Page 23 of Hunting Brooklyn (Stalkers in the Woods #5)

Chapter Twelve

Slade

S he doesn’t fight me now. Her resistance burned off in the pyre of what just happened.

Instead, Brooklyn clings to me in the aftermath, legs loosely slung around my waist, head lolling against my shoulder, relaxed for the first time since I first saw her on that trail.

Her skin is slick with salt and copper. Her hair is a flag of surrender, stuck to her cheek in drying ribbons of sweat and blood.

I stand in the heart of the forest, the taste of her still in my mouth, my own blood crusting my upper lip where she split it with that beautiful, stubborn skull.

The world is silent, the echo of her scream still bouncing off the pines.

She smells like sex, and violence, and the first clean snow of the year.

I take my time with her, carrying her the last two hundred yards to the cabin. No rush. The chase is over. She is mine, and nothing will ever change that. I want her to remember this: the slow, deliberate way I refuse to let her go.

Her breathing steadies as we get closer to cabin. I feel the hitch in her chest when she realizes I am not taking her to a pit, or a grave, but home. Her home now. Temporarily, anyway. Just until she surrenders her heart to mine.

The door is heavy, warped by the wet, but I bump it open with my hip and shoulder us both inside. I lost my mask somewhere in the woods, and quite frankly, I have no need for it, and I don’t miss it. It served it’s purpose in the hunt and now the woman who stole my soul is mine.

The warmth hits us first, the dry, pine-laced air from the fireplace. The living room is exactly as I left it: table set with two chipped mugs, boots drying on the rack. The only new thing is the coppery path of blood we leave from threshold to hearth.

I set her down in the chair nearest the fire, cradling her head so it doesn’t snap back and ruin what’s left of her. Her eyes flutter open. Blue as a mountain sky, ringed in white. The look she gives me is a howl without a sound.

“Stay still and relax,” I say, because I can’t help myself. “Don’t make me tie you again.”

She doesn’t answer, but I see her jaw set. The fight isn’t gone, just buried under the avalanche of endorphins and exhaustion. I want to peel it back out of her, someday. Not today.

I turn my back and head to the kitchen to fill a big bowl with water from the kettle, watching the steam spiral up like a ghost of all the things I could have done to her and didn’t.

Soon. I pour in some cold, swirl it, check the temperature with my knuckle.

Perfect. Grabbing a wash cloth, I set it in the bowl to soak before adding some epsom salts lying at the back of one of the kitchen cabinets.

When I look back, she hasn’t moved. Her legs are spread, bare and splattered with mud and come.

Her shirt—my shirt—is torn from the struggle, one breast half-exposed, nipple gone to a hard knot in the cold.

Blood trickles from her shoulder, a thin red line down to the crook of her elbow.

Her knees are wrecked, feet caked in dirt and blood.

Various cuts and bruises map her skin. Such a silly little fox.

Her hands rest in her lap, fingers twitching, not sure what to do.

I kneel in front of her, setting the bowl on the floor. My knees crack. She flinches, but doesn’t lean away.

“Give me your hand.”

She lifts it, slow as a dying animal. I take it in both of mine. Her fingers are sticky with sap and blood, the palm scored from where she cut it on the lamp and another neat line from the rock she smashed it on. I run the cloth through the water, wring it out, and start wiping the mess away.

It’s not an apology. It’s an act of possession. Every wound is fresh, every bruise in need of some care. I clean the gash in her palm first, dabbing until the dirt gives way to angry pink. I press a towel to the worst of it, then wrap it in gauze from the first aid kit on the side table.

She watches, barely blinking.

“I liked it when you sucked the blood,” she says. Her voice is raw, more rasp than sound.

I glance up. “Good.”

“Why did I like that?” She sounds scared, like she doesn’t know who she is.

Not bothering with an answer, I move to her knees, which are scabbed over with a dozen scrapes from where I pinned her on the forest floor. There’s still a pine needle stuck to the skin above her kneecap. I pick it off, hold it up for her to see, then flick it into the fire.

“You’re not going to stitch me up? That looks pretty deep,” she asks, eyes slitting with suspicion. “Don’t you want to keep me alive?”

“I want you to heal,” I say, voice measured. “You’ll scar, but you’ll remember why. Plus, it’s not worth stitching. Looks deep, but it’s not.”

She shivers—not from cold, but from the memory.

