Erotic Romance
Date Published: 4/28/2017
Yumiko Itsumoto wants it all. An accomplished artist and feared attorney, she gets what she wants, all else be damned. Now she wants love, even if it means charting a new course for her life, but changing course can be dangerous. In mere moments, she tumbles from the dizzying pinnacle of success into a bottomless abyss of murder and treachery. Yumiko will not live happily ever after—not this time—but can she at least find a way to stay alive?
Editor's review
Author J. Whitney Williams follows CARRIED AWAY—his surprisingly intelligent and deftly written debut—with a story that is even sexier, more thrilling and more enthralling than the first.
Again taking the reader on a trip across the world, meeting strange people in strange places via a prodigious narrator, CHOSEN PATH follows Yumi, a powerful and apparently dispassionate supporting character introduced in book one. But appearances deceive. Here, the reader is immersed in Yumi—into the very depths of her complex mind, her conflicted yet determined soul, her insatiable sex drive.
When Yumi encounters the woman who she presumes to be the fiancée of the love of her life—perhaps her only true love—she has every reason to seize the opportunity that presents itself to erase the woman from both of their lives forever. It’s no wonder Yumi is the prime suspect for the unfortunate woman’s swift and seemingly heartless murder. Unable to recall herself, Yumi assumes the worst, too. It wouldn’t be the first tragic fate to befall someone who stood in her way—or the last—and cameras don’t lie.
In CHOSEN PATH, Williams explores the very essence of what makes us human. The protagonist, a uniquely flawed yet extraordinarily likable woman of many talents and trades, demonstrates the jealousy and manipulation we see in ourselves and despise in others. At the same time, we’re drawn to Yumi. Geisha. Samurai. Assassin. Pseudo-royalty. Nothing happens to her; she creates. If we all shaped our own circumstances, our destinies, as adroitly as she, what paths would we choose and where would they lead us?
Excerpt:
The metal shriek of the train’s brakes reamed
out my skull. I didn’t realize I was staggering backwards until I slammed
squarely into the chest of a shocked bystander.
I
jumped and turned, excused myself, and walked toward the exit. Then I ran, but
only one step. Clinging desperately to such cool as I could keep, I walked the
rest of the way to the escalator. Exit gates flashed through the intermittent
gaps between people’s walking legs. It was a trap.
I
paid my PASMO with a credit card. The exit gate would read it on the way out
and know I had been there. It would know who I was. The two hard plastic wedges
that politely give way for innocent travelers would crush me. The entry gate
read my PASMO on the way in. The exit gates would be ready, waiting to strike.
There had to be another way out.
I
needed time to think—time and thoughts, neither of which I possessed in
abundance. Over to the side of the atrium, I camouflaged myself by staring at a
system map. That bought me time but not much. People would ask if I needed
directions. They would ask why I killed that woman. I needed to be alone.
My
PASMO would betray me to the gates. It already had. It was too late. They knew
I was in the subway, and they were guarding all the exits, waiting. The public
bathroom’s walls and ceiling closed in around me, squeezing like the too-tight
tie of my obi around my waist.
The
girl was right. My kimono was lovely. It was Kosei’s favorite, black silk, soft
lining. Flames, which I never cared for, licked up from its hems, but they
morphed into a mix of petals and butterflies, flying into a black sky. My obi
accented the flames’ colors. It bore the subtle texture of a dragon’s skin,
coiled around my waist. I had it in a drum knot that day, but there were
painted accents on it so if I tied it dangling, the ends would appear to be the
dragon’s head and tail.
I
rose and shook my hands, pruned from being held so long under the running
water. The dragon stirred. I froze, but too late. It was awake, shifting in the
light, too tight and too wide.
The
dragon’s coils expanded, deviating from their neat, overlapping paths. It
slithered around me, deftly reaching out to encompass my arms in its turns. It
crawled down around my hips, frightening away the butterflies, diving between
my legs to coil around one thigh then the other. The dragon had me, but it
toyed with me. The gates would have killed quickly. As it undulated around my
form in a single, sinuous arc of circumscription, it clung tight around me, not
tight enough to crush my bones and suck the marrow, but tight enough to show me
how it could.
It
pressed hard and turned, forcing its way around and over my breasts, climbing
up along my shoulder, down my back, and around. The dragon was strong as living
steel. It snaked around me and defined the limits of my body, carefully
propagating each curve down its length. Its slightest mistake could have torn
me apart, forcing my flesh into an inhuman mold, squeezing me between its coils
like dough through fingers.
The
steady motion of its turns and counter-turns sheared my kimonos against my skin,
burning them with friction, raising just enough smoke to imbalance the rising
heat of the infinite sea of flame below me into a whirlwind, a sheath of fire
whipping through that nonexistent space between the dragon and my skin. The
maelstrom whirled, tight as the dragon but fast and angry. I threw my head back
and coughed in the suffocating torrent of ashes and dust, a volcanic plume of
butterflies, of flowers, of shredded silk, blowing high into the air.
The
dragon’s head rose behind me, above my eyes. It flattened and widened like a
hooded cobra. It swelled and ascended like a hot-air balloon. Its hungry eyes
smoldered, and in a flash, its multi-forked tongue snapped down around me and
blinked away, tasting my flesh. It licked again, its tongue descending around
my head, enveloping my body as bonsai roots clutch a stone, branching into
hairy tendrils to search every surface, looking for its meal.
The
third time, it penetrated, measuring the rounds of my eyeballs and digging far
enough under my toenails to taste the quick. My scream only gave it new entry,
and it pushed aside my breath to lick the disused corners of my lungs. The
tongue pressed both sides of my eardrums, filling my ear canals and yawning
open my Eustachian tubes for its tiny tendrils to pass. It burrowed through the
deepest recesses of my sinuses, prodding at the edges of my brain. It missed
nothing, delicately attenuated enough to tickle my ovaries and so long and
serpentine that two ends intertwined somewhere in my gut.
All
those sensations slammed into my mind at once, bowling over all thought and
scattering self-awareness like autumn leaves before a winter wind. The flash of
its disappearance left my consciousness hollow, echoing with gentle resignation
to the permanence of those sensations, deceived by their sudden absence. Into
that absence, it licked and lingered for almost half a heartbeat, sliding over
me before it was gone, testing every crevice, every pore, tasting and judging.
It withdrew, filling the tracts of mind it had conquered with a twinge of shame
for disappointing it.
The
dragon’s face loomed over the earth like a thundercloud. It sent lightning,
thick and dazzling, along every path its tongue had tested, snatching me up
naked from a ruined world, from its preparatory coils, its whirlwind of fury. I
slid along the peristaltic press of its throat, down into its belly. It
devoured me. I belonged to the dragon. I was part of it. It was part of me.
I
kicked and struggled in my acidic sack like a fetus unready to be born while my
flesh melted away. I was not dead. I was no longer anything at all.
About the Author
A mathematician by training and computer programmer by trade, J. Whitney Williams lives and works under the X in Texas, thinking too much and speaking too little.
Contact Links
Purchase Links
2 comments:
Thank you for posting
Awesome! Thanks!
Post a Comment