“Finish,” Nathan peacefully pushes her to continue.
“There’s more?” I swallow the burn in my throat. How can he take any more of this? It wasn’t about Nathan taking his time, but him not inflicting that kind of hurt on his mother! She knew that!
“I know about Eddlen coming to you and trying to coerce you to kill yourself. Nathan killed him, which stopped any further plans of using him. I needed something stronger than my story of what happened to Justin and me, so Roehl twisted Tracey’s dreams. I’m sorry, Tracey. Your dreams were because of us.” She stands. “It worked out perfectly that our father was as crazy as he was and followed through with his own plan of wanting to kill us.” She comes over, and I move closer to Nathan, not wanting her to touch me.
“Taylor?” Justin calls with an edge of befuddlement lacing his tone.
She cringes. “Baby, I am so sorry. But I did what I needed to do.”
I move from the bed, letting go of Nathan’s arm. Whatever I was helping hold in by touching him floods out like a broken dam. “How could you, Taylor?” Nathan shouts. “How could you trust him? Why would you go to him?” His voice booms against the walls of the room, sending vibrations through the air. “We are family. Your father was going to die anyway! You don’t hold a smidgen of patience?” He glares at her through angry, narrow eyes. “All you had to do was tell me, ‘Nathan, we need to handle this now,’ and the shit would have been handled.” He stands from the bed, fuming with rage. “You want to know something, Taylor?” he asks in a softer tone. “It wasn’t Roehl seeing Tracey tonight that sparked his interest. Don’t get me wrong, hearing and tasting her made him hunger for her, but because you had already sparked his interest and she is with me―and you know how Roehl is about me―he had wanted her before now. That’s why he was out here today.” Nathan shoves both hands through his hair and leaves them clasped at the back of his head. He’s trying to calm himself, but battles through a raging anger and an abating tranquility until. . .
“What the fuck were you thinking, Taylor?” He explodes.
I inch toward him. He leans over, resting his arms on his knees.
Seconds pass, maybe a minute, before he roars on his rise, the entire bed coming up with him. It flips through the air, and I duck as it flies over my head and hits the wall behind me with a loud crash from the bedrails and shattering of the mirror.
I rush to him.
“Don’t, Tracey,” he orders with a point in my direction. I have to. . . He’s shaking with anger.
Justin races to Taylor, shielding her.
Nathan’s hands ball into fists, and his jaw locks. Shifting his dark gaze from me to Taylor, he backs to the wall behind him. The anger is overruling his calm, but he’s trying.
“Nathan, please. Just hear me out,” Taylor begs from behind Justin.
“What is there to hear?” Nathan yells in a deepened growl. He shakes it away and asks, “What could you possibly have to say? Look at what you’ve done. As if enough shit wasn’t going on. I’m not that hard or heartless. How many times I would’ve killed him just by your request. What would have made this time any different? Why bring her into it?”
“Nathan, I―”
“You were selfish! You only thought of yourself!” he shouts, cutting her off.
“No!” She matches his yell. “I did it for us!”
“Us? Who? You and Justin?”
“No, the lot of us!”
“How? How could this have been for us? You said it yourself. Roehl could walk through her classroom, right? Follow her home? You brought this on.” Calmer, he asks, “What happened to you? What did he do to you?” An idea raises his eyebrows. “No. What did you give him?” He growls from the back of his throat.
A foot away from him, he throws his hand out in my direction and forces a retraction of the small steps I took. He holds me in place with a force that restricts the movement in my lower body. “Don’t stop me, Nathan.”
“Wait, Tracey. Let her answer the question.”
Taylor moves out from behind Justin. “I will answer, but only after you accept Tracey.”
Nathan’s anger roars inside him. He fights against it, enjoying the wrath and hating it. He releases the hold on me, and I run into him. I grab his cheeks and force him to look at me.
His eyes are closed, but he says, “Tracey, I need to know her answer.”
“No. You need to calm down. Let me help you.” I push my hands from his face to his neck. “Look at me.”
He opens his dark night-blue eyes. “Tracey, why would she do that?” Sharp teeth dig into his trembling bottom lip and his heartache creases the middle of his brows so tightly I have to rub the center of mine to ease the tension. Nathan’s dagger-glare flicks to Taylor. “Not you, Taylor.” The words break from him in whispers. “Everyone else I can accept would do it. Everyone else could cross me. I never thought you would. And what makes it all so much worse is you went after my heart. You risked my heart for yours to be better.” In my next blink, Nathan’s swiping me aside, and shoving Justin against the wall, pinning him there without laying a finger on him.
Taylor squares off. “Nathan,” she warns.
“What did you offer?” he growls through his teeth. I reach for him, but I can’t move.
