Excerpt from EARTH BOUND

Keep reading for an excerpt from the next Sea Haven novel by Christine Feehan

EARTH BOUND

Available July 2015 from Jove Books

PAIN was a strange entity. It could live and breathe, existing in every cell in one’s body. It could cripple, rob one of breath, of dignity, of quality of life. Pain could be the first thing one felt when waking and the last thing one felt when falling asleep. It was an insidious enemy. Silent. Unseen. Deadly. Gavriil Prakenskii had decided some time ago to make pain his friend.

If he was going to survive, if it was even possible with pain as his companion, he would come to terms with it—and he had. Until this moment. Until pain wasn’t about the physical or the mental, but all about the emotional. That was an entirely different kind of pain and one he was completely unprepared for.

His life was one of absolute discipline and control. He planned his every move and his contingency plans had backup contingency plans. There was never a moment that he wasn’t ready for. There was never a time when anything shocked or surprised him. He stayed alive that way. He had no friends and he thought of everyone he encountered as an enemy. The few people he had ever allowed himself to feel even a drop of friendship with had eventually betrayed him, and he simply counted those painful moments as important lessons to be learned.

He was used to deceit and betrayal. To blood, torture, pain and death. He was used to being alone. He was most comfortable in that world because he understood it. He was thirty-seven years old and he’d been in that world since he was a child. He knew more ways to kill or torture a human being than he could count. It was instinctive, automatic and a natural part of him. He carried death with him the way others might carry their identities, because he was death. If he came out of the shadows, even for a moment, it was to deliver that killing blow.

Few ever saw him. He lived in a shadowy world, and moved through it like a phantom, a ghost in the night, leaving dead bodies in his wake. He wasn’t real, was nothing more than a shadow someone might catch a glimpse of. Insubstantial. Without substance. He hadn’t been human in years. Yet here he stood in the early morning, dawn streaking long rays of light through the velvet black of night, with his well-ordered world crumbling around him so that he felt the earth actually move under him.

His palm itched. Not a small nagging itch, but a full-blown do-something-this-minute-to-alleviate-it itch. Gavriil pressed his hand tightly into his thigh and held it there, his heart suddenly beating hard in his chest. Life sometimes threw curves at the most unexpected times—yet he should have known this might happen.