Page 160 of Falling for the Enemy

Currently, Thora, her young Viking bride, stood at the edge of the ravine, looking back at the only man she’d ever trusted. Jocelyn’s fingers danced across the keyboard, painting a dark flood of retribution on the page. The words, her vengeance, rolled like lava spilling downhill, inevitable and destructive, and so forebodingly perfect.

It was poetry.

She forged the moment where everything fractured, where love collided with doubt, and Thora discovered her father’s betrayal. Her protagonist’s devastation spread across the page with visceral potency. Now, Thora had to choose between forced marriage to Leander and staying loyal to her own blood.

A reckoning was coming.

For weeks, Jocelyn struggled to put her gooey characters into conflict. Now, her hesitation was gone. She didn’t shy from treachery. She craved the war. She wanted vengeance. She needed justice—raw, ruthless, and brutal justice.

The challenge had honestly been not killing Leander. Romance readers had an unspoken rule that heroes shouldn’t die. Happy endings were sort of guaranteed. But man, Jocelyn really wanted to kill the love interest and move Thora into a beautiful castle off the coast of a female colony where nothing with a dick ever bothered her again.

But she wouldn’t. She’d keep her promise to the reader and figure out a way to redeem the dumbass hero in the end.

If only reality were that easy.

Leander had been a selfish hero and he deserved to suffer. But he didn’t deserve a Viking funeral, so there would be no pyre burnings today—even if the temptation remained.

It would have been easy. Cathartic. But in the end, beneath all her hurt and anger, Jocelyn wanted to see that Thora got the hero she deserved.

She, sadly, was still a romantic. Despite all the disappointment and all her trust issues, some part of her still craved the happy ending others magically found.

She’d gone years not even thinking about her personal love life, but Soren changed that. And now she had all these tedious feelings that mostly fucking hurt and she didn’t know how to make herself stop feeling them.

So she wrote. She wrote until her fingers ached, then stretched and wrote some more. She wrote until she couldn’t keep her head up or her eyes open and then, when she woke up with her face stuck to the keyboard and pages of

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She deleted the gibberish and picked up right where she left off writing.

It was easy to shut the world out. Once her notifications were silenced, she sank into blissful, uninterrupted peace. Jocelyn’s fictional world had become an impenetrable fortress around her, protecting her peace and her fragile heart.

She had blocked Soren’s number again, the moment after she forwarded the picture of him and Olivia. Then she blocked the email address Olivia used to send it, perfectly aware it wasn’t her real email and was just some throwaway account designed for whatever kind of other cunt-games she played in her free time.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Olivia might be a cruel, calculating bitch, but she meant nothing to Jocelyn, nor did she owe her anything.

Soren was the one who broke his promise to her. He vowed not to hurt her. Actually begged her to trust him. And then he abandoned her and betrayed her anyway, setting fire to everything they’d built.

So she channeled all her fury and heartache into her book. The pain and anguish poured out of her like water, her tears bleeding onto the keys and the prose some of the brutally best words she’d ever written.

Thank God for her work. It kept her breathing. It kept her laser-focused on the things she could control rather than the uncontrollable that scared her.

Sure, some might say leaning this hard into any obsession could form a dangerous imbalance and might carry real consequences down the line. But until one of those consequences got up and actually knocked her to her ass, she decided not to worry about it.

Beyond the clicking of the keys, Jocelyn vaguely registered Cordelia’s ticking toenails across the wood floor.

“One second,” she said, trying to get her thought down before it flew out of her head.

Cordelia whimpered, the piercing, incessantly high-pitched whistle of a chihuahua that should really be used by the CIA for interrogations, because after only about one minute of that screeching cry, a person lost all patience and would do anything to make it stop.

“All right already!” Jocelyn shoved back from the computer with a tense inhale, as if she just broke through the surface after spending days underwater.

Her body instantly registered the fight against gravity as her locked muscles painfully unfolded after days of intensely hunching over a keyboard, and she groaned, rolling her neck.