A helicopter screech cut off outside, signalling the other team had arrived. “Go collect the package.”
“Sure thing.” He nodded and jogged from the room.
Drake scrambled over the coffee table, doing his best to return to Eleanor.
Urgency tried to undermine my precision. I wanted nothing more than to rip his fucking throat out, but they were linked. Their minds were threaded with hallucinations that were so real, so tangible, it became real.
I need her free from the fantasy.
Eleanor’s moans, as she continued to fight elixir, did their best to distract me.
Fire blazed in my blood for instant and brutal retribution.
The old Sully—the one impassioned and ruled by his love for this girl—would’ve carried her from the room and punched a hole in his fucking brother’s chest. He would’ve tried to skirt the very rules he’d coded for Euphoria and lost Eleanor in the process.
That man kept losing because he kept being controlled by his mistakes.
I wasn’t that man anymore.
Thanks to Tritec, I was clearheaded and methodical. It gave me the willpower to stand before my goddess and my brother all while he made his way back to her and reached to grab her.
I swallowed down my hatred. I quaked with my fury. And I permitted him to paw at her because I needed to do this right. I needed to not only kill him but fucking obliterate him.
And I know just how to do it.
Eleanor cried out, her tone full of disgust but also rapidly building need.
Elixir was winning.
Hold on, Jinx...hold on.
I couldn’t help her overcome elixir’s insidious consummation the same way I had on my island. She needed to be fucked so her overstimulated system didn’t kill her. It wasn’t about pleasure anymore, but survival. She needed orgasm after orgasm, and...I couldn’t give her that.
I’d put her through enough.
I’d hurt her past forgivable.
I had another plan.
A better plan.
One that I didn’t know for certain would work, but I had to try because nothing else was possible. I had no stamina to fuck her to the levels she needed, and I wouldn’t lay a hand on her while my motherfucking brother still breathed.
This is the only way.
A man ran into the room, holding out a medic bag complete with the travel defib and syringe in sterile packaging.
I accepted it.
He left immediately, leaving me alone with the woman I loved and the brother I cursed.
Placing the defib on the couch, I shoved Drake away again and untied Eleanor’s hands and ankle from the curtain tiebacks holding her prisoner.
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
