“Please, what, little one?” Her free hand comes up to brush hair from my face, the gesture almost tender. Almost loving. “Please don’t kill you? Please make it quick?” Her thumb traces my cheekbone with the kind of gentleness that makes the threat so much worse. “I’m not going to kill you, Charlotte.”
Ah, she knows my name.
How the hell does she know my name?
“I’m going to give you so much more than death.” Her face descends toward my throat, and panic detonates in my chest, a violent blast that steals the air from my lungs.
I thrash. God, I thrash like my life depends on it because it does. My free hand claws at her face, her shoulder, anything I can reach. My legs kick uselessly against the car, heels scraping metal. I bring my elbow up and drive it toward her ribs with every ounce of strength I possess.
She doesn’t even flinch.
The impact jars through my bones, but she stands there, rigid as if carved from marble. Her lips brush my racing pulse, and the feeling sends electricity crackling down my spine, not pleasure, just pure animal terror translating into sensation.
“Your heart is so loud,” she murmurs against my skin. “Thunder beneath my hands. War drums summoning me home.”
“P-Please,” The word breaks apart in my mouth, fragments of sound that mean nothing. “Please d-don’t!”
Pressure blooms at my throat.
At first, it’s only weight, her mouth closing over my skin, pinning me there as my breath stutters uselessly in my chest. Then something sharp drives in, sudden and indescribable,while my mind scrambles for meaning it can’t find. Heat flashes white-hot, and pain detonates through my neck.
I scream, but the sound comes out thin, strangled, as a tearing sensation rips through me, deep enough that my knees buckle even though she still has me trapped against the car. Something warm spills immediately, slick against my skin, and the realization hits an instant later.
Blood.
I feel it running down my neck in thick, pulsing streams, soaking into my collar, sliding along my collarbone, and down my chest. With every pull of her mouth, more pours out of me, my body growing heavier, weaker, as if gravity has doubled. The world tilts, lights blur as the warmth keeps flowing, unstoppable.
I can’t breathe.
My hands scrabble uselessly at her arms, at the car, at anything solid, fingers already clumsy and numb. The pain isn’t clean or contained—it spreads, radiating outward in blinding waves, as if she’s gone past skin and muscle and sunk into something vital. Somethingessential.
It’s the sensation of being pulled apart from the inside.
A dizzying weakness floods my limbs as panic spirals, my thoughts scattering into fragments, burning, pressure, the sickening awareness of being drained.
She’s going to kill me.
The certainty lands cold and absolute, even as the blood keeps running, hot against my skin, pooling beneath me, every ruthless pull of her mouth widening the agony and dragging more of me away.
And I still don’t understand how this is happening.
Only that it is.
My scream rips across the empty lookout, echoing off trees and stone. But there’s no one to hear it, no one to help, just me, her, and what’s-his-name’s body cooling on the gravel, andthe city lights twinkling below with no one knowing what’s happening up here.
She drinks.
And drinks.
And drinks.
The warmth of the hood beneath me grows colder. My vision fragments at the edges, reality breaking apart into puzzle pieces that no longer fit together. The stars overhead multiply, then blur, then fade.
The cold spreads from her grip into my veins, through my chest, down my spine. Not the cold of winter but the cold of absence. The cold of everything vital being pulled out and swallowed down.
This is dying.
I’m dying.
