Fifth
a
Fury
Goddess Isles
Book Five
by
New York Times Bestseller
Pepper Winters
Fifth a Fury
Copyright © 2020 Pepper Winters
Published by Pepper Winters
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Published: Pepper Winters 2020: pepperwinters@gmail.com
Cover Design: Ari @ Cover it! Designs
Editing by: Editing 4 Indies (Jenny Sims)
OTHER WORK BY PEPPER WINTERS
Pepper currently has thirty-two books released in nine languages. She’s hit best-seller lists (USA Today, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal) thirty-eight times. She dabbles in multiple genres, ranging from Dark Romance to Coming of Age.
For more information, please visit: www.pepperwinters.com
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Goddess Isles Series – Available Now
Once a Myth
Twice a Wish
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Fifth a Fury
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Quintessentially Q
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Je Suis a Toi
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Can’t Touch This
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Fifth a Fury Blurb
“There was a beginning once. A beginning that started with being sold to a monster I fell for.
There was an ending once. An ending that came cloaked in bloodshed and fury.”
Eleanor Grace is a simple mortal who has the power to topple a god. She captured his heart, fed him a different future, and fought for a fantasy that wasn’t make-believe but destiny.
Sully Sinclair is a man masquerading as a monster. He let down his shields and allowed a goddess to show him a simpler path. However, neither of them could predict the war that was coming, nor the toll it would take.
A fated romance.
A fight that will finish in tears.
The age-old battle of good versus evil.
Dedicated to:
The survivors of the world.
Through hardship, heartache, health, and hell.
You are the true heroes and heroines.
Contents
OTHER WORK BY PEPPER WINTERS
Fifth a Fury Blurb
Dedicated to:
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Letter from the Author
WOULD YOU LIKE REGULAR FREE BOOKS?
OTHER BOOKS AVAILABLE FROM PEPPER WINTERS
PLAYLIST
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Prologue
FURY.
Red hot.
Scalpel sharp.
Motherfucking fury.
I was its prisoner, master, and king.
It bowed to me, crippled me, and twined around my veins as I sank deeper into the sea.
Fury.
An emotion as familiar to me as the warm ocean sucking me down. A feeling I’d always tried to harness, expel, and ignore. I’d failed on multiple occasions. I’d kneeled beneath its sinister sufferings and existed with silent loathing within my heart, but now...
Fuck.
Now...I no longer turned away from the shooting shards of hate. I welcomed the acidic contempt. I turned my back on humanity and permitted fury to strip me of everything I’d been. To delete my failures. To erase my past. To leave me empty
apart from one deeply dangerous thing.
Eleanor...
I jerked beneath the sea.
He took her.
Fury!
I welcomed the poison.
The heinous howl for blood.
Eleanor!
My fury grew again.
My bones snapped with it.
My heart smoked with it.
My entire world was soaked in rage-dripping FURY!
It mutated the water around me.
It sent shockwaves through the sea, no longer living within me but surrounding me, choking me.
Eleanor...
I opened my mouth and screamed.
Bubbles shot from my lips.
Oxygen poured from bruised lungs.
And another kind of darkness encroached.
A darkness that promised to strangle me if I didn’t find her, free her, kill him.
That was my only purpose now.
Kill.
Kill my brother.
Kill Drake.
Drake.
Motherfucking Drake.
He has her.
He took her.
He’ll DIE.
The surface twinkled above, showing me the way to my vengeance.
My fists curled underwater.
My wounded eyes blinked in the salt.
And my fury morphed from emotion to element.
Blazing fire and howling gales—a tsunami beneath me, churning up the sea floor. I was mayhem. I was unchained.
I’m free.
Fury was no longer just a feeling but an offshoot of every disaster I wielded.
Magic.
Black magic.
Dark magic.
A magic that would extract its payment in souls.
Drake’s soul.
FURY.
His blood would flow.
His bones would snap.
His life squeezed to nothingness in my fist.
The man I’d been sank to the bottom of the ocean—useless to me now, a hindrance, a weakling who’d been afraid of his power.
A god who hadn’t been able to protect his goddess.
I was no longer divine.
I was no longer human.
I was a vampire thirsting for blood.
I was hell.
I was death.
I. Am. Fury.
Chapter One
SULLY.
His fall into the ocean was on repeat inside my head.
Tripping out the door.
Plummeting down, down, down.
My heart squeezed each time his splash replayed.
A splash and then...nothing.
My thoughts weren’t in my body, locked on Drake’s lap, skimming over the sea, but back there. Back where Sully had fallen. Where he’d disappeared. Where we’d been separated against our will.
Sully...please.
Almost an hour had passed.
The longest, nightmarish hour since I’d last seen him.
Since I knew he was alive...
“Descending,” the pilot yelled over the din. “Found it.”
The pilot’s voice brought me back; Drake’s legs tensing beneath mine ripped me from my wonderings.
I glanced out the window, shuddering as Drake’s hold on me tightened.
Monyet.
The island with a large laboratory hidden within its paradise, pumping out drugs that went above and beyond aphrodisiacs, creating who knew what else within its walls.
Sully...are you okay?
My mind split down the middle. It now had the ability to focus on my plight while staying firmly on Sully’s in my past.
It was like staring into two mirrors.
A mirror angled behind me—a portal to a man who I begged to rise from the sea. And another angled on my present—revealing unfolding events taking me farther and farther away from him.
“About fucking time,” Drake muttered as the helicopter engines cut off mid-screech, the rotors slowing down the moment we touched land.
I shuddered again, overflowing with disgust as Drake pushed me off his lap and onto the seat beside him.
