Playboy billionaire Aiden Grayson is being blackmailed and when he meets his handsome new bodyguard, Julian, he's slowly overcome by feelings he can't deny.
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Aiden Grayson is a child of privi...
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44. JULIAN'S POV
I thought I'd be stuck in some dreadful, never-ending line waiting to be welcomed into the fiery pits of hell by the big, bad Satan himself whenever I died.
I always assumed that my soul would go in the opposite direction of Heaven after my time on this beautifully convoluted earth came to an end; it would not pass go or collect two hundred dollars, but instead, it would fall straight into the gloomiest parts of the underworld where I would be forced to live out eternity in a place that had universally been deemed most appropriate for rapists, pedophiles, and terrorists.
I knew in my heart and - not entirely pure soul - that hell wasn't a place where I belonged.
My mother would beg to differ, though. She always implied that hell was my endgame due to my unwavering desire for people of the same sex; however, much to my surprise and probably hers too if she'd been here with me, I found myself to not be in the netherworld.
Instead, I was someplace eerily quiet, surrounded by nothing but darkness.
And I wasn't scared or apprehensive, wherever I was; just a little cold and achy. I remember how I got here, if that counted for anything. I remember that I passed out after losing too much blood from taking a bullet to the gut, however long ago that'd been.
There was one thing that I was for sure of, up until this point, and it was that I definitely wasn't dead. Dead people don't wake up on cushiony beds with what sounded like beeping machines all around them.
Yeah, this wasn't hell.
Either way, it took my brain and the rest of my body a few minutes to pull its shit together. When I finally managed to open my eyes and was able to officially throw out the foolish theory that death had taken me under, I was elated to confirm that I was lying in bed, alive - and also in a world of excruciating pain now that my body had awoken from its slumber - but alive, nonetheless.
Placing a hand to my face - using the arm that hadn't been injured - I rub the sleep from my eyes, later looking straight ahead to see a panel of people sitting around a small table conversing. For whatever reason, I couldn't seem to hear their voices.
I figured the flat screen hanging on the wall was on mute or something. I knew that I wasn't deaf because I could hear the hospital's machines around me going off... Oh shit, I'm in a hospital! That must mean I survived Clarissa's attack, right?
But what about...
"Cassie!" I called out to no one in particular, shocked to hear how hoarse my voice sounded. Going against my better judgment, I tried to sit up in bed. Regret immediately washed over me when the soreness in my abdomen sent an incredibly painful dose of Lay-Your-Stubborn-Ass-Back-Down throughout my entire body, causing me to reluctantly go back into the position that I was previously laying in. "Ow! Where are my fucking drugs?"
