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I grab the lamp off the nightstand — it’s a cheap thing, metal, maybe twelve inches of heft — and I run at him.

I am not a fighter.

I have no training.

I have no plan.

What I do have is about a year’s worth of compressed rage looking for somewhere to go, and Wraith has the extraordinarily terrible judgment to walk right into its path.

But of course, he fucking deserves it, because in the course of my life, he is the fucking nexus of my rage.

“Die, you motherfucking asshole,” I spit as I swing the lamp at his head.

It connects with a hollow, ugly sound.

“Ow,” Wraith says. “June, what the hell?”

I hit him again.

“Holy fuck. Stop it.”

He reaches for me with the hand that isn’t covering his eye, and I slip aside. I swing the lamp a third time, catching him on the side of the head, and it makes a deep pinging sound, and he slumps sideways but stays standing.

“You need to stop. Now,” he says.

But he isn’t the boss of me anymore. And in staggering sideways, he’s let his guard down and left his legs wide open. I may not be an expert at taking a man down with a cheap lamp, but I know something else I can do.

I cock a leg back and kick him hard in the groin.

The sound he makes is not dignified; it’s this short, high, collapsing sound, like all the air going out of something, and he folds forward at the waist, one hand still pressed to his eye, the other dropping to clutch at the general disaster area I’ve just created between his legs, and I feel a savage, electric satisfaction that I am not even a little sorry about.

I kick him again.

Same place.

Because once doesn’t feel like enough. Once feels like a polite suggestion, and I am done being polite.

He makes the collapsing sound again, worse this time, and he’s bent nearly double now, and the lamp is still in my hand, and I think about what I know about the human body, which is admittedly not a lot, but I know one thing, which is that the back of the skull is a real place that exists, and that it is, according to every action movie I have ever watched while eating cereal at two in the morning, a vulnerable one.

So I bring the lamp down on the back of Dylan Mercer’s head with everything I have left.

There’s a sound like a bat hitting a fence post.

Then there’s silence.

And Wraith goes down like someone cut his strings, and he hits the floor of my apartment in a boneless, graceless heap, and he does not get up.

I stand over him, breathing hard, the lamp still clutched in both hands, and I wait.

He doesn’t move.

I stare down at my unconscious, abusive ex-boyfriend, my heart pounding violence and vengeance through my veins, sweat on my brow, my chest heaving, my battle-lamp in my hands, and one thought goes through my head…

What the fuck do I do now?

Chapter Two

Wraith