For fifty minutes or so, the pilots had skimmed over Sully’s empire, peering at each island, trying to figure out which one housed a lab. Unfortunately, it’d become fairly obvious as darkness descended, and lights spangled below.
The smaller islands with no inhabitants were easy to discount, followed by those with smaller populations performing whatever tasks Sully had set for them to do. Monyet was at least twice the size of Serigala, and directly in the centre of a fortified encampment. Ringed with fences and palm trees, it sat in a well-lit facility reeking of scientific dealings.
“We’re on the main helipad within the barbwire perimeter,” the older pilot said. “They’ll have heard us arrive. Better figure out your story, quick.”
“I don’t need a story,” Drake said. “This is family owned, and I’m family. Therefore, it’s mine, and everything inside is mine.”
“Nothing is yours,” I snapped. “You’re a thief.”
He chuckled, his eyes still tight with fatigue from his indulgence with elixir. “Thief? I prefer to be called an opportunist.”
“Bastard suits you more.”
He shrugged. “I don’t mind that one.” He looked out the window, eyeing up the lab he’d come to raid.
Drake had been bold and uncaring that he trespassed. He’d stolen so much from Sully already...and now, his thievery would continue on a different island.
Sully...
I hugged myself as goosebumps decorated me.
Please...please be okay.
“What’s the plan?” the remaining mercenary asked.
I curled around my pain, turning my attention away from the mirror on my present and stared into the one showing that ever-repeating image of Sully being thrown out of the helicopter.
Falling.
Falling.
Splash.
“There’s four of us,” Drake muttered, rubbing his eyes as the exhaustion still consumed him from Euphoria. “They’re just nerds. We’ll knock, ask politely, and leave. They don’t obey; they die. I want out of this stinking country the second we’ve got elixir on board.”
“Fine.” The mercenary nodded.
The pilots jumped from the cockpit, moving toward the door where Sully had tumbled.
Nausea lapped up my throat.
You better be alive, Sully.
The pilots—one young with brown hair, and the other old with grey—glanced at each other before the older one snipped, “You hired us to fly you around, Mr. Sinclair, not to shoot anybody.”
Drake latched his fingers around my wrist, jerking me from the helicopter.
I tripped at the sudden inertia and fell to my knees as he yanked me from the machine. My skin scraped on the roughness of the helipad as he dragged me to the grass a few metres away and left me puddled at his feet.
I hissed at him.
He smirked.
Keeping his hand on my shoulder to prevent me from standing, he nodded at the mercenary to pass a spare handgun to each pilot. “Stand with me, gentlemen, and you won’t have to shoot anyone. You’re there for show, that’s all.”
The men accepted out of ingrained decorum, cringing against the arsenal. “What do you expect us to do?”
“Just have my back.” Drake grinned, his fingers digging deeper into my shoulder. “They won’t put up a fight. My brother hires pussies. Geeks who jerkoff into their test tubes. I promise.”
“It’ll be easy.” The mercenary chuckled. “In and out. We’ll be done in five minutes flat.”
“Get off me.” I struggled, shoving Drake’s hand away and swooping to my feet. “Don’t touch me.”
Blood trickled from my grazed knees.
Sickness splashed up my throat.
Drake just laughed as if I was a silly gerbil caught in his paws.
Ignoring him, I locked eyes with the pilots, and snapped, “Sullivan Sinclair will pay you an exo
rbitant fee if you use that gun you’re holding and kill the man holding me prisoner. Take me back to Sully, and you’ll be rewarded—”
“Stupid, stupid Eleanor.” Drake slapped me around the head, sending me tumbling forward, my skull throbbing. “Don’t listen to her, gentlemen.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll give you a bonus when we disembark in Jakarta. How about that? Help us gather this last item, and I’ll pad your payday with another twenty grand each.”
“Sully will give you a hundred,” I hissed. “Kill Drake and—”
“Shut the fuck up, bitch.” The mercenary tried to strike me, but he missed.
I ducked and ran.
A gunshot cracked in the night, kicking up grass and soil by my feet.
I froze.
Drake’s footsteps padded lazily behind me.
My skin crawled as he moved in front of me and reached out like a considerate confidant, taking my hand in his. “First and final warning, Eleanor Grace. Move without my permission again, and the next bullet goes into your back. You’ll either die or be disabled. Either way, I’m past caring.”
He jerked me into him, his palm gluing itself to mine. “I’m getting old, you see. After fucking that goddess last night, my urge for sex has been well sated. I get hard at the thought of a billion dollars, not your pussy...even if my brother has become obsessed with it. When I’ve had some sleep, I’m sure your little outbursts will turn me the fuck on, and I will enjoy finding out why my baby brother couldn’t keep his hands off you, but I will warn you, in my current mood, I honestly don’t fucking care what state you’re in when I do fuck you. Alive, bleeding, or quadriplegic, so I suggest...” Leaning putridly close, he ran his nose along my cheekbone before whispering in my ear. “...you listen to me and be a good girl if you want to stay alive.”
Tearing myself away, I tried to unlock our hands, but he dug his fingernails into my knuckles.
I despised him.
I cursed him with a thousand hexes.
“That goddess you slept with was called Jess. You shot her. She’s probably dead. Just like Sully is—”
“Dead. Yes, I truly hope so. A tad inconvenient seeing as I didn’t get everything I needed, but...ah, well.” Flicking his gaze to the pilots behind me, he asked, “Can a man survive a fall from that height?”
I looked over my shoulder, hope flaring, despair cloying.
The pilots threw each other a look before the older, greyer one shrugged. “We were over a hundred feet high.”
“So...is that a yes or a no?”