by Laura Avery
QUIVER
A DARK ROMANCE
BOOK EIGHT
BY LAURA AVERY
Copyright 2018 Laura Avery, all rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced without written consent of the author. This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Quiver is a dark romance and is intended for mature audiences only. It’s extremely possessive and crude. Please don’t read if strong sexual situations, language, violence, and bullying offends you. All individuals portrayed in this work of fiction are eighteen years of age or older.
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Chapter One
“Bloody murder.”
EMERY
*Two years ago
The music was almost as loud as the beating of my own heart as I took the steps up to the second floor one at a time. Jackson had told me to meet him up here, ordered me to, and I had obeyed just like I always did. I kept thinking about how sexy he had looked in the kitchen, pressed up against me.
I knew it was stupid.
Jackson was terrifying and dangerous but the thought of someone like him putting his hands on me made my stomach do things I didn’t know was possible. My experience with boys was nonexistent and even if it hadn’t of been… Jackson and his brothers weren’t just boys.
They were Gods to this whole town.
Why do you still want his approval after all these years?
Think about all the ways he’s made your life hell, Emery.
They were the same thoughts I’d had for the last four years and just like every other time; they did little to ease the overwhelming tension that built in my chest whenever Jackson popped into my mind. I knew he hated me, I just didn’t know why.
The only thing more mysterious than why he loathed me so much was why he looked at me like a piece of meat he owned. The only thing more mysterious than that was why I liked it so much. And the only thing more mysterious than that was…
Oh, hell, the list could go on and on.
Everything about Jackson and his brothers was a fucking mystery.
Yet, there I was, following his commands once again.
I stopped outside one of the bedroom doors and took a deep breath as I tried to steady my racing heart. This was it, the moment I had been waiting for my entire academic career.
I was either going to be humiliated by Jackson or taken to another world by him. Either way, it was enough to make my body quiver. He was behind the door, waiting for me.
Waiting to make me his once and for all.
I took a deep breath and then opened the door slowly, finally feeling brave enough to face the passion and hate that was waiting for me on the other side. I inhaled the breeze that hit me as the door swung open and then gasped. It was the wrong room, the wrong brother, and the wrong experience. Nothing about the scene in front of me looked like a dream, more like a fucking nightmare.
I felt myself getting light headed.
And then I opened my mouth and screamed bloody murder.
Chapter Two
“I wasn’t holding my breath.”
EMERY
*Present
The first thing that hit me was the smell. Even before I forced my eyelids to flutter open and take in the concrete walls that surrounded me. The scent was so overwhelming that I felt like I was going to vomit up whatever was living inside of me at any moment. It was a mix of dust and rotting water.
When I was finally able to lift the bricks disguised as eyelids up on my face a pounding headache was waiting for me at the center of my temple. I dragged my head up off the hard and cold floor, trying to make out my surroundings.
Only my vision was blurry, not fully adapting to my surroundings.
Where the hell was I?
What had happened to me?
“Jax…” My voice felt hoarse; as if I hadn’t had anything to drink in days. “Jackson?” I forced my body up off the floor and looked around the empty room, letting everything that happened the last time I was awake come flooding back to me.
I had been smothered with something walking through Jackson’s kitchen and then dragged out of the house. I had a vague memory of trying to fight before I drifted off into darkness.
I dragged my body across the floor to the metal door that rested there with a sudden surge of strength. I tugged on the handle but it didn’t budge, locked tightly from the other side. My mind was spinning and my heart racing.
Cameron.
It had to be Cameron.
“Hello!” I screamed, pounding heavily on the middle of the door. “Let me out of here!” I was answered with silence besides the echo of my own screams. “Jackson is going to kill you!” I tried again but after a few more minutes of pounding it was clear no one was coming.
I slid my body back down to the ground, exhausted in such a short amount of time. What was the matter with my body? Why did I feel so damn week? Was I still drugged?
My vision became hazy and then I felt my eyes slipping shut again.
Was I going to die?
***
JACKSON
“Jackson,” Pierce tried to reason with me for about the tenth time since I had left the house a few hours earlier. “You need to come back home so we can figure this shit out.”
“There’s nothing to figure out,” I snapped, pushing the pedal harder into the floor of Liam’s fancy sports car. “She was there and now she’s not. Cameron fucking took her.”
“And you out chasing down leads that don’t exist is going to do what for us exactly?” My brother sighed heavily. “Come home so that we can figure this out together.”
“You don’t need me there to track him down,” I insisted. “It’s better this way.” My rage had been off the charts since I had woken up in the middle of the night to find Emery missing from my bed. My first thought had been that I was going to spend all morning punishing her for leaving my room without permission. The thought made my cock hard as a rock before I even reached the bottom of the steps.
