Mine instead of his. Such a simple concept that had taken so much blood to achieve. But lying there in Nathan's arms, feeling his come still sticky between my thighs, I finally believed it might be true.
Tomorrow we'd hunt. Tomorrow I'd face the monster who'd made me.
But tonight, I was just Bunny. Broken but breathing. Damaged but not defeated.
And for now, that was enough.
21
Edge
Iwoke up screaming.
Not the kind of scream that tears from nightmares—I'd trained myself out of those years ago. This was different. Soundless. Internal. Every nerve firing at once as my body tried to process proximity to its maker.
Nathan was already awake, hand steady on my shoulder. Not restraining. Just... there. Present. Real.
"Breathe," he said, but breathing felt like drowning. Like my lungs had forgotten their purpose and were trying to collapse instead.
The motel room came into focus slowly. Water stain on the ceiling shaped like a bird. Crack in the wall that looked like lightning. Nathan's face, concerned but calm. Always so fucking calm while I shattered into smaller and smaller pieces.
"What time is it?" My voice sounded wrong. Scratchy. Like I'd been screaming after all.
"Four thirty."
Three and a half hours until dawn. Three and a half hours until we moved on the facility—an abandoned psychiatric hospital forty minutes outside Boston where our intel suggested Gabriel had set up his new operation. Three and a half hours to hold myself together when every cell in my body was either preparing to submit or preparing to slaughter.
I sat up, pulling away from Nathan's touch. I couldn't think with his hands on me. Couldn't separate what was real from what wasn't.
"I can feel him," I said, and hated how small my voice sounded. "It's like... like my bones know he's close. Like everything he put inside me is waking up."
"That's the trauma talking—"
"No." I turned to face him, needing him to understand. "This is different. This is... fuck, I don't have words for it. Cellular recognition? Proprietary programming responding to proximity? My body knows its owner is near."
"You don't have an owner."
"Tell that to my nervous system."
I stumbled to the bathroom, needing distance. Needing space. Needing something I couldn't name and couldn't find. The mirror showed me what I already knew—I looked like prey. Eyes too wide, pupils dilated, that particular pallor that comes from fear so deep it bypasses the conscious mind entirely.
No. Not fear. Something worse.
Anticipation.
I splashed cold water on my face, trying to shock myself back to the present. But the present kept sliding away, replaced by sense memory. Gabriel's voice. Gabriel's hands. Gabriel's particular way of breaking someone down to component parts and rebuilding them in his image.
Daddy's special girl. Daddy's perfect pet. Made for me, weren't you? Every piece of you crafted for my pleasure.
"Stop." I gripped the sink hard enough to hurt. "You're not her anymore. You're not his anymore."
But my reflection didn't believe me. She looked like a child playing dress-up in killer's clothes. Scratch the surface and find the frightened girl underneath, still desperate for Daddy's approval even while planning his murder.
Nathan appeared in the doorway. He'd pulled on jeans but nothing else, scars mapping stories across his chest. Real damage. Real survival. Not like my careful conditioning, designed to leave marks only on the inside.
"Talk to me," he said.
"About what? How I can feel my programming activating? How every trained response is warming up like an athlete before a meet?" I laughed, sharp and bitter. "How part of me is excited to see him? How fucking sick is that?"
