Filed To Story: Craving The Wrong Brother Book PDF Free by Elysian Sparrow
“Ten kids? Are you seriously blackmailing me right now?”
“Do you want me to die?” he asks, like it’s a legitimate threat he’s prepared to carry out.
“Jesus, Knox. Don’t joke about that.”
He tries to laugh-actually laugh-but it comes out as a grunt of pain that makes my stomach turn and my heart clench with worry.
“Fine,” I say, trying to keep my voice light and steady. “One kid.”
“Ten.”
“Two. That’s my final offer.”
“Ten.”
“Fuck off.”
The silence that follows is different from before. I panic.
“Knox? Knox!”
But he’s out.
I don’t remember what happens next exactly. The details blur together. Just that I start screaming at Mud, at Hunter, at Knox himself. My voice is hoarse, useless, but I can’t stop. My hands are still in his hair, fingers tangled in the dark strands. I can’t let go. I won’t let go.
In the mirror, I see Mud glance back at me, his eyes wide and wary. Like I’m the grenade now, ready to explode at any moment.
We pull up somewhere minutes later. The car screeches to a halt in front of a building that makes me blink in confusion.
A veterinary clinic?
I stare at the sign, trying to process what I’m seeing. “What the fuck?” I whisper.
Mud’s already out of the car. Hunter too. The doors swing open, and people come running out-mer in scrubs carrying a stretcher that looks like it was d?signed for something much smaller than a full-grown man.
I don’t want to let go. Not when they reach in for him with careful hands. Not when they start lifting his body off my lap.
If Mud says this is where they go for treatment, then I have to trust him. What other choice do I have?
They carry Knox inside, the stretcher sagging under his weight but holding. Down the hallway in the clinic, they go through a set of glass doors that swing shut behind them.
And I run after them-because I need to be where he is, because I can’t bear to be separated from him now.
But someone stops me.
“Ma’am, you can’t go in there,” a woman in blood-stained scrubs says, stepping into my path and blocking the door with her body. “Please just wait at reception.”
“Knox!” I scream, trying to push past her. “Let me through!”
But Hunter pulls me back from behind.
“Just be calm,” he says into my ear. “Knox is a survivor. He’s going to pull through this. And then you can give him those ten kids he wants.”
I laugh despite my mood. “Two was my final offer.”
“Great. You can argue about it when he comes out of surgery.”
I nod, swallowing the knot in my throat as I stare at the door I’m not allowed to go through. I believe it. I have to believe it. Knox will come out of there. Because he’s Knox. Because he’s stronger than shrapnel and blood loss and the kind of injuries that would kill ordinary men. Because he’s mine, and I’m his, and that has to count for something in this cruel, chaotic world/I just got him, and I’m not losing him.
When he does come out-not if, but when-we’ll have that argument about babies all over again. We’ll fight about numbers and timing and whether our hypothetical children will inherit his stubborn streak or my reckless curiosity.
But no matter how many we have or don’t have, no matter what the future holds, I already know one thing with absolute certainty-
My heart is his.
Strictly Knox’s.
And that’s never going to change.
My final offer’s still two kids, though. I’m not all about that life.
THREE MONTHS LATER-
“Again!” Jade yells. He’s standing beside me with his hands in his pockets, earmuffs on, stop until the clip’s empty.”
I nod without saying anything because what is there to say?
The first shot goes off, jerking my shoulder with the recoil. I keep going.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang. and safety glasses pushed up just enough to see my face “Don’t
The sound is everything, louder than the voice in my head that keeps whispering, ‘You killed someone, you killed someone, you killed someone. The indoor range smells like gunpowder and industrial bleach, a smell that makes my eyes water. My ears are muffled by the protective gear, but I can still feel each shot rattling through my chest.
Bang.
Bang.
I didn’t want to be here. Didn’t want to be standing in the firing range beneath Knox’s club, listening to Jade bark instructions at me. But after months of therapy sessions where I’ve danced around the warehouse incident-unable to voice my actual problem without risking jail time-Knox decided I needed to face my demons head-on.
And apparently, my demon is holding a gun again.
The weird thing is, when Jade first handed me the Glock, I didn’t flinch. Didn’t freeze up or have a panic attack or any of the dramatic reactions I’d been expecting. My hands just closed around it like muscle memory. Guess the problem isn’t the weapon itself. It’s what I did with one just like it.
It’s the act of killing someone that’s eating me alive.
Knox is getting therapy too. He’d shot down my suggestion initially, stubborn as always, but when the night terrors came back worse than before and he started refusing pain medication as some kind of twisted form of trauma treatment, I put my foot down. You either go to them, or I bring them to you. The therapist I found for him costs more per hour than most people make in a week, but it’s working. He’s not constantly scanning every room for threats anymore. He’s not having panic attacks when I’m out of his sight-or at least, he’s getting better about hiding them.
Right now, he’s watching from behind a one-way glass partition while lying on his stomach getting tattooed, apiece he’s been working on for two days. The doctor said it’s too early to be getting ink over his scars, but Knox has never been one to listen to medical advice. He won’t tell me what the design is and keeps it covered every time I try to peek. All I know is he can see us through that one-way mirror, watching Jade teach me how to shoot.
It’s like having a golden retriever boyfriend, if golden retrievers weighed two hundred pounds and had separation anxiety issues the size of Texas. When it comes down to it, he’s more of a clingy Rottweiler.
The last shot echoes longer than the others. When I finally lower the gun, my hands are shaking, not from fear, but from the sheer physical effort of keeping that thing steady.
Jade steps forward and hits the button on the control panel that brings our paper silhouette toward us.
When the target stops in front of us, it’s unmarked. Not a single hole. Not one.
“Wow,” Jade says. “This is actually impressive. How do you miss seventeen shots? I mean, mathematically speaking, shouldn’t you have hit it at least once by mistake?”
TU.14 Thu, zo dun
“Fuck you, Jade.” I reply.
He laughs. “You’re spectacularly terrible at this. I’m charging Knox extra for these lessons.”
Before I can respond, he’s plucking the gun from my hands. He proceeds to check the chamber, eject the empty magazine, and reload, doing it all with ease.
“How’s my mom?” I ask, needing to fill the silence.
Jade doesn’t look up from the gun. “You know Margot. Back to her usual routine. She misses you terribly, though. You should really think about letting bygones be bygones.”
“I’m just not ready.”
“You can’t keep avoiding your family, Sloane.”
“I’ve got priorities right now,” I say, and I can feel my shoulders tensing up. “Besides, you see how Knox hangs around me constantly. Until they give me their word that they’re not going to start drama about us being together, they can stay in limbo.”
He hands the gun back to me. “That’s it? Your family accepting your boyfriend? You should have just said that months ago. Your mother’s moved way past caring about that. She forgave me, remember?”
“Right,” I say, but the word tastes like sawdust.
Because what I’m not telling Jade is that Knox isn’t the actual problem. He’s the excuse. My family has turned into a complete circus, and I’ve been trying not to let the entire thing swallow me whole.
New Book: Returned To Make Them Pay
On her wedding anniversary, Alicia is drugged and stumbles into the wrong room—straight into the arms of the powerful Caden Ward, a man rumored never to touch women. Their night of passion shocks even him, especially when he discovers she’s still a virgin after two years of marriage to Joshua Yates.