As soon as I reached the kitchen and saw signs of a struggle, though, my cock went limp again. Emery hadn’t snuck out of bed like a bad girl, she had been dragged, and then she had fought. Me? Well, I had been asleep like a fucking pussy that had let someone else take his property right out from under his nose.
“We should let her stay gone if you ask me,” I could hear Liam mumbling in the background. “I sure have been devoting a lot of my time and energy to come chick I could care less about.”
My hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Tell our beloved older brother that he doesn’t have to help if he doesn’t want to, I’m more than happy to take care of Cameron by myself.”
“He doesn’t mean it,” Pierce sighed. “He’s just stressed.”
“And I’m fucking not?”
“Of course, you are.”
Some guy tried to cut me off and I sped up, slamming down on the horn. “Fuck out of here with that shit,” I hollered at him out of the passenger side window and shook my fists into the air.
“Jackson,” Liam’s voice was clipped. “If you even put one scratch on my car, I swear to God, Emery won’t be the only one who goes missing. And trust me when I tell you they won’t find you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Why don’t you let me worry about your car and you worry about our long lost foster brother out there causing problems for us. Who knows what he had planned for us next.”
“We’re going to find him before that happens,” Pierce assured me.
“Then make it fucking happen.” I hit the end button on the Bluetooth and let the line go
dead as I took the exit, speeding too fast off the ramp and swinging a left.
I glanced down at the wound on my stomach, catching a little bit of blood starting to creep out. I shoved the fabric of my shirt over it again, pressing down hard enough to stop the liquid. What the fuck was the matter with me lately? I was completely off my game. Getting stabbed and then letting my guard down long enough for Emery to get taken from my very own bed?
Well, not again.
No one was allowed to make her pay besides me.
I was going to get her back and then I was going to kill Cameron once and for all. I didn’t give a fuck what it took or what measures I had to take in order to make that happen.
It was why I was turning into the parking lot I was. Why I was going to the last person on the planet I should ever ask for help. You could say whatever you wanted about him but at least he got shit done. Hopefully, my brothers didn’t disown me completely when they found out.
I wasn’t holding my breath.
Chapter Three
“Why was someone doing this to me?”
EMERY
*Present
I felt like my body was starting to unravel almost as much as my mind. I had no idea how long I had been trapped between these four walls, how long I had been stuck with nothing but the company of my own thoughts but it was starting to get to me.
It was so silent. So empty.
I felt like I was going crazy.
I had spent the last I don’t know how many hours pounding and screaming, begging for someone, anyone to come in here. I was starting to wonder if this was it for me.
If whoever took me was just going to keep me in here until I died.
Was this how I was going to die?
Alone and so slowly that I wanted to rip my own eyes out?
“No,” I whispered to myself. “You aren’t going to die, Emery. Jackson is going to save you.” I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the cold wall, letting the sensation wash over my body while I waited for it to take care of some of my sweat. “He’s going to come for you, Emery.”
I knew I sounded like a crazy person but it was hard to care.
It was hard to care about much of anything.
Why was someone doing this to me?
I tried to imagine I was anywhere else but there, tried to think about the last time I had been truly happy, the last time I had been truly lost in something so great that nothing was bothering me, that every single one of my problems seemed too small to matter.
Of course, Jackson shot into my memory right away.
The night before when he had promised to break me in over and over again had been hotter than anything I could have ever imagined. So hot that even under all this stress, my pussy was throbbing with soreness, reminding me that the last 24 hours or however long I had been locked up like a prisoner had been no match for the hardness of Jackson’s massive cock.
The way he had touched me…
The way he had kissed me…
I wanted to relive that moment over and over for the rest of my life.
And at the rate the whole situation was going, I just might.
***
24-48 hours earlier*
EMERY
“What?” Jackson asked from next to me, his eyes sealed tightly shut.
I glanced over at his flawless skin. How could someone so cold look so angelic like when he was sleeping? “I didn’t say anything,” I pointed out, pulling the blanket tighter around my body.
“You don’t have to say anything for me to know the wheels are turning in that dramatic mind of yours.” He pushed his eyelids open and traced those deep grey eyes onto me. “It bothers me when I don’t know what’s going on inside of that mind of yours, lamb, so you better start talking.”
I sighed and sunk my nails into the bedspread roughly. The last hour had been amazing but now that my body was coming off from our pleasure train all the same doubts that had been there before had come rushing back too fast for me to handle.
I opened my mouth and then snapped it shut again.
Jackson pulled his head up, twisting to the side so that it was resting on his hand while he looked over at me. “Emery, I can practically see the wheels spinning out of control in that complicated mind of yours. If I have to ask you to speak again, I’m going to grow hostile.”
My mind was complicated? Ha! That was ironic coming from him.
