The Beats in Rift (27 page)

I hurry the girls from the side room used to store crap in and enter the club. It’s packed with all our family and they are all silent. Keeping a room full of hard ass bikers, their women and their kids quiet is not something to be taken lightly.

The door opens and my gorgeous man fills the space of the door frame. “Surprise!” We all scream and he jumps. He actually jumps.

I rush over to him. “Happy birthday, baby,” I say.

“Holy shit, I nearly had a heart attack.” He squeezes me against him.

“I signed the deed on the studio today.” I beam up at him. He had bought me my own studio as a surprise for my birthday. It’s small but perfect for starting out. He had my original red Fender restored and framed behind the desk, while my black one took pride of place in its stand in the recording room.

“Would you like to unwrap your gift now or later?” I ask seductively. He looks over at everyone smiling at him then back to me, pulling away, his eyes rake slowly over my body.

“Now.” He grabs my hand and marches me up the stairs to everyone hollering and catcalling us, then the music plays and their voices filter out.

He rushes me into his old room. I bite my lip as he stalks towards me. “I love that fucking dress, baby.”

I giggle. “I know.”

“Lift it to your waist,” he orders. I shake my head and he cocks an eyebrow. “No?”

“I need you to take it off. Unwrap me, your gift is underneath.”

He grins and turns me around, gathering my hair and scooping it over my shoulder to kiss the bare skin exposed at the nape of my neck. “You smell fucking divine.”

His fingers slide the zipper on my dress, slowly lowering it, tracing kisses down my spine as he uncovers bare skin. When he reaches the top of my ass the dress drops, pooling at my feet. “What’s this?” he asks. His fingers stroke the ribbon tied around my waist.

Turning me around to face him, he sucks in a breath at the bow sitting over my belly button. “For real?” he asks.

I grin. “I found out last month but I didn’t want to tell you straight away.” His eyes narrow. We’ve been trying to get pregnant ever since we got married, and I was starting to worry until I felt sick and went to the doctor to be told I was three months pregnant. I didn’t even have a bump, my stomach was flat. He told me that was perfectly normal and I could be carrying low in my back, and it was also normal to still have a light period in my first couple of months. Rift was away at the time, so I held out for the fourth month to find out what we’re having to surprise him for his birthday.

He looked down at the ribbon. “How far along?”

“Four months,” I murmur.

“Is there a reason this ribbon is blue?”

I bite my lip and nod. His face lights up, his eyes sparking.

“Holy shit, you got my boy in there?”

He picks me up, spinning me around, his head burrowing into my neck. “Happy birthday, Rift,” I whisper.

Carrying me over to the bed he makes slow intense love to me.

We have everything. Each other, two beautiful girls, and now a boy on the way. Justin is happy and settled, and finally content with me being with Rift. He said he likes to see the light back in my eyes.

He’s right; the light is back because Rift is my light, my soul mate, and I am The Beat in Rift.

Keep reading for a sneak peek at upcoming works

Synopsis for Façade

You meet someone. You date. You fall in love. You marry.

The four simple rules of love….

Wrong! I’m married but I’d never met him before now, never dated him, never fell in love. I have no access to the memories of the most magical time of anyone’s life.

My mind won’t allow me to evoke the past, I can’t remember those four simple stages.

I can’t comprehend why I would have ever married someone like Dante. I should never have passed the first stage, although, I may have seen him through the eyes of the woman I once was, this me that lives, breathes here now, can’t understand how we made it to the next stage.

I’m not sure, without memories, how I know that this voice inside me, telling me I would never have chosen him, speaks some truth, I just know. He’s controlling, arrogant, callous and violent, and utterly hell bent on humiliating and degrading me – Like watching me falter, watching me struggle to comply and be the woman he married, powers him- as though he wants to break me piece by piece. Fibre by fibre. Until all that’s here is the shell he created from a soul that I once owned.

Now my memories are slowly returning. And they show me a completely different side to meeting him. Our dates, falling in love. The Dante haunting me in the shadows of my mind is loving, gentle and utterly enamoured with me, nothing like the man with me now.

And this is what taunts me. My tender lover turned into a debauched, cruel sadist who is determined to consume my life, destroy my mind and murder my spirit.