I work upward, following the map of her injuries. The bruise on her inner thigh is already flowering, a dark blue-black thumbprint where I grabbed her. I touch it and feel her body tense.

“Did I hurt you?” I say.

“You broke me,” she says. It sounds like a curse, but she doesn’t pull away.

“Next time, use the safe word.”

Her mouth twists, but she doesn’t ask what it is so she can use it. Good girl.

Cleaning her feet before standing to empty the bowl and pour a clean one, I head back and take my time on her upper body.

The torn shirt resists, but I strip it away, baring her entirely.

Her nipples are mottled red, one still glistening with the saliva I left behind.

The marks from my teeth on her neck are already darkening, a necklace of bruises to go with the one she actually wears.

I want to bite her again. Instead, I clean the dried blood from her shoulder, tracing the edges of the wound with my thumb. When she winces, I blow on it to numb the sting.

She hisses, then looks away. “I should hate you,” she says.

I rinse the cloth and wring it out until it’s just damp.

“I know,” I say. “But you don’t.”

That brings her eyes back to mine, wide and unguarded. She wants to argue, but I can see the truth in the way her thighs press together, the way her chest rises and falls under my gaze.

I kneel between her legs, drag the damp cloth up her thigh, over her hip, up her belly to her breasts.

I clean her with care that I’ve never possessed.

Something precious, or irretrievable. My hands linger on each bruise, each bite, until I am sure she feels them twice: once from the pain, once from the memory of pleasure.

She doesn’t look away the whole time. I wonder if she’s trying to memorize my face, or forget it entirely.

When I reach her neck again, I pause. The fox charm is still there, glinting in the firelight. I press my thumb to it, pinning it to her skin.

“You earned this,” I say. “You didn’t give up.”

“I never wanted it,” she says, but her voice is softer now.

I hold her gaze as I wipe the last smear of blood from her jawline, thumb tracing the corner of her mouth. There’s a cut there, from where my teeth broke the skin. I wipe it, and her lips part, involuntary.

I want to fuck her again, right here, right now, but that is not how you tend a wound. Not the first time. There’s a hierarchy to these things.

“I’ll be right back.” She’s trying to cover herself with her hands and it’s taking every ounce of self-control not to punish her for it. Why can’t she see what I see?

In the bedroom, I strip off my own shirt and grab pair of boxers from the trunk by the bed, then change my pants before heading out and handing them to her.

“Put these on,” I say.

She stares, suspicious. Makes no move to grab the clothes, but her nerves are showing. Her hands are trembling as she tries to hide her body from me. As if I haven’t seen it all and loved every moment.

“Now,” I add, just in case she needs the cue.

She slides the boxers up her legs, wincing as the waistband presses the bruise on her thigh.

“Come, let me help.”

I help her into the shirt, it’s grubby from the hunt, but I want her to wear it, to smell me.

She lifts her arms and I guide them through the sleeves, pulling the fabric down over her ribs.

The shirt is big, but she fills it out, her curves beautifully tight against the fabric.

I stifle the urge to run my hands up and down her body, but that would be counter-productive.

I’d have to strip her, fuck her senseless, and then restart the whole process.

Besides, she is exhausted and needs to rest before I destroy that cunt again.

“There,” I say, standing to admire the effect. “Almost civilized.”

She looks at herself, then at me. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you… nice, all of a sudden?”

I bend to her level, face inches from hers.

“I’m not nice,” I say. “I’m thorough. I want you in one piece, healthy, happy, mine. If I wanted a toy, I’d have bought a flesh-light. But I want you. Alive. Sharp. Scared. Whole.”

She doesn’t answer. Instead, she touches the fox charm at her throat, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger.

I watch her do it, and for a moment the world is silent except for the crackle of fire, the slow drip of water cooling in the basin, the twin heartbeats echoing between us.

The predator is gone, for now. In his place: a man who has what he wants, and plans to keep it.

I sweep the hair out of her face, let my fingers rest at the hollow of her throat, just over the fox.

“Mine,” I say, not needing to raise my voice.

She closes her eyes, shivers, and then—finally—nods.

That’s all the surrender I need.

She stays on the couch, arms hugging her knees, until the fire and the silence work their way beneath her skin.

It doesn’t take long for the cold to bleed from her bones, replaced by the dull, confused ache of hunger and shame.

I watch her, notice the changes: the way her shoulders hunch in my shirt, the tight pinch of her jaw, the tremor in her fingers as she presses them to her mouth to bite the skin along one knuckle.