Page 8

8

Cleansing

The cabin’s silence felt electric as we stumbled through the door, rain-soaked and trembling. My body still burned where Jace had claimed me against that tree—bruises blooming on my thighs like violent watercolors, bite mark throbbing at the junction of my neck and shoulder, bark abrasions scoring my back in crimson trails. Physical evidence of surrender etched into my flesh.

Jace locked the door behind us with mechanical precision, despite his own wounds—the scars I’d carved now rain-washed and furious against his skin, glistening like fresh confessions. I stood dripping on the threshold, shock settling into my bones as I tried to process the sharp left turn my carefully plotted revenge had taken. How quickly predator became prey, and back again.

“You’re shivering,” he observed, voice rough but steady. Not concern. A clinical observation of my weakness.

I didn’t respond, watching with detached fascination as water pooled at my feet, each droplet a tiny hourglass counting down something I couldn’t name. The storm still raged outside, thunder punctuating the heavy silence between us like a heartbeat. Everything had changed in those woods. Everything and nothing.

“I’ll build a fire,” he said, moving toward the hearth as if the balance of power hadn’t just inverted between us—as if he’d never been my captive, as if I hadn’t been his for fifteen years. As if control had always rested in his scarred hands.

Maybe it had.

The thought burned through me, acid in my veins, unacceptable and unbearable. Seven days of calculated torture, and he had merely waited. Allowed it. Participated in my ritual of revenge while biding his time, watching me with those patient predator’s eyes.

While I watched him stack kindling with efficient movements, his back to me in a display of either absolute trust or supreme arrogance, a terrible clarity descended. My body still hummed with the aftershocks of our violent coupling in the forest, nerves raw and exposed, but my mind rebelled against the implications of what we’d done. What I’d allowed. What I’d wanted.

Fuck this.

I needed to be clean.

Without a word, I peeled off the remains of my shirt and jeans, letting them fall to the floor with a sodden slap. Jace turned at the sound, eyes tracking me with predatory focus as I stood half-naked in the cabin’s dim light, goosebumps rising on my skin—from cold or from his gaze, I couldn’t tell anymore.

“You need to get warm,” he said, gaze lingering on the marks he’d left on my skin, something possessive flashing in his expression. Something ancient and territorial that made my insides twist with both revulsion and want.

“I need to be clean,” I replied, voice hollow, stripped of everything but raw truth.

Understanding dawned in his eyes, followed by something darker, more knowing. “That’s not how it works, kitten. You know that.” The nickname slid between us like a blade, familiar and wounding.

I turned away, unable to bear the knowing in his gaze—the way he saw through me, always had. The bathroom beckoned—a sanctuary of sorts, a place to wash away… what? The forest? The past fifteen years? The girl I had been before Spider put a shotgun to Honey’s head and pulled the trigger? No—much further back than that. The dumb teenage girl who should have said no to the boy all the girls and women were dying to say yes to. The girl who believed Jace could love without destroying.

The bathroom door didn’t lock—I’d removed the hardware when preparing the cabin for Jace’s captivity, another detail in my meticulous planning that now seemed absurdly shortsighted. Add it to my list of catastrophic miscalculations. I stood beneath the shower’s spray in my remaining undergarments, letting scalding water sluice over me, turning my skin angry red, pain blooming everywhere the water touched.

As if heat and pressure could somehow scrub away what I’d become. What I’d always been, perhaps. A foolish girl perpetually blind to the one person on this earth I desperately needed to see clearly. Before I showed up at his clubhouse, I was certain. Focused. But with dawning horror over the past few days, I realized I may never be again. Clarity was luxury for those who hadn’t been twisted into darkness.

I didn’t hear the door open, but I felt the shift—molecules rearranging themselves around his presence, air particles bending to accommodate the gravity he exerted. When I opened my eyes, Jace stood on the other side of the shower curtain, his silhouette dark and imposing against the plastic, like a shadow come to life.

“Don’t,” I warned, voice wavering despite my attempt at firmness, the command paper-thin.

The curtain rings scraped against the rod—a metallic shriek of surrender—as he pulled it aside, stepping into the shower fully clothed, crowding me against the tiled wall until there was nowhere to retreat, nothing between us but steam and fifteen years of nightmares.

“You can’t wash it away,” he said quietly, voice barely audible over the pounding water, each word dropping between us like stones. “Believe me, I’ve tried.”

His clothes clung to his body like a second skin, emphasizing the lean muscle beneath, the scars I’d given him visible through the torn, wet fabric—my signature written in his flesh. Water beaded on his eyelashes, ran in rivulets down the planes of his face, catching in the hollow of his throat. He looked both vulnerable and dangerous—a contradiction that defined everything between us. Creator and destroyer. Salvation and damnation.

“I just want to be clean,” I insisted, hating the pleading note in my voice, the raw need. “Just for a moment.”

Something softened in his expression—not pity, never that, but recognition. “It doesn’t work that way, Naomi. The things they did to you, the things I did to you, the things you’ve done—they’re part of you now. Part of us. Carved deeper than skin.”

“There is no us,” I snapped, the denial automatic even as my body betrayed me, leaning almost imperceptibly toward his heat, muscle memory overriding survival instinct.

His laugh was soft, knowing, the sound crawling under my skin to nestle somewhere dangerous. “Say that again without your pulse jumping in your throat. Without your body remembering what happened in those woods.” His eyes dropped to where the water cascaded over my collarbones, following paths his fingers and mouth had traced hours before.

I shoved against his chest, the wet fabric bunching under my palms. “Get out.” The words emerged strangled, unconvincing even to my own ears.

Instead, he stepped closer, one hand bracing against the tile beside my head, the other coming to rest lightly on my hip. Not restraining. Anchoring. Claiming territory already surrendered.

“This isn’t about what happened in the forest,” he said, eyes never leaving mine, pupils dilated until only a thin ring of amber remained. “This is about everything. All fifteen years. You’re trying to wash it all away so you can be who you were before. My girl, my kitten, even back then you had claws. You were mine. You are mine.”

The accuracy of his assessment felt like a physical blow, stealing the breath from my lungs. “She’s dead,” I whispered, the confession torn from somewhere hidden. “They killed her.”

“No.” His thumb traced small circles on my hip, the gentle touch at odds with the intensity in his gaze, with the violence we’d done to each other. “She evolved. Transformed. Survived.”

“Into what?” I demanded, voice cracking like thin ice over deep water. “A psycho who kidnaps a man and spends a week carving her trauma into his flesh? Who gets wet watching him bleed? Who comes harder in the middle of a storm with dirt under her nails and tree splinters in her back than she ever did before?”

His smile was slow, predatory, something ancient and terrifying in its satisfaction. “Into someone who matches me. Who sees me. Who knows exactly what I am and isn’t afraid to be the same.”

“I am afraid,” I admitted, the confession torn from somewhere deep and rotting. “Not of you. Of this. Of still wanting this. Of what that makes me.”

“Good.” His hand moved from my hip to cup my face, thumb brushing my lower lip, calluses catching on sensitive skin. “Fear means you’re still feeling. Still alive. The dead don’t feel anything at all.”

The water continued to pound down, steam rising around us, creating a world apart from reality. In this cocoon of heat and moisture, the lines between captor and captive, predator and prey, villain and victim blurred beyond recognition. But which one was I now? Which one had I ever been?

“I should hate you,” I whispered, the words hanging between us like smoke.