Fifth a Fury (Goddess Isles 5)

The yellow shirt fell to the floor. My fingers sparked with electricity. My hands shook as I forced myself not to caress her, not to tangle her mind any more than it already was.

She shivered and groaned at my proximity, her breasts heavy, and lust trickling down her inner thigh. She had no idea I’d been the one to touch her, yet her skin flushed for me, her invitation heavy with her scent in the air.

Drake’s cock thickened at her cries, once again trying to get to her.

I braced, ready to keep him at bay. However, Eleanor was no longer tethered and she bolted.

She left Drake clutching at air and his hard-on bouncing in his haste to chase.

It took fucking everything to stand still while Eleanor tripped over a rug and fell to her knees, scurrying like a mouse, bumping into a bookcase in her hurry.

All instincts told me to protect her. Go after her. The primal need to kill Drake almost overrode my discipline.

You snap, she dies.

You kill Drake, she dies.

You do anything wrong, she dies.

So get it fucking right.

My teeth almost turned to dust as I ripped my gaze off the hunt in front of me and locked onto my cell phone.

In this world, I was a cripple.

But in that world…I was god.

I was the creator and architect. I could bend the rules to suit me. I could use Drake’s mind to break him, instead of his body.

If I couldn’t stop the fantasy, then…I would join in.

My desire for bloodshed unfolded with morbid magic.

It would be the worst thing I’d ever done.

I would step over every boundary and humanity I had left, embrace every shred of darkness in my soul.

And I would relish every fucking minute of it.

My thumbs flew over the screen as I typed new lines of code. I added a cypher, changed a character, conjured a new kind of nightmare. Every edit I made, Drake and Eleanor would witness each revision, their illusion morphing around them. As I snuffed out the sun and drenched them in darkness, they’d see all manner of changes.

Amendments that shouldn’t be possible.

Tricks that couldn’t be true.

My fingers flew faster, twisting the code past all realms of comprehensible.

This was to be Drake’s crypt. It was only fitting that I spared no expense to his demise.

Currently, Drake and Eleanor were in a campsite set in an American forest on the dawn of the Revolutionary War. A meagre camp where the guest who’d asked me to cypher such a fantasy wanted a bearskin tent, an avatar skilled at combat, and a native Indian girl who happened to be gathering water at a river. A girl who would be overpowered, overcome—a goddess high on elixir who would spread her legs for the illusion of forced conquering.

It’d proven to be a success.

The guest had left entirely satisfied.

Yet Drake would find death instead of pleasure.

My lips thinned as I typed faster and faster. New lines of text slipped into the old, distorting a fantasy within a fantasy, a world within a world.

A world unlike any explorer in the 18th century would’ve found.

Only once I’d completed the amended falsity did I prepare to join them.

Grabbing a few boxes of my Euphoria supplies where Drake had left them scattered, I inserted eye lenses and earbuds. I didn’t bother with anything else, only requiring the bare essentials for my insertion.

Ensuring the lounge doors were closed, I grasped the sedative tight in my fist and hovered my thumb over the screen.

I pressed the button to load a third person into their delusion.

The world went white.

Geneva vanished.

And Sully…was no more.

Chapter Seven

STRANGE THINGS WERE HAPPENING.

An odd thing to think—considering how strange my life had become—but strange things occurred nevertheless.

Things that shouldn’t be possible.

I was no longer in Switzerland but in a forest filled with towering pines. Autumn leaves crackled beneath my moccasin covered feet. Soft beaded leather clothed me, feathers bounced in my hair, tattoos glowed on my arms hidden beneath ivory bangles.

My skin was darker, my hair black instead of brown.

I felt wilder, more in tune with the forest, knowing the breeze swept from the north and the sun signalled late afternoon. I was as native to these woods as the chipmunk watching us and the herd of deer running past in the distance.

Unlike the man doing his best to bed me.

He was an outlander.

A ruffian who stood like a tree trunk with flaming red hair, matching copper beard, and hands the size of dinner plates.

I’d been dodging him since he’d tried to pounce on me by the river’s edge. I’d darted out of his grasp, nimble and swift while he was lumbering and slow.

The only problem was with every second that ticked past, my swiftness drowned beneath sex. Elixir crept faster and crueller through my blood, ensuring I buckled beneath its horror, all while I did my best to ignore it.