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Okay. Deep breath.

Perspective.

Sterling Hayes was objectively the hottest man alive. He was built like sin, smelled like forests and bad decisions, and had just spent the afternoon making me see heaven with his mouth. Anyone with a pulse would have reacted the way I did. It was human biology. Chemistry. Physics, probably.

It was nothing more. And it absolutely didn’t mean anything meaningful.

It was just a perfectly natural response to an unfairly attractive man doing unfairly attractive things less than ten feet away.

I repeated all of that to myself as I moved the pillow off my face and back under my head, and then I sank deeper into the mattress. Little by little, the mortification loosened its grip, and my eyelids grew heavy. The comforter wrapped warm around my legs, and my breath eased into something steady.

My eyes slipped shut, and sleep claimed me in one smooth move, like it’d been watching my disastrous evening and decided mercy was the only option.

I didn’t have sweet dreams.

Branches whip against my arms as I tear through the trees, the night swallowing every breath that scrapes out of my chest. The ground is uneven beneath my feet, and roots grab at my ankles like they’re in on it, like the whole forest decided it preferred me dead.

“Siennaaaa.”

His voice drifts between the trees, stretched thin and coaxing, the sound of a man who’s already decided how this will end.

My legs nearly buckle. Not again. Not this time.

I force myself onward as my vision narrows to a dark, frantic tunnel. The moon is barely threading through the canopy, but I don’t dare slow down enough to let my eyes adjust. Stopping means dying. He promised me that once, whispering it against my throat like a lover making a vow.

“Sweetheart, you’re making this harder than it needs to be,” he calls in a singsong voice as if we’re playing hide-and-seek and not the world’s sickest final round.

“Come on out. Let’s talk.”

Talk? He wants to listen to me beg.

I stumble over a fallen log, catching myself at the last second. Bark tears across my palms, and I wince at the pain…but I force myself to get back up and run. A twig snaps behind me, and my heart stutters.

He’s too close.

“Sienna,” he croons again. “You’re not being smart. You know I don’t like it when you run. You know what happens every time.”

Keep going. Keep going. Keep going.

A sob presses up against my teeth, desperate to break free, but I swallow it down, knowing one slip of sound will expose me. I shove through a curtain of low branches, and thorns catch in my shirt like they’re trying to tug me toward him.

“Do you remember what you said?” His calm voice drifts from somewhere to my right. “That you’d never leave me. You swore it.”

I clamp a hand over my mouth to smother another terrified sob.

“I forgave you once,” he says. “But you don’t get a second chance, sweetheart.”

A bird shoots out of a tree overhead, the sudden flutter of wings shattering the brittle quiet.

My pulse spikes as I force my legs to move faster.

I scan the shadows for anything that might save me—a light, a path, some impossible miracle…but all I find are trees pressing close and his footsteps closing in.

My foot catches on a root, and I stumble again.

“You always were clumsy,” he murmurs, so close now that it feels like his breath is against my neck.

No.