Page 7

7

Run, Kitten, Run

The forest swallowed me whole—rain-slick branches clawing at my skin, mud sucking at my boots with each desperate stride. I’d always been the prey, but never like this. Never with such terrible anticipation flooding my veins.

Lightning split the sky, illuminating the dark woods in stark, electric clarity before plunging me back into shadow. Thunder followed, so close it vibrated in my chest cavity like a second heartbeat. Nature’s violence mirroring what was coming.

What I was running toward as much as from.

The shotgun weighed heavy in my hands, barrel slick with rain, metal cold against my palms. A useless talisman. I knew I wouldn’t use it—not on him, not on myself. Its only purpose now was to slow me down, to ensure the inevitable.

Another flash of lightning, and I caught movement through the trees to my left. Jace, cutting through the forest at an angle, tracking me with the single-minded focus of something born to hunt. Seven days of captivity should have weakened him. Instead, he looked unleashed. Uncaged.

Primal.

I veered right, abandoning the faint trail for denser undergrowth. Branches whipped across my face, drawing blood I couldn’t feel through the adrenaline. My lungs burned, muscles screaming from exertion and the cold penetrating my rain-soaked clothes. My heartbeat pounded in my ears, matching the thunder overhead—or maybe becoming it.

I broke through a thicket onto a rocky outcropping and froze, momentarily disoriented. The ground fell away sharply before me—a fifteen-foot drop to a swollen creek that tumbled furiously over moss-covered stones. The rushing water below beckoned—another escape, another way to run. But I knew it would just prolong the inevitable.

“Nowhere left to run, kitten.”

His voice slithered down my spine—intimate, possessive, impossibly close. I whirled, shotgun raised instinctively, my finger trembling on the trigger.

Lightning flashed again, and what I saw stole the breath from my lungs.

Jace stood at the edge of the clearing, rain sluicing down his bare torso, plastering his hair to his skull. The scars I’d carved into his flesh during those seven days stood out livid against his skin—deliberate marks of my rage, my pain, my desperation to break something as beautiful as he was. To punish him for making me want him still.

In the pulsing light, with water streaming down his face and chest, he looked like something ancient and terrible. A vengeful deity stepped from Norse mythology—all muscle and sinew and focused rage. The rain had washed away the blood but left the wounds, like runes inscribed on a warrior’s flesh.

A predator who’d finally stopped pretending to be tame.

“You’re slow,” I taunted, edging backward, feeling loose stones shift beneath my boots. “Fifteen years out of practice?”

His smile was all teeth, no humanity. “I could have caught you at the tree line. But the chase…” His eyes, amber in the darkness, tracked down my body, lingering on my heaving chest, the curve of my hips, “that’s half the pleasure.”

I raised the shotgun higher, aiming for his chest. “Stay back.”

“Or what?” He took a step forward, unconcerned. “You’ll shoot me? We both know you won’t.”

“I killed Honey,” I said, the words torn from me like a confession. “You know that, right? It wasn’t Spider. It was me.”

He paused, but only for a heartbeat. “I know. You believe it was all your fault. You’ve carried guilt that wasn’t yours to own for too fucking long.”

My finger trembled on the trigger. “And you’ve spent fifteen years hunting my captors because what—you forgive me? That’s bullshit.”

“I’ve spent fifteen years hunting them because they took what was mine.” His voice dropped, becoming something dangerous, possessive. “And I don’t forgive, kitten. I reclaim.”

Thunder crashed overhead, drowning out my bitter laugh. “There’s nothing left to reclaim, Jace. They made sure of that.” The words felt hollow even as I said them. A lie I’d told myself for years.

“We’ll see.”

He moved then—so fast I barely had time to register it. One moment he was six feet away, the next his hand was on the shotgun barrel, wrenching it upward as he stepped inside my guard. The gun discharged into the night sky, the recoil tearing it from both our grips. It clattered on the rocks, then tumbled over the edge, splashing into the churning water below.

I stumbled backward, my heel catching on nothing, balance failing. For a sickening moment, I was falling—then Jace’s hand shot out, fingers circling my wrist in a grip like iron, yanking me forward.

I collided with his chest, the impact knocking the air from my lungs. Before I could recover, his other hand fisted in my hair, wrenching my head back to expose my throat. My pulse thrummed against his palm, rapid and hard like a trapped bird.

“Now what?” I gasped, rain streaming down my face, mingling with tears I hadn’t realized I was shedding. “Going to kill me? Fuck me? Both?”

His eyes moved over my face with terrible intensity, cataloging every feature as if memorizing it anew. Fifteen years of darkness, of hunting, of obsession—all focused on me in this moment.

“I’m going to show you what they couldn’t take from us.”

“There is no us,” I hissed, even as my body betrayed me, arching against him, seeking the heat of him through our soaked clothes. My hands, which should have been pushing him away, instead clutched at his shoulders, nails digging into wet skin.

“Liar.” His mouth descended on mine with bruising force, teeth scraping my bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. The metallic taste flooded my senses—familiar, visceral, arousing in ways that should have horrified me. It tasted like before. Before the years of rape and torture, when violence and pleasure were still mine to choose.

I bit back, savaging his lip with equal violence, my hands clawing at his chest, nails digging into the fresh scars I’d given him. He growled into my mouth, the vibration traveling through my body like an electric current, igniting nerves I thought had died years ago.

Lightning split the sky again, illuminating us in stark relief—two fractured lovers locked in combat, in communion. In that frozen instant, I saw us as we truly were: depraved, drawn to each other across time and trauma, inevitable as gravity.

He tore at my shirt, fabric ripping beneath desperate hands. I fought him, not to escape but to escalate—driving my knee toward his groin, catching his thigh instead. He responded by lifting me bodily, spinning us both, then slamming me against the broad trunk of a nearby oak.