Taylor cries, “Blind him. Take away his hearing and speech.”
The veins and muscles in Justin’s neck reveal beneath his skin as the strain in his face flushes his pale skin beige, and strings of saliva blows past his clenched teeth from an inaudible holler. Dark eyes search the room and a whimper breaks from Taylor when she looks away from him.
“I’m growing impatient,” Nathan drawls. His skin’s a shade redder. He’s so far beyond control there’s nothing I can say to sway him at this point.
“Me. Uncontrolled. I promised I’d take care of a few things for him, and that I would convince you to come back.”
“Why?”
“I needed him dead,” she utters, tears streaming.
“Why not come to me?”
“Excuses don’t matter, brother, but”―She wipes her tears―“I love you, Nathan. I never thought he would come back. I didn’t think about him wanting her.” Her tears return by the boatload. “I was selfish and cared only of my needs. I’m sorry.” She steps to him, and a tear drops from his eye. His pain eats away at me, and I want to make it better. “We’re family, and I love you,” she expresses. “I will not ask you to forgive me, but stand with me. You know I won’t be able to do whatever it is he will require.”
Nathan releases Justin and walks backward to me. He grabs my hand and kisses my cheek. “I’m sorry I did that to you.” He’s calm as if nothing happened. Looking back at Taylor as we leave the room, Nathan peacefully informs, “I have no love for you, Taylor, and I will not help you. You’re dead to me.” Pulling open the door, he concludes, “See you at breakfast.”
Bonus Chapter
Nathan
I chat with Scott about their school day, rejecting, again, him trying to convince me to attend the final stretch of their senior year. My being around would make it easier for Tracey to manage our bonding and allow me to keep an extra eye on her with this damn Roehl fiasco. But, I can’t be around Tracey twenty-four hours out of a day; I sleep next to her for five to nine hours, and we’re often together right after she’s out of school. Unlike Glen and Scott, we need breaks from each other. I need for us to have breaks from each other. I don’t want me to be the only part of Tracey’s world. I also hated high school.
For Scott and Glen, though she knows mostly everything now, something still isn’t right with those two. I have a bad feeling about her acceptance. If Scott messes up just once, Glen might try to kill herself, just to break free of the bond’s hold.
“Yo.” Olar comes in, plopping down beside me on the couch.
“Sup.” I slouch, pulling out my phone. Email after email . . . I can’t wait for Kathy to come back from vacation; business life is so much easier when she’s
around. I send her a quick, We Miss You! E-Greeting Card, with a note jokingly asking her to come back early. I know she won’t, but she’s the best assistant I’ve had in a long time, and I miss her.
Another email comes through with six more orders, making it twenty-two for today, and it’s not even after three. I stuff the phone back in my pocket, making a mental note to check it again before five so I can have the temp we hired to process the orders and set up shipments. The workload is heavy without a partner.
Olar tosses me a pack of candy, asking, “How’s Aunt Nati holding up.”
I grumble, slouching further on the couch. “She’s holding. Aunt Cent will help her through it.” My Aunt Cent, Tracey’s school’s nurse, lost my uncle two years ago, a freak accident none of us ever got the scoop on, and if she did, she never mentioned it to us. My mother’s actually taking my father’s death much better than I expect her to. But we all know she’s hurting. When she sneaks away, we can hear her cry out for him. Or, when she walks along the edge of the water for hours, never looking away from the sun. It’s hard to see her like that again, but she’s been doing well at holding it all together. She has our entire family relying on her to be strong, and I believe it’s us who keep her pushing on without my father.
“Where’s Tracey? She better?”
Unwrapping a Starburst, I mutter, “Eh. Yeah. She still won’t tell me about these visions and hallucinations she used to have, and that part of her mind is blocked off from me. Maybe she’s blocking it from herself. Everything else I need to know, I can just float through her brain effortlessly. But for that. Nothing. Roehl hasn’t made his move yet, I’m on standby waiting for him to try to taint her.” Pressing together the pink and yellow taffy, I throw it in my mouth. Chewing, I finish, “She and Glen are outside helping my mom with the flowers in the front. Tracey’s been trying to stick close to her, feeling guilty about her losing my father.” I look at my phone vibrating again. This time, about this shit with Olar that he’s disgustingly stepped in. “By the way, great job getting Lunis on your tail,” I praise sarcastically.
“Ha, ha. Thanks, again.”
“Don’t thank us, Olar,” Scott starts, “because all you did was add to our headaches. You should be saying sorry.”
Olar grumbles.
“What?” I blurt at his expression requesting my objection. “You did add to our headaches. We took care of a minor situation for you and ended up causing a bigger one. Why did you go after Lunis’ family anyway? Indebting yourself. Then, allow him to believe it was a family decision? You know that comes down on me.”
