The fae steps out of it straight into my path.
I try to twist aside. My boots skid on wet leaves. I’m still turning when it hits me with the force of a battering ram, lifting me clean off my feet.
For one weightless moment, the world turns into a spinning blur of trees, and sky, and ground.
Then the ground slams into my face.
Air explodes from my lungs. Dirt fills my mouth. Pain flares along my jaw. Blood coats my tongue.
I scramble up, pushing onto my hands and knees?—
Its foot connects with my ribs.
The pain is absolute. It whites out my vision and empties my mind of everything except the burning reality of my bodyfolding around the blow. I can’t scream. There’s not enough air. My mouth opens anyway. Nothing comes out except a thin, whistling wheeze.
I curl around the agony as its foot connects a second time. My arms lock around my middle, trying to protect my stomach.
I can’t see. I can’t think.
Fingers close around my ankle, and the world jerks into movement. I’m dragged backward across the ground. My head bounces off a rock. Light bursts behind my eyes. I claw at the earth, at ferns, roots,anythingI can reach. My fingernails catch on stone and bend back, tearing away from the nail beds. The pain of it makes my stomach revolt. But nothing I do matters, because it doesn’t slow down.
“No!” The word tears out of me, ragged and desperate. “Please. No! Stop!”
It does.
The relief lasts half a second. Before I can react, it flips me onto my back and settles on top of me, its weight across my thighs, knees pressing into the ground on either side of my hips. I thrash beneath it, bucking and twisting, trying to throw it off.
It’s wearing a thin, ragged tunic that might once have been white, but is now filthy and torn. Its legs and feet are bare, streaked with dirt … and pressed against me through that thin fabric and my hunting leathers …
My mind goes blank.
In one terrifying second, everything I thought I understood rearranges itself. Because the body pinning me down is unmistakably,undeniablymale. I canfeelthe evidence pressed against my hip—the weight and heat of …it… even through my leathers. There’s no way to pretend otherwise, no way to keep thinking of him as an ‘it’, as an animal, as a …thing.
He’s male.He has male parts that work the same way as ahuman man’s. And he has me pinned beneath him, completely at his mercy.
Terror floods through me, a different kind than before. This one is older and deeper, the kind that every woman learns early in life. Iknowwhat men do to women they have pinned beneath them. I know what happens to girls who can’t fight back.
I scream.
The sound rips out of my throat. I scream, and I thrash and claw at him—his chest, his arms, his face. My torn fingernails drag across his skin, leaving pale tracks that don’t bleed. I scream until my voice breaks, my lungs burn, and the sound dissolves into sobs that shake my whole body.
The fae doesn’t move.
He sits astride me, watching and waiting while I exhaust myself. His expression doesn’t change.
When I finally go silent, chest heaving, and my face wet with tears, he leans down. So close I cansmellhim. Earth and sweat, and green growing things … And underneath that, faint but unmistakable, the copper tang of old blood.
His eyes meet mine. Pale gold, empty of anything I recognize as mercy.
“Weak.” One word, delivered in a quiet, bored tone.
He straightens, and I suck in a breath of relief.
His hand closes around my throat.
Fingers curl loosely over my windpipe, his palm cold against my racing pulse. The strength in that grip is unmistakable, a promise of what he could do if he chose.
“Please.” My voice shakes. “Please. I won’t run again. I swear, I won’t.”