“It’s just…” I started. “When you were hurt…”
“I’m fine,” he cut me off, totally misreading where I was going with it. “Someone shoving a knife into my stomach isn’t going to get to me, Emery, and you shouldn’t let it get to you either.”
I glanced at him. “Why not?”
“Because.” He shrugged. “It happens.”
“You getting stabbed just ‘happens’?” I asked incredibly.
“Not me getting stabled,” he sounded casual. “But me getting in situations where things get violent. I have a reputation to uphold, lamb, and if that means I have to put people in their place then I have to put people in their place.” He reached out and ran one of his fingers up and down my neck. “I won’t tolerate being disrespected.”
I shot up in bed, shoving his hand off my skin. “So, let me get this straight. You’re going to keep putting yourself in dangerous situations, situations where you might die, and I have to stay silent while your life hands in the balance? Getting no say in anything!”
He pushed his body up more gracefully than I had and let out a half groan. “What are you talking about, getting a say?” he sounded surprisingly calm.
I took a deep breath and tried to collect my thoughts. “I mean that you almost died, like off this planet died, and your brother’s treated me like your whore. Nothing I said even mattered.”
“Did you think it would be different?” He raised his eyebrows and shook his head in confusion. “You’re part of the reason my family is turned upside down right now, Emery. How could you of thought Pierce or Liam, especially Liam, would hear you out about anything having to do with me? This isn’t… that’s not how we work.”
“So, you can sleep with me…”
“What we have is about revenge,” he snapped. “You know that.”
“So, you can sleep with me,” I kept going, ignoring his interruption. “But I can’t speak a word about you maybe dying in front of me, I can’t worry about your life hanging in the balance.”
“You can’t act like my girlfriend,” he corrected.
“But you can act like my boyfriend?”
“It’s different.” His chest raised and fell roughly.
He was getting annoyed with me.
“You said you loved me!” I spat out off impulse.
Jackson’s eyes grew dark and then he looked away from me, refusing to meet my eyes. He sat there for what felt like forever, not offering me any kind of explanation. Just when I thought the conversation was over he sighed and spoke deeply. “It doesn’t mean what you think it means, lamb.”
“What does that even mean?”
His large arms rested on his knees as he turned my question over in his complicated mind. He looked so small in the largeness of his bed, his defined muscles glistening in the darkness. God, what I would give to get trapped inside of that mind of his for just a few minutes. To be able to decode how he worked, why he thought the way he did. I would need a fucking map just to make it a few inches.
“It means,” his voice was raspy and edgy. “That I don’t love the way you do. You think of love as a good thing but it's not, it’s a weakness. It isn’t all fucking rainbows and butterflies for a man like me. So, yeah… maybe I do love you.” His teeth clenched together and I could tell just how hard it was for him to even say that much. “But it’s only because the word has a different meaning to me. It’ll never be in the way you want, in the way a girl like you needs.”
My heart was racing, my body quivering.
“And that’s why we’ll explode every fuck
ing time.” He finally looked at me. “Why we would never work even if we are incapable of staying away from one another. We’re like fucking lightning in a bottle.” He reached out again, running his finger over my top lip. “I never know which is stronger my love for you or my hate for you.”
“Me either,” I admitted.
He dropped his hand and his eyes went cold again, his body stiff. He was back in his own thoughts again, the moment completely gone. I wondered if we would ever have another one again. I wanted to drop it, to take what I could get, but the ache in my body wouldn’t allow me to. It wasn’t fair. Nothing about him and me had ever been fair.
“So, I have to go through it alone,” I clarified. “You being hurt. While Pierce and Liam have each other. While Morgan gets to fucking know more details than me.”
He snapped his head around, jaw tense. I expected him to scold me for swearing at him, for catching an attitude, but he surprised me with his icy tone. “What do you mean Morgan knew details?”
I waved my hands in the air, annoyed. “I mean she knew everything! Pierce clearly values her opinion since she got to know more details than me.” I looked down at my hands. “She knew about the whole damn attack before I even had a chance to blink. About Cameron, about…” I trailed off, trying to control the tears from falling down my face. “Everything.”
“Pierce shouldn’t have told her anything,” Jackson huffed in anger.
“Well, he did,” I informed him.
“Well, I’ll talk to him and make sure it doesn’t happen again.” He leaned back on the bed and let his head fall into the pillow. “God, Emery, you’re so annoying. I shouldn’t be worried about who the fuck my brother is sticking his cock into but you make it a whole big thing.”
“Morgan and Pierce aren’t like that!” I gasped.
“If they aren’t, it’s because of him and not her, trust me. I see the way she looks at him. She’s like a lost puppy dog with a bone following after her master.” He chuckled to himself and then sighed. “Still, him telling her anything about our family business is concerning.”
