Race the Darkness by Abbie Roads Page A

else, was when she’d suddenly remember everything. Every—” Her voice choked off, her eyes clenched shut as if trying to not see the horrors replaying in her mind.
    Words of comfort seemed shallow and hollow compared to the magnitude of what she’d survived. He said the one word, the only word that seemed to make sense to him and packed it full of compassion and support and caring. “Isleen. Oh, Isleen.”
    She snuggled against his chest, and he concentrated on the sensation of simply holding her. Of how her fragility made him feel strong, how her smallness made him feel large, how her touching him made him feel alive.
    He’d never held a woman just to hold her. With Camille, it was about fucking—getting her off, getting himself off, and getting the hell out of there.
    Bile frothed inside his stomach, threatening to roil up his esophagus. It was perverse to touch Isleen with thoughts of Camille in his head.
    He forced his thoughts in a safer direction. There were so many sounds in a place like this, but just as it had been over the past days, they were in background, not all cramming into his ears and demanding his attention at the same time. Here with Isleen, he had control of what he heard, of whether to attend to it or not. And fuck—he didn’t tune in with her. Not at all. What the hell did that mean? Was she some sort of antidote to his hyper-hearing? Were they making a weird trade-off—his protection for control over supercharged hearing? As long as she was happy with the trade, he was ecstatic.
    From the moment he’d found her, their futures had woven together, then tied themselves in a double knot. The only question: What kind of future was it? The fluffy friendship kind or the I-want-your-sex kind? His dick went all rah-rah, sis-boom-bah for the sex kind. He rearranged his hold on her so she wouldn’t feel his pecker poking her in the ass cheek—no telling how she’d react. No telling if she’d been sexually abused on top of the obvious mental and physical damage. A single beat of his heart pumped the urge to kill Queen—again—through his system. The Bastard in His Brain fell in love with the idea, sending a shock of electrical energy pulsing through him as if Xander had just jammed his finger in a light socket.
    A powerful need to murder the already dead nearly overwhelmed him. Queen’s quick, easy death carried no justice. She deserved to suffer. She deserved to be stripped of her flesh inch by inch, deserved to have each muscle ripped from its tendon, each bone broken. The torture he wanted to put her through was boundless. Nothing could ever make up for what she’d done to Isleen.
    Isleen tightened her grip on him, the action dissolving his anger.
    A mere shuffling of fabric from the doorway caught Xander’s attention. His innards twitched in surprise. It had been a long time since someone had been able to sneak up on him without his ears alerting him. Damn.
    Uncle Matt stood just inside the room, arms crossed spoiled-kid style, lips pinched into a belligerent grin. Matt’s plastic-surgery-made-perfect nose wrinkled as if Xander and Isleen smelled worse than a roadkill skunk on a foggy morning. It amazed Xander that Matt and Kent weren’t besties—their level of continuous contempt for Xander could’ve been the foundation for a great friendship.
    â€œYou fucking kidding me?” Anger and asshole dominated Matt’s tone. “What is it with you and your dad? A genetic anomaly that turns you both into pussies around these women?”
    Inside the circle of his arms, Isleen tensed and then withdrew from him. That his uncle’s words had pulled her away from him hit the ignition switch on Xander’s anger—after he’d just gotten it under control. “It’s been a long time. Too long, probably. But you keep talking like that, and we’ll be finishing this conversation with our