“You want to feel safe?” he growls, his belt hitting the floor with a metallic clatter. “Then let me ruin you.”
His hand wraps around my throat as he kicks my knees apart. I rasp out, “I don’t want safe.”
“Good. Because safe doesn’t fuck you like this.”
It is a collision of heat and horror. His body cages me, his hips bruising mine as he drags his cock along my slit, teasing me with the very thing I’m terrified to want. He leans down until our foreheads touch, his eyes boring into mine. “Tell me you’re mine,” he breathes.
I can’t. The word is caught in the throat of my memory. He slips the tip in, just enough to make my eyes flutter. “Say it.”
I shake my head, rage and tears warring in my chest. He slides in deeper, a slow, agonising fill. “Say. It.”
I bite my lip until the copper taste of blood fills my mouth, and then he pushes all the way in. A scream is ripped from me, echoing against the rotting wood of the cabin. He doesn’t stop. He fists his hand in my hair, driving into me with a filthy, desperate intensity.
“You think he touched you like this?” Damien snarls, his rhythm becoming a war. “I’ll finish what he started. I’ll burn your name into my skin if it means you remember you’re mine.”
I claw at his back, biting his shoulder to keep from shattering. He fucks me until River’s eyes fade, until my own name is a distant sound. Until he breaks, whispering: “Don’t ever look at another man like that again. I will gut him, Raven. I will make you watch me rip him open—and then I’ll fuck you over his corpse.”
When the shaking finally stops, the emptiness is sharper than the act. He wraps me in a blanket, tucking me against his chest with a tenderness that feels like a lie.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he mutters into my hair. But he did. He meant every threat. He’s scared. He’s terrified that whatever River was to me… it wasn’t nothing.
“You don’t get to decide what I remember,” I say, my voice firm despite the tremors.
“I know,” he whispers.
I press my forehead to his chest, listening to his heart—fast, uneven, and alive. “I don’t know who he was to me. But I know who you are. You’re the one who stayed when it got ugly. Even if you stayed wrong.”
His arms close around me, desperate and tight. And somewhere in the back of my mind—quiet, patient, watching from the tree line—River smiles.
Because this is exactly what he wanted. He wanted me broken. He wanted me here. And most of all, he wanted me to remember.
Chapter 36
RIVER
The waiting has ceased to be an exercise in patience; now, it is simply rot.
It is a slow, black necrosis eating its way through my composure until there is nothing left but the raw, pulsing nerve of my intent.
I pace the perimeter of the tree line like an apex predator with a snare cutting into its leg, every step replaying the same image I refuse to picture and cannot escape—his hands on her, her body giving in because it always gives in when it’s tired enough, because pain is familiar and familiarity feels like safety when you’ve never had anything else.
She didn’t choose him.
That’s what I tell myself first. Then I say it again. Then I say it louder, until the words are the only thing drowning out the sound of the wind through the pines. She chose quiet. She chose the blunt-force trauma of his presence to make the noise in her head stop. And he knows that.
Damien knows exactly how to make her go still; he knows how to press until she stops fighting, stops questioning, and—most importantly—stops remembering me.
That’s unforgivable.
I stop moving. The cabin in the clearing creaks—old wood, bad bones, a structure held together by the same rot that’s currently claiming my mind. I memorised the anatomy of this place the second they arrived.
I counted the steps from the porch to the bedroom door. I found the blind spot near the back window where the moonlight fails to reach. I know the warped board by the sink that groans if you put your weight on it wrong. I know the house better than the man currently hiding inside it.
I don’t need to go inside.
I crouch near the edge of the clearing, dragging my fingers through the cold, damp dirt, letting the rage sharpen into something clinical and usable.
Escalation isn’t a scream; it’s precision. I think of the asylum—the blinding white walls, the sterile, chemical smell of the unit, the way they taught her to doubt her own skin.
