She acted as if she was about to put a curse on me. Another one. Curses upon curses, layering me in hexes and damnation.

Clamping a hand over her mouth, I growled, “Shut up. You’re just proving your stupidity. Proving that every word out of your mouth is wrong. I should gag you as well as bind. I don’t have to listen to—”

She bit my palm, tore her face away, and spat at my feet. “Gag me, and next time I attempt to kill you, I’ll succeed. Feelings or no feelings.”

I pressed against her, skin to skin, lust to lust.

That everlasting spark between us switched from a burn to a blaze. The forest became alight with it, the rain glittered with it, my blood hissed with need and want and yearning.

“Your mouth will get you hurt.”

She tried to step back, colliding with the door. “Your stubbornness will get you nothing.”

“I don’t want anything.” I looked deep into her eyes, hoping my words pierced true. “Especially not from you. Bodily gratification is all you’re good for.”

She sniffed and tipped up her chin. “We’ll see.”

“I guess we will.” Stepping away from her, I uncurled my fingers from around her keys.

Instantly, her defiance switched to cajoling. “Wait. Don’t—”

“I look forward to living with you, Gemma Ashford.”

“No—!”

In a whip fast move, I cocked my arm and hurled her keys into the forest. I threw them toward the drop-off where new waterfalls splashed over rocks and debris, falling from sky to valley.

They made no noise as they disappeared.

Not a single sound as they condemned her as mine for evermore.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I COULDN’T MOVE.

He threw them.

He actually threw my keys away!

Eerie emptiness filled me: the iciness of shock and the hollowness of defeat.

Going home was no longer attainable. Escaping this monster had become an unsurmountable problem. A problem that included days’ worth of hiking to find populated areas of the national park. The logistical nightmare of not having enough rations, correct footwear, or emergency beacons to find my way out of this cave labyrinth was a disaster.

If I didn’t die with him, I might very well die running from him.

Him.

God, HIM!

Something snapped back into place within me, blasting away my shock, filling me with scalding brimstone.

How dare he?!

Joshua, my mother, my work, my house. God, my house. My lovely, lavender house that’d been waiting empty and alone since I’d left. Who would water my plants? Who would tell my online fans that I would never post another video, never hunt another climbing route, never be the girl I’d once been?

Rain fell harder, thunder rumbling in the distance, the storm regathering above us, almost as if it sensed me burning up, knowing that if it didn’t extinguish my rage I would self-combust and annihilate everything within my path.

Him.

God, how could I hate someone so much and be so drawn to them at the same time? How could I vibrate with longing and loathing?

It was sick.

It was twisted.

I despise it!

It would be the greatest pleasure to throw him off the cliff after my keys. Yet if he touched me the way he had before, I would melt. I would fight. I would beg. I would come.

Argh!

Oblivious to my inner breakdown, he raised his face to the rainy sky and sighed. “We need to get back to Fables, but I’m done being wet.” Pointing at my Jeep—my trusty, wonderful Jeep that he should never have known existed—he commanded, “Get inside. We’ll wait it out.”

And yeah...that was all I could handle.

Bound hands or not, he would pay for stealing my final chance at freedom.

“You bastard!” Throwing myself at him, I wedged my shoulder into his chest and bulldozed him to the muddy ground.

He crashed into the dirt, flat on his back, gasping as his lungs struggled to drink air.

I stood over him with rope-wrapped wrists.

The temptation to run while he was incapacitated came and went.

There would be no more running. He’d made sure of that. From now on, I had to stay. I was his, whether I liked it or not. But I wouldn’t make it easy for him. I wouldn’t let him keep barriers and shields between us.

He felt what I did when his cock was buried inside me.

I know he did.

He’d felt that punch to the heart, that utter destruction of everything inside, and until he admitted it, we were both as good as dead.

Raising my foot, I stomped directly over his demonic heart. Pressing my toes onto his rib cage, I added all my weight so he felt a fraction of the worry and wrongness that I did. I wanted to crush his heart. To stop its tattered beating until he was reborn a gentler, kinder version of himself.

I stomped harder.

Anger roared through me as the image of him tossing my keys into the darkness replayed over and over again.

“God!” I twisted my foot harder into his skin, needing to hurt him. Needing him to feel as wretched and as horrified as me.

In reflex, his hands latched around my ankle. His biceps bunched with the instinct to jerk and throw me off him. But...the second he touched me, the droplets ceased falling, the forest stopped splashing, and it was just us.

Us in terrifying silence.

Silence full of intimacy, sympathy, and worst of all...need.

His hands on me.

His fingers tightening around the paper-thin skin of my ankle.

I swayed as the chemicals in my blood made me useless and utterly incapable of being rational.

His hips rocked up, seeking. My belly clenched, answering.

Madness.

This is madness!

We were once again infected with madness.

The silence ended as quickly as it’d deafened us, returning to crashing rain and growling thunder. We shivered at the same time, leaving us at the mercy of lust.

His fingers glided up my calf, electricity sizzled from his skin to mine—lightning bolts between us instead of from the sky. My knees threatened to buckle beneath the desire to fight and fornicate.

His eyes turned heavy and hooded; his head shifting in the mud as his fingers crept higher.

A moan crawled up my throat as he traced around my knee.

His bare cock thickened, smeared in mud and rain, looking as if we’d both been animals of the woods for far longer than just a night.

Our gazes locked.

My breath caught.

And I was wrong when I’d thought there was more between us. More was such a lackluster word. More was a pittance to the truth.

What twined around us...what turned our heartbeats into battle songs and bodies into mindless desperation was pure necromancy. Magic that had the power to restore the dead, convene with past lives, and somehow stitch forgotten souls back together again.

His stomach flexed as he slowly sat up, guiding my foot down his chest until my dirty toes pressed against his cock instead of his heart.

His teeth bit into his lower lip as he rocked his hips against my sole, rubbing his hardness against me, uncaring of the filth, turned on by my hate, knowing as well as I did that our connection made no sense.

We couldn’t explain why we embraced violence instead of understanding. Why sex was easier than words. Why a single stare shared agonizing secrets that our lips would never utter.

Sitting in the mud, his long legs spread in front of him, he followed the contours of my calf with his fingers, slipping up and up, tracing from my knee to the back of my thigh.