Olar flicks his tongue over his hooped bottom lip ring. It wiggles back and forth, each flick the count of a second. I throw a piece of candy at him, forcing his attention back. “Okay, okay,” he sings. “I fell for this girl. She wasn’t my mate. They killed her, thinking she was, and I sought out revenge. She made me happy, and she didn’t need to die because of their assumptions and their need to make us miserable.” Eating the candy I threw, he admits, “I did kill his sister and his mother and told him our family was after his. He sent me a message, saying I had a debt established and owed him three lives, not including my own. Oh, and because of this, I need to stay over here a while.”
The news doesn’t surprise me. It’s the story of my life. “Yeah, well, thanks for that. Stay as long as you need, help me look out for everyone and not kill Taylor. Keep an eye out for Tracey and Glen, and help us figure out what we’re going to do about Roehl.”
He nods and asks, “Are you going to help Taylor fight off Roehl’s calling?”
I let that question hang out to dry as I leave the living room. Taylor means nothing to me. My sister, of all people, I never thought would betray me. First Rose, she broke my heart, now Taylor, she’s breaking my soul. Family is supposed to love and support each other. It’s why ours sticks together. We vowed to never turn our backs on each other. My injurious dynasty is turning out to be the complete opposite.
Little Nathan avoids me, turning down the hall to his left when we’ve entered the same hallway. I ignore him, unsure as to whose side he’s playing on.
Passing the large living room window, I retrace my steps and stand before it. I convince myself, because of her. . . To hell with my father, my sisters, my fucking brother and his crazy ass girlfriend, Lunis, Olar and the shit he just topped my plate with, and Scott and his Glen. To hell with the struggle between my Burdened and I. . . To hell with this world we find ourselves embroiled in. She’ll heal me, anchor me, and carry me from here on out. Nothing else matters.
Standing, Tracey throws her dirt-smeared fists on her hips, thinking about the placement of the flowers. She isn’t a dig in the dirt and get dirty type of girl, but she’s doing it because she thinks it’s what my mom wants. Wiping her hand over the side of her face, she smudges dirt on her cheek.
I laugh once, shaking my head. Her curves, the milk chocolate curls draping her back that match the color of her eyes, this arch of her pink lips, the softness of that sand colored skin, her elegant touch, the beat of her heart . . . She’s my weakness, my strength, my space, and my gravity.
Tracey looks in my direction, noticing my stare. She smiles. It’s something in the way she looks at me. She sees me like no one else. Actually sees me as a man and not a beast. Tracey’s the best thing God has blessed me with, and I don’t deserve her. He may not have made me, but there’s nothing in me that doubts He took a part of me to make her, molding her exclusively for me. She doesn’t know the half of how happy she makes me and how much I appreciate her staying by my side, but she also doesn’t know the turn our lives are about to take.
Hey. You okay? Her voice sings through my mind. I meet her eyes and our heartbeat slows from erratic to calm.
Yes. You helping? I ask, admiring her.
Something like that. I smile at her pinched nose as she looks around at the flowers. Looking back at me, she kisses the air. I’ll be in shortly.
I nod.
For once, there’s a glimpse of happiness.
Thanks for reading Plight, Book 1 of The Sephlem Trials. Grab your copy of Book 2 Brazen: Thoughts of Wicked Mind HERE, and see what’s next for Tracey and Nathan.
If you enjoyed reading Plight, please consider leaving a review or rating. Thanks for your support! FA.
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Enjoy some extra’s for this series over on its website.
The Sephlem Trials
About the Author
Felisha (Peiri) Antonette writes heart-throbbing young adult and new adult, paranormal, science fiction, and romantic suspense stories. With a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Creative Writing, she uses her knowledge to write memorable characters and mind blowing twists.
When she's not writing, Antonette is spending time with her daughter, binge watching Netflix, or working out at the gym.
Connect with the Felisha Antonette at
[email protected]
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Also by The Sephlem Trials
The Sephlem Trials
(YA-Dark Paranormal Romance)
Plight: Call of the Burning Feather
Brazen: Thoughts of a Wicked Mind
Cohere: Stains of the Fallen Tears
Finite: Whisper from the Defining Silence
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The Separation Trilogy
(YA-Dystopian)
Inception
Imminent Threat
Salient Invaders
Ominous Order
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Blind Trust Standalone Series
(NA-Romantic Suspense-18+)
Blind Trust
Vague Perception - 2021
Tunnel Vision - 2021
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Plight: A Dark Paranormal Romance (The Sephlem Trials Book 1) Page 42