I am, Star, and just like with some stars in the sky, the light you see is an echo, a façade, I am already gone

I am a no one.

Especially to him. To him I am the dark in his desires, the corrupt in his depravity.

The sin in his immorality.

A snippet from upcoming novel

Blake

I’ve never hesitated before, I kill without remorse.

The girl who loves me, Abby, the one I fuck and leave because I don’t have feelings for her, I just enjoy the pleasures of her body, the warmth she lets me into, she’s a psych major and says I have psychopath tendencies. She says I have a deficiency in empathy. She cried at me one night, telling me I lack the emotions to care about anyone. But if that was true why do I care about my brother? And why when the single tear that dropped from the green eye and the
live
tattoo on the wrist of the little spitfire girl that nearly knocked herself out running into me earlier at Ryan’s college, would make me hesitate in this moment? Why did seeing her in the mirror stun me when I recognised her, make me not want to squeeze my fist tight around her neck, ending the inconvenience of this cluster fuck of a job?

Of all the coincidences this one blew my mind. The aroma of her body flared the life of the man in me when it hit my nose. She was scared and shaking, the sweat carrying her scent to me, making me become human in a time I needed to be the Evil I was born to be, created to be what the fuck ever.

“You fucking coward, at least face me if you’re going to kill me,”
She murmured.

Pride, hell I was proud of her in that moment and that was a new feeling for me, she wasn’t as weak as I first thought.

My anger grew, I didn’t want to feel anything, I needed to kill her.

This job had turned bad so fast it was a shit storm that might have me tracking the client who hired me and killing him for fun. No one was supposed to be here except the parents, and it was supposed to be a quick, clean kill while they were asleep. An alive girl and two dead people in a mass of blood and gore in the dining room was not how I wanted to leave this house.

I had no choice now, I spun her around and forced her head back into the mirror knocking her unconscious. It shattered and splintered around her like confetti.

She was beautiful, I was cold-hearted not blind. She lay there with her hair fanned out around her, her mind at peace. She would never feel it if I just ended her life right now, but I couldn’t. I stalked back into the shadows and waited and watched as she arouse from her temporary slumber. Why I stayed I will question for my entire life.

When I broke I didn’t see it, I felt it though.

When I kill I don’t think about the person I kill, the family they might have or the person who has to find the bodies. So to watch first hand as a girl awakes from a dream to be forced into a nightmare and watch her break right in front of me is a surreal moment, it’s an uncomfortable experience for me. I can’t work out what this is I’m feeling.

It’s visible, a person’s soul fracturing. You see their world collapse, their beliefs leave them. You see the raw grief switch to anger, the why has this happened to me transform their features. Then the shutters closing over their eyes, their soul dimming their light. The darkness, the cold, evil taking them hostage, altering them forever, the slouch of the shoulders, and the drop of the mouth. The color of their skin turning pale. You see the anger, grief and disbelief rage in their eyes like a storm at sea before it calms to an empty ocean, just deep depths of emptiness.

You don’t just kill the mark when you do a job, you kill the spirit in the people that loved them.

How will she let this change her? What will she become when she resurfaces from the depraved actions of a soulless killer?

Coming soon

The Devil visited me three times in my life, albeit, my short life. Not in the physical sense you must understand, but very much literally.

He was persistent, if not resolute and tenacious. His ruthless greed to annihilate me was utterly disturbed. I am sure if he had hierarchy, the man at the top would have dragged his arse into Hell prison just for his unscrupulous methods.

I was just fifteen when I first became aware of what he was capable of. This initial taste of him set the playing field for how my life was to be
lived
– for want of a better word.

He mocked me at this point, showed me mercilessly how he played the game, and how he liked to cheat at said game. He ridiculed and taunted until six months later, he won and took something of so much importance from me that I would never be the same again.

His second visit was, in my eyes, so much more cruel and heartless. I know we’re talking about the devil here, and yes, you have a right to say he had no heart, but even then, even when I was so utterly broken, I begged to differ and hoped – no prayed, that somewhere deep in the caverns of his black and tortured soul there was something that beat and confused his emotions once in a while.