Hurry.

My fingers slipped on the clips holding down the Jeep’s hood. Circling the front grill, I popped the other clips and hoisted up the heavy metal. Bending forward, I reattached the battery cables, ensuring the engine looked untampered with and ready to race.

Shivering now I was no longer hot from running, I quickly resecured the clips before dashing to the tree where I’d buried my keys.

Where is it?

Rain continued to pummel me, getting heavier by the second. Each droplet was a grenade, bruising my arms and exploding with wetness upon my head.

Come on...where is it?

I squinted in the darkness, seeking the first ribbon tied in the undergrowth.

I can’t see it.

I skirted around the clearing, waiting for lightning flashes to peer into dark bushes.

It took too long. Far too long. I began to second-guess myself. I began to doubt the past few days hadn’t been a terrible dream brought on by sleep deprivation and food poisoning.

Surely, it couldn’t be real.

Surely, there wasn’t a man living alone out here...untamed and—

A-ha!

A bedraggled, soaking ribbon hung limply in the rain, pointing toward the ground and the small stone I’d nicked with my knife.

Pouncing on it, I dug with my bare hands, scooping away the dirt until my fingers closed triumphantly around metal teeth and a copper keyring of a climbing shoe, courtesy of my brother when I’d first hit online success.

Breathing hard, I pushed off from my knees.

I turned to rush to my Jeep.

Something huge and hard tackled me from the darkness.

Air was knocked out of my lungs; pain detonated from the impact as we fell together, splashing onto the rain-drenched ground.

In a sheet of white lightning, I froze as my captor pinned me to the mud and tried to once again wrap his hands around my throat.

His preferred method of murder.

His only focus to destroy me.

Our eyes clashed in the night. His long hair hung, dripping wet as he fought to keep me down. Instinct fought back. My hands tried to push him away. My hips surged up to knock him off. My skin once again sparked with unwanted electricity.

“You don’t get to leave me. Not you too.” He swatted away my hands, reaching for my throat.

I glanced at my Jeep, just waiting to carry me home.

I curled my fingers around my keys that were my ticket to safety.

And...I snapped.

I lost it.

He doesn’t get to hurt me anymore!

With a bolt of power, I knocked one of his knees out from under him, sending him tipping sideways. I rolled with him, pinning him beneath me, reversing our position.

I didn’t hesitate.

With my hands clutching deadly keys between my knuckles, I struck his face, his throat, his chest. “I curse you!”

Fresh blood bloomed where the metal bit into his skin, mixing red-black in the night with waterfalls of rain drowning us.

I added to his scars. His many, many scars. I would slice his damn throat if I could.

He grunted as I wounded him.

He raised his hands to protect his face as I slashed like a mad woman, no thought to my strikes just that I had to keep hurting him to hold him at bay.

“Stop!” he growled.

“Let me go!”

“Never.” His eyes blazed. “You’re mine to do whatever I want with.”

“How wrong you are!” I swiped harder, faster, driving his head into the mud.

“For the love of fucking God.” His hips shot upward, unbalancing me. “You little fool, you can’t win!” He tipped me.

It was my turn to roll sideways, moaning in pain as his heavy weight sandwiched me into the wet dirt.

Mud painted both of us.

Our hair was caked in it. Our eyelashes and cheeks, our throats and our souls. Every inch filthy and ruined.

Once again, our eyes locked in the raining gloom.

And once again, the world shifted.

A cosmic shift.

A transcendent punch that said he was more than just a bastard. He could be more to me than any other male, and how absolutely tragic that somewhere in his broken soul, some part of him spoke to some part of me, whispering that we could be perfect for each other.

That this blistering, bulldozing connection wasn’t fate but fucking lunacy.

“Get off me!” I turned mad. I fought like a feral wolf.

And his blood ran quicker from my keys.

His blood showed he was human. His anger revealed he was not. He was both monster and man, and suddenly, I wasn’t cold anymore.

I was hot and heavy and so full of rage, so pissed off at life and luck that I screamed. I screamed to expel the unfairness, the grotesqueness, the rightness even while we dueled to the death.

“Die!” I screamed the single word. The word he’d whispered to me as his fingers had suffocated my body when we’d first met. Back then, in his house of horrors, he’d won. Out here, in the rain of shame, I would.

“Fuck’s sake!” He arched away, ducking away from my keys, doing his best to subdue me. “Just stop!”

We rolled again. We fought faster, crueler.

“I’ll never stop because I won’t let you hurt me!”

“Your very presence crucifies me!”

“Too fucking bad!”

We both lost any rules and guidelines of how a man and woman were supposed to treat each other. He grunted as my knee landed in his ribs. I moaned as his hand pulled my hair. We groaned as we rolled and tumbled, kicked and bruised.

We panted and gasped, one winning, the other losing, the roles reversing with each breath.

Until finally, he played dirty.

He slapped me, making my head ring. Then, in a wave of power, he rolled me until I slammed onto my back. His legs clamped over my legs, bringing his hips hard against me. His arms shoved mine away, giving him a heartbeat’s chance to grab my throat.

The second his fingers wrapped around my neck, I lost something inside me.

Sanity?

Humanity?

The very core of who I was.

He wanted to take my life?

Well, I would take his pain with me.

My hands shot downward while his squeezed tight around me.

My fingers dived between us, unzipping his soaking trousers and slipping into the damp heat of him.

I wrapped both hands around his cock and balls. My right around his hard shaft, my left around the soft vulnerability of his testicles.

And I motherfucking squeezed.

I squeezed as hard as he squeezed my throat.

He buckled over me.

He strangled a cry.

His fingers loosened around my neck.

And then, as if all of this had been some twisted, tangled foreplay, raw, savage desire blackened his face.

There was no pause.

No thinking.

His mouth slammed against mine.

His tongue speared past my lips, bringing rain and pain, mud and darkness.

His fingers switched from strangling me to clutching me as if I was his savior and seducer all in one.

My mind blanked.

My fingers continued to torture him, but his kisses were a different kind of torment. He kissed me as if he was the one suffocating. He bit my lip and swept his tongue deep into me—tasting me, feeding me his need—as though kissing me was the only thing he lived for.

I choked on his lust.

I twisted his cock and fisted his balls.

I delivered agony to him.

And all he did in retaliation was kiss me.