Ink by Jade Hernández

Author:Jade Hernández [Jade Hernández]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aleera Anaya Ceres/Jade Hernández
Published: 2023-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

There was a single moment when the darkness swallowed me whole. I couldn’t be sure how long it lasted, only that it did and by the time it was over, it spat me back out into the light.

My breaths sawed in and out of my body, painfully scraping through my throat every time I tried to suck in air. My face was coated in thick liquid, causing me to see red.

I tasted copper on my lips, and while I still had my sense of taste, everything else was numb. The pain in my body didn’t come until later. The rest of my senses came gradually. Sound. White noise filled with my own breaths. Red became the maroon and black decor of the shop. My eye throbbed. My knuckles screamed. Every bone in my body felt like it’d been through a grinder.

And yet the sweet breath of life filled me.

“Fucking shit! Xiomara! Xiomara, are you okay?”

I vaguely recognized the voice. Not at first. Not until he stood in front of me, taking my bloodied cheeks in his hands.

My breathing finally stilled and his name escaped me on a sigh of relief. “Ink.”

His cold facade cracked like ice splintering down the middle. The veins on his neck pulsed. His jaw worked. And yet his eyes on me were tender.

“Xiomara, are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I think.”

“Baby, let go of the bat.”

I hadn’t felt the cold metal grasped tightly in my hands, slick with rivulets of blood. I loathed to let the weapon go, but Ink was here.

He was safe.

It’d be okay.

The bat dropped between us with a clang to the ground.

Only then did Ink grip me by the elbows and turn me. The jolting action pulled me from my shock, like every other time before I felt myself grounded back to reality after the initial disorientation. Everything slammed into me at once. The smell was the worst of all. The tang-like cold metal.

My gaze swept around the shop, surveying the destruction.

“Let’s get out of here,” Ink ordered. “I’ll take care of you.”

“But what about–”

“The club will handle it,” he assured me as he walked me out of Devil’s Ink.

And I believed him.

I believed he would handle the mess–and the dead bodies–I left on the floor of his shop.

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