Beyond the Horizon by Bea Paige

Author:Bea Paige [Paige, Bea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Two

Malakai

Connie’s wrong.

No, that’s a lie. I’m full of shit. She’s so fucking right. I haven’t got the guts.

Before today, I never considered myself a coward. Connie just proved that I am. She laid down the gauntlet and I balked. Connie carved me up with all her anger, each word a slice against my skin, opening old wounds and making a plethora of new ones, and I’m left standing here behind Grant’s dusty boat shop bleeding onto the weathered board beneath my feet.

Yet, I’m so fucking proud of her grit, her determination to make a stand. No one has ever stood up to me like that before. No one would dare.

A man like me is capable of terrible things, violent things, but for her I’d crack open my chest and let her see what she does to my heart. If I was brave enough, I’d let her hold my battered and bleeding organ in her hands and give her the choice to breathe life back into it or crush it within her grasp. I’d give her that power.

But I’m not brave enough, and it isn’t just because I fear for her safety.

A long time ago I lost hope of ever loving another human soul again. When Annabelle chose Blake over me my heart was crushed. I would’ve survived that, eventually, but when my father murdered my mother my heart broke entirely. I was a kid who lost three people he loved dearly in a space of a few months. Two to each other through love and one to my father through violence. Painstakingly slowly, I rebuilt myself into a hard, hollow, husk of a man and became the criminal my mother tried so hard to prevent me from becoming.

The Punisher.

That’s what they called me. I was the one the King sent out to do his bidding. I hurt people for someone I despised, first for my uncle and then for my cousin when he passed away. I broke people, I took life without any thought or care. Ma Silva was right to protect Connie from me. That kid she’d once known, he’s gone. I’m not a good man, but for Connie, for her, I want to be. Only I’ve just fucked that up.

She was so angry. She had every right to be, but beneath that I swear I felt something infinitely more powerful than hate. I felt it that night I left, and I ran from it, from her. I felt it in all the messages she sent me over the past year and whilst they kept me sane, they also kept me far, far away from her. Until that last damn one. Until she made peace with herself, with me, and said goodbye.

Like the sick, masochistic bastard that I am, I couldn’t let her do that.

I want her. I want her so much that I can’t fucking think straight.

But I can’t have her.

I fucking can’t.

The King will kill her.

So I do what I always do. I shut down. I become hard, cold, thoughtless.

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