Bark bit into my back through what remained of my shirt. My jeans were next, button popping free as he wrenched them down my hips. I kicked, catching him in the shin, earning a snarl and fingers digging bruises into my thighs.

“Fight me,” he urged, voice guttural against my ear. “Show me you’re still in there. That they didn’t kill the fire.”

I answered with actions, not words—scratching, biting, writhing against his restraining grip. No longer trying to get away, but making him work for every inch of surrender. This wasn’t like the mechanized responses my body had been trained to give during those years of captivity. This was mine. Raw. Real. Chosen.

Rain poured down mercilessly, turning our skin slick, washing away blood as fast as we could draw it. In the intermittent lightning, I saw his face transformed by savage desire, by possessive rage, by something darker that mirrored what I felt coursing through my own veins.

Recognition. Reclamation.

When he finally tore my panties aside and drove into me with a single, brutal thrust, the pain was secondary to the overwhelming sense of completion. Of pieces long separated finally, violently reunited.

I screamed—not in protest but in primitive triumph. My body remembered this—not the mechanical violations of my captivity, but this monstrous connection that felt like destruction and creation simultaneously.

He withdrew almost completely before slamming forward again, pinning me against the tree with the weight of his body. My legs wrapped around his waist instinctively, heels digging into the small of his back, urging him deeper. Taking control even in surrender.

“Look at me,” he growled, one hand gripping my jaw, forcing my gaze to his. “Say my name.”

I clenched my teeth, refusing, even as my body clung to his, inner muscles tightening around his invasion. I wouldn’t give him everything—not yet. This was still my choice.

His hand moved to my throat, applying just enough pressure to restrict my breathing without cutting it off. “Say it, Naomi. Say who’s inside you right now.” His eyes burned into mine, demanding acknowledgment.

“Fuck you,” I gasped, the defiance undermined by the way my hips rocked to meet his brutal pace, by the way my body welcomed the violence, transformed it into something electric.

His grip tightened fractionally. “Who spent fifteen years hunting the men who touched you? Who killed twelve of your captors with his bare hands? Who never stopped looking for you?”

Each question punctuated with a thrust that sent sparks shooting through my nervous system, pleasure and pain so intertwined they had become the same sensation. Lightning crashed around us, as if the storm itself was answering his questions.

“I tore those men to pieces for you, kitten. Only for you.”

“Jace,” I finally whispered, the name torn from me like a confession. A summoning.

“Again,” he demanded, hips driving forward relentlessly, the bark of the tree scraping my back raw through the tatters of my shirt. Every scratch a reminder that I was alive. That I could still feel.

“Jace,” I said, louder this time. Then, as his thumb pressed against my clit, circling with devastating precision: “JACE!”

The sound echoed through the forest, swallowed by thunder that seemed to answer in kind. His mouth crashed down on mine again, swallowing my cries as the pressure built inside me—a tidal wave of sensation threatening to drown us both.

When release came, it was cataclysmic—muscles seizing, vision whiting out, reality fracturing around the single point where our bodies joined. I felt him follow, felt the hot pulse of his release deep inside me, felt his teeth sink into the juncture of my neck and shoulder, marking me as his. It was sick and animalistic and I never wanted anything more.

For endless moments we remained locked together, trembling with aftershocks, rain continuing to pour down our intertwined bodies. Only our ragged breathing and the storm’s fury broke the silence.

Slowly, awareness returned. Of the cold. Of the raw abrasions on my back. Of the undeniable fact that something had fundamentally shifted between us—within us both.

Jace lowered me carefully, steadying me when my legs threatened to give way. His hands, so violent moments before, now moved with unexpected gentleness over my skin, cataloging injuries, assessing damage.

I pushed him away, stumbling backward on unsteady legs. I wouldn’t be swept away again, wouldn’t surrender everything like that naive girl I’d been fifteen years ago. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” he asked, voice rough but no longer feral. “Don’t care? Too late for that, kitten. Fifteen years too late.”

I gathered the remains of my clothes, clutching them to my chest like armor. “This doesn’t change anything.” The lie tasted bitter on my tongue.

His laugh was low, knowing. “It changes everything. You feel it as much as I do.”

I did. That was the terrible truth—I felt myself for the first time in fifteen years. Not the broken victim, not the vengeful captor, but something new. Something forged in violence and darkness but no less real for its monstrous nature.

“What happens now?” I asked, hating the uncertainty in my voice.

Jace approached slowly, like one might a wounded animal. When I didn’t retreat, he brushed wet hair from my face with a touch so tender it hurt more than his violence had.

“Now we go back to the cabin,” he said simply. “We get warm. We clean these wounds—yours and mine.” His fingers traced the bite mark on my shoulder, a possessive caress. “And then we finish what we started seven days ago.”

“The scars?” I asked, confused.

His smile was slow, predatory, but with an edge of something that might have been genuine warmth. “No, kitten. The reckoning. The truth. All of it.”

He held out his hand—a choice, an invitation, a challenge.

I hesitated, balanced on the knife’s edge between past and future, between running forever and standing my ground. Between the broken girl I’d been and the shattered woman I’d become.

Then I took his hand.

Not in surrender, but in acknowledgment of what we both knew: we were the same, carved from the same past, the same trauma. And whatever came next, we would face it together—terrible and beautiful in our shared monstrosity.

The storm raged on as we made our way back toward the cabin, his arm around my waist less for affection than to keep me upright on legs still trembling from exertion. But I didn’t pull away.

For the first time in fifteen years, I wasn’t fighting. I wasn’t surviving at all costs. I wasn’t hiding.

I was coming home.