The words slice deep, but the blaze in my chest leaves no space for pain. I stalk closer, looming over her, making sure she feels the weight of what stands before her. My voice drops, low and dangerous. "Yes."
She doesn’t recoil. Instead she rises, the blanket sliding from her shoulders to the floor. Her palm whips across my face with a force that rings throughout the cabin. The sting is immediate, leaving heat across my cheek before I can react.
The crack reverberates through the cabin, a brutal reminder of her defiance. My head jerks to the side, skin searing fromthe strike. I straighten slowly, the sting fusing with the storm already inside me. Her chest heaves, her eyes blaze with fury, her lips parted as if daring me to push further. A dark tide rises within, rage and hunger tangled with obsession, mutating into a brutal need that threatens to consume us both.
I seize her face in both hands and crush my mouth to hers. The kiss is brutal, searing, a clash of teeth and breath that tastes like fury and possession. Her lips part against mine, and I taste myself still lingering on her tongue, the raw reminder of what she gave me moments ago.
Caryn pushes at my chest, her palms pressing with desperate strength, yet a fractured moan escapes her lips, betraying the fight she clings to. I seize that sound, drinking it down, forcing her to face how completely I have already taken hold of her. Her trembling only sharpens the ache inside me, fueling the hunger that rages to consume her.
My hands slide from her jaw to her throat, holding her there, not strangling but keeping her bound beneath my touch, a visceral reminder that she is caught, that escape is no longer hers to claim.
I tear my mouth from hers before the hunger drags me past the edge, chest heaving as I press my forehead against hers. Her breath mingles with mine, ragged and unsteady, her lips swollen and damp from the force of my kiss.
Her eyes blaze into mine, wide with fury, yet behind the fire flickers something raw and unguarded, a trembling spark of need she does not want me to see. The taste of her, mingled with the lingering salt of my release on her tongue, clings to me and feeds the maelstrom rising inside. Every heartbeat dares me to claim more, to drown us both in the fire in which we already burn.
“You don’t get to walk away from this,” I whisper, voice rough with restraint. “Not from me. Not now.”
Her breath shudders as she wrenches back, clutching the blanket to her chest like flimsy armor against the live wire still sparking between us. The blanket trembles with her grip, her knuckles white, her body shaking from more than cold. Fury burns in her gaze, but beneath it smolders the undeniable heat of need she cannot extinguish.
I watch the conflict ripple through her, every line of her body caught between defiance and surrender, and I allow it, stepping back just enough to remind her that distance is only what I grant. For now.
The wind howls against the cabin walls, low and hungry. I glance toward the window. Snow swirls in thick sheets, heavier than before, battering the glass. The mountain groans with it, alive and restless. Another storm is rolling in, worse than the last. I can feel it in my bones, in the way the air tightens, in the way the fire struggles against the draft.
We’re not leaving this mountain anytime soon. The knowledge sits heavy on my chest like a sentence carved in ice. The storm has sealed us in, and the knowledge grinds through me with the certainty of a trap closing shut.
Enemies prowl in the dark, Brenner is secure in the woodshed, and Caryn’s eyes sear into me with defiance and need. The air between us vibrates with danger. The real tempest isn’t outside but here between us, building with every look, every breath, every silent promise of impact.
13
CARYN
The cabin holds its breath. The last thing he said still scrapes across my skin. The true storm is not in the sky but here. The walls creak as the wind presses against the logs. The window glass trembles. Snow stacks against the door like a barricade built by a ruthless hand. I tuck the blanket closer, not for warmth, but to keep from flying apart.
I taste him when I swallow. The memory of my knees on the floor flashes through me, heat and humiliation tangled with a need that will not release me. My thighs tighten at the memory, a restless ache that betrays me. I hate the honesty of it. I hate that part of me is still trembling from the way he kissed me after I hit him, how my body arched toward him, wanting more.
He could have taken me then, buried himself inside me while the storm raged, and the worst part is that I would have opened for him, my body welcoming him. But he didn't. That restraint feels like another method of control, and the ache it leaves feels like punishment.
I tell myself to stand. I tell myself to speak first. He moves before I can. He crosses to the door, listens, returns to the fire, and stands over me with a look that could pin a storm in place. I brace for orders. None come. Only the steady scrape of hisbreath, the rasp of wood settling, the roof timbers complaining as the weight above grows heavier. The mountain tightens its grip.
"Say it," he tells me, voice low. "Admit why you came."
I shake my head, throat raw as the truth claws its way up. My body betrays me with a throb low in my belly, heat rising with the memory of the night he pulled me out of darkness. "You know why. You saved me once. I wanted to see if you were real, if the ghost that haunted me was made of flesh I could touch, a man I could want."
"That's not all."
I hate that he is right. I drag in air, trying to hold the words back, but they come anyway. "I thought that if I found you, the noise in my head would stop. I thought a face would tame the shadow." I force myself to meet his eyes. "I was wrong."
The couch sinks slightly as he sits beside me. He does not touch me. The restraint lights a fire in my chest that is not rage. I should be shouting. Instead I am confessing to the man who bound my wrists and held my head while he used my mouth for his pleasure. The thought should drown me. It doesn't. It steadies me.
"I keep asking myself if you forced me," I say, each word a step across ice. "In your kitchen. On your couch. In your bathroom. I replay it, frame by frame. I should be able to hate you cleanly. I can't. I can't say you raped me. If I'm being honest, each and every time, somewhere deep down inside I wanted it. Even when I fought you, I wanted it. I'm not sure what that makes me, but I'm pretty sure it's nothing I should be proud of."
He turns his head, and the fire throws lines of light across the hard planes of his face. For a fleeting instant the hardness softens, a trace of something gentler surfacing before he masks it again. "It makes you honest."
My laugh catches. "It makes me lost."
"You can't be lost, I found you besides. You can be lost, found and honest."
Silence grows, thick as wool. The storm lays another cold hand across the roof. Somewhere outside a tree groans and then settles. When I asked Zeb about the men he explained Brenner was in the woodshed, trussed up and waiting, and the other man was dead and lying out in the snow. The images jab me with a guilt I did not expect. I should care more about them than I do. My guilt is that somehow, inexplicably, I led them to Zeb's doorstep. I should care less about the man at my shoulder than I am coming to realize I do.
