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Turning my head, I bit my bicep as hard as I could, and my howls of grief finally quieted to whimpers of pain. But what made me go completely silent was what I heard in that stillness. Something was moving in the cave.
At first, I feared that it was the hum of drone blades, but when it stopped and started again, I realized that it was something even more terrifying. The slow, gravely scrape of a body dragging itself across stone.
I glanced up from the arm my face was buried in, but the cave was pitch-black. I couldn’t see the man approaching, but I could hear him getting closer with every push and pull of his massive body.
My heart beat so hard I could feel it behind my straining eyes, which darted in all directions, desperate to catch a flash of a brass button or gleaming white teeth. Anything that would help me prepare for what was about to happen.
I can outrun him, I told myself. If he touched me, I would jab at his injuries, grab my bag, and follow the cave wall to the entrance as fast as I fucking could.
But the truth was that I couldn’t have moved if my life depended on it. The terror had sent my body into a freeze mode so intense that it bordered on paralysis. I could hardly breathe. Hardly blink. Running was an impossibility.
With blood thumping in my ears and a whimper of fear lodged in my throat, I stared helplessly into the darkness as the scraping sound got closer. Then, once it was practically on top of me, it stopped. I widened my eyes and held my breath as I waited for something to happen. And with a grunt and a groan and a sharp hiss of pain, it did. The form of a man began to take shape in front of me, so close I could feel the warmth of his torso on my face. The brass buttons on his blazer seemed to glow in the dark as he reached up with thick fingers and unbuttoned each one.
Stomach acid seared the back of my throat as I watched those fingers do the same thing to the buttons on his white striped shirt.
I begged my body to move, to run, to kick and shove, but it simply curled in on itself even tighter as a tiny, panicked yelp slipped past my defenses.
The man then removed his shirt and jacket in one motion, and I couldn’t take it anymore. Slamming my eyes shut, I sucked in a lungful of air and debated letting it out with a scream. I had the power to stop this. To make it all just go away. The fear, the pain, the grief, the hopelessness. One scream, and it would all be over.
But I hesitated.
Because the next move the man made wasn’t to unbuckle his belt or unzip his trousers.
It was to drape his bloodstained shirt and jacket over my trembling ball of a body.
His clothes landed on me like a wool blanket on a raging fire, extinguishing my fear, my despair, and my shivering on contact. And it had nothing to do with the warmth of his body. It was the warmth of his gesture that had made all the difference.
Because for the second time in two days, I didn’t feel completely alone.
CHAPTER 12
DAMIEN
Ihardly noticed the rain as I marched through a blackened forest, dodging every branch and boulder on instinct rather than sight. I didn’t know where I was going, but my body did. It navigated those woods as if it were being steered by someone else.
Someone who obviously knew where to find my girl.
I could feel the pull of her. The urgency to move faster, the almost-panicked need to see her again.
When I finally crested a hill and emerged from the woods, I was standing at the edge of a pasture, staring at a house that I knew I had never been welcome in. But she was in there—I could feel it—and welcome or not, I was going in.
As I trudged through the gate and across the pasture, I knew in my gut that something bad was about to happen. Everything felt wrong. The storm. The golf ball–sized hail scattered across the ground. The unfamiliar car parked in the driveway. Even my jacket. I went to zip it up and realized that I wasn’t wearing it. I always wore it.
The wind howled, and the rain roared, but that all faded away the moment I heard her scream.
Breaking into a sprint, I charged around the side of the house and burst through the door, hoping that I was overreacting. Hoping I’d find her standing on a chair, pointing at a spider. But what I saw was worse than anything I could have imagined. On the far side of the kitchen, with her face pressed against the floor and her bare arse up in the air, my girl was being restrained and forcibly fucked by a man who was about to die.
Something happened to me as I crossed that kitchen. A relaxing. A letting go. It was as if there was so much darkness inside of me that freeing it was easier than keeping it at bay. A sense of calm washed over me as I wrapped that piece of shite’s silk tie around his fragile neck and pulled it taut. As I glanced down at my girl’s perfect face, now badly bruised and staring up at me in shock. As her swollen lips parted and whispered my name.
Those two syllables felt like petrol in my veins, fueling my rage, igniting my wrath. Standing up to my full height, I lifted that rapist pig off his knees, napalm pumping through my muscles as I tightened the noose. And as the life drained out of his worthless body, the girl never once took her eyes off of mine. She had a front-row seat to the freak show—the monster that I’d been molded into was unleashed and on full display—and she accepted it. She looked at me like a savior instead of a psycho, and it felt fucking amazing.
But not nearly as amazing as the way I felt when I realized she was wearing my jacket.
Pain, sharp and swift, ripped through my side, and I sat up with a jolt.
“Sorry,” a feminine voice said. “You were bleedin’ through your bandage.”
With my heart still pounding, I glanced down and found the redhead kneeling beside me. Her hair was different—darker, more bronze than copper—but the way it spilled down the back of my uniform made me feel the exact same surge of pride that I’d felt in my dream seconds before.
