion crashed over me like a tidal wave, and I had to throw out a hand to brace myself on the wall so that I wouldn’t fall.

“Levi?” Eve said again.

And the exhaustion was quickly replaced by dread. Awful, crushing dread.

Eve had witnessed this. She had watched everything that I had just done to these people.

Normally, I didn’t mind people seeing what I was capable of when I slipped into the insanity in my soul. It just made them fear me more. Respect me more. It added to my already impressive reputation and painted me as someone that people didn’t fuck around with. But this was Eve. And I hadn’t wanted her to see this. I hadn’t wanted her to know the true depths of the depravity that I was capable of.

Because I didn’t want to see the horrified expression on her face when she looked at me. I didn’t want to see the revulsion that would be written all over her features every time she looked at me from now on.

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