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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Monty Jay
Read between
June 16 - June 20, 2025
“Until I find his body, Thatcher Pierson is our number one suspect in the murder of those girls and May Pierson. I’d get used to it now so it won’t be so difficult adding money to his books when I throw his ass in prison.”
Rook squats down, pulling a coin from his pocket and flipping it. It rings in the air as it hits the wooden coffin. “We will make them pay for this, May. I promise you.”
I warned them what I would become if they took him from me. Now there is no need to fear the reaper. They should fear the woman who loves him.
“Hello, darling phantom.”
I’m empty, driven by ego and the control that comes from ending someone’s life. That is who I am. That is the person who she has to deal with, to understand I am not her death-crossed lover. I’m the root of all evil, the seed of immorality.
“You left.” Her voice shakes, sadness and grief rippling from every single word. “You left Alistair. You left Rook and Silas. You left me.” Her small hands hit her chest at the words, as if she feels each of them like a knife to the heart. I feel her emotions like every drop of rain. How easily she shows every ounce of feeling on her face. Always real, too raw.
“Remember that when you try to love me again.”
“You’re my brother. I hate you—I hate you so fucking much, but you’re my brother,” he hisses, flashing the coin tattoo on his inner bicep that mirrors the only one I own. The same one Alistair and Silas bear. “You’re his brother! Silas is locked in a goddamn ward. I buried someone I love without you and thought you’d be next. I’m not losing any more of you, regardless of your frigid personality.”
It’s all I can think about when she’s around. How she felt, what she sounded like, that my blood flows through hers, and how well she’d taken everything I’d given.
“From you?” she asks, crossing her arms in front of her chest. “What are you going to do, kill me in my sleep?” “Don’t flirt with me like that.” I smirk, watching the color of her cheeks turn pink.
He’s not allowed to have her either. No one is. Because even though I can’t have her, she’s still my ghost. She still haunts me. And every single murderous inch belongs to me.
“you fuel more than my ego, knowing how far you’d go for me. You’d give me anything. You and that pretty, dark heart.”
“Maybe I’d die for you, Thatcher Pierson,” I mumble. “But death is inevitable for us all. It’s what you’d do for me that matters.”
“You’d disappear again, just like you did when you were a little boy, just to keep me safe.” I push off the doorframe, turning to walk down the hallway with his eyes still on my back. “And I didn’t even ask you to.”
“You were there on the most traumatic night of my life. The last good thing in a room filled with so much bad. You were there, and I clung to you.”
Do you know what it’s like to go your entire life and never know gentle? How to be kind? Then you meet someone who is overflowing with it, and suddenly, you can’t be anything but soft just for them? Touching Lyra is the same as stroking ivory keys.
“No tears, Scarlett. Not for me,” I say. “Save those for someone who deserves them.”
We were young when she came back to Ponderosa Springs. It was everyone’s first day back to school, and I remembered her the moment she stepped into class. And I remember that day because I heard music when she walked in.
“My dislike never had anything to do with you, darling phantom. You were a reminder of what my father wanted me to become,” I tell her candidly. “Until one day, you weren’t.” “And now? What am I a reminder of now?”
“All the things I can never have.”
I never thought there would be anything stronger than the urge to kill. Until I tasted her. I’d die to be inside of her. Consuming her. Beneath her fucking skin. To feel her clench around me in ecstasy as her blood poured into my throat like ambrosia.
He has nightmares, I want to say. Horrible nightmares that I can hear from the hall, in my room. The bed creaks beneath his terror, and he shouts nonsense into the night. But I don’t think he’s even aware of them.
I mean, what would I say? He’d been teaching me how to kill people so I didn’t go on a murder rampage, we fooled around a handful of times—oh, and we had sex in the house my mother was murdered in just before everything went to shit?
I look at both of them waiting for me, and I can’t think of many other places I’d want to be than right here, surrounded by two people I’d never planned to meet but can’t live without. The kind of friends you dream of as a lonely kid. I lift the bottle up. “To all of us surviving.”
“Darling.” He traces the front of his white teeth with his tongue, a starved animal ready to feast. “I’d rid the world of men who breathe the same air as you.”
“I wish you’d stop me from hurting you, darling phantom,” he whispers, “because I cannot stop myself.”
Maybe it’s the isolation, the lack of human contact, or maybe I’d just accepted that I am, in fact, weak for one dark-haired girl with eyes that tell stories of the dead. That someone had found a way inside, and I don’t want her to come out.
“Wait, wait. I’m not laughing at you,” she breathes. “I just—I think I broke you.” Yeah, I think you broke me, too.
I’m trying, to no avail, to keep her at a distance so I don’t have to admit that she scares me. A man who fears nothing is afraid of all she is. All she makes me want. All she makes me feel.
“You’re sunlight.”
“Why!” she exclaims. “What are you protecting me from, Thatcher? Just tell me!” One last push and the dam inside of me falls. It shatters, exploding into small pieces and leaving no chance for rebuilding. “Me!” I yell, the sound echoing in my chest. I barely recognize my own voice. I grab the sides of her head, caging her between my palms as my fingers tangle into the hair at the back of her neck. “Me, you stubborn fucking girl. I’m protecting you from me.”
“I crave you,” I exhale, the admission slicing my throat on its way out. “My body wants you every second of the day and twice
as much at night. I want you in the most unhinged ways, ways that would scare you.”
“I’m incapable of giving you what you want.” My throat is raw. “A relationship? A man who loves you? I can never be that. You will always require more from me, and there is nothing more I can give. I’m uncaring and cold. Love doesn’t live in my world. I’m a killer, darling. That’s all I will ever be.”
There will forever be a piece of me that is open, carved in the shape of her body.
“You don’t need to protect me, not even from you.” She holds me tighter, as if her touch will make the words soak into my skin. “I’ll take what you can give me, don’t you see that? I would rather have you like this than live without you. There is no one else out there for me. I was made for you.”
I wish I could say that I don’t believe in fate, but if it was real, I think I would’ve been made for her, too.
“That they deserve more,” I begin. “You deserve more than I can ever give you. I’m incapable of holding your heart, of taking care of it. Stop giving it to me. Stop before I kill it for good.”
“I don’t want to leave you empty, Scarlett. Don’t make me leave you empty.”
Thatcher doesn’t want to leave me empty, and I don’t want to leave him lonely.
“Lyra, I’m so sorry.” Conner holds his hand up, trickles of blood decorating his mouth. “Please understand, that was—”
“The worst mistake of your fucking life.”
“Please,” I beg, my eyes burning. “I’m not worth this.” His finger swipes across my cheek, catching the drop of water before it falls any further. My breath catches, and I can do nothing but watch as he presses his thumb into his mouth, cleaning my tears from his skin. “Oh, darling,” he purrs, swallowing my tears, “you’re worth it. Bloodshed and all.”
One who would watch my every move, write it down in her brilliant mind, and keep it there as a permanent memory. And later, when I force my cock inside of her, I’m going to make her tell me everything she saw. Every. Single. Detail.
I want her against me, pressed into me so that I can erase every inch of Conner’s touch from her body.
I can’t give her love, care for her in the way someone should, but I’m tired of not giving her me. Not when she’s the only person capable of having me. The distance I’d created between us had been to protect her. But today, that distance is the reason she was alone with Conner.
