He grunted as I wounded him.
He raised his hands to protect his face as I slashed like a mad woman, no thought to my strikes just that I had to keep hurting him to hold him at bay.
“Stop!” he growled.
“Let me go!”
“Never.” His eyes blazed. “You’re mine to do whatever I want with.”
“How wrong you are!” I swiped harder, faster, driving his head into the mud.
“For the love of fucking God.” His hips shot upward, unbalancing me. “You little fool, you can’t win!” He tipped me.
It was my turn to roll sideways, moaning in pain as his heavy weight sandwiched me into the wet dirt.
Mud painted both of us.
Our hair was caked in it. Our eyelashes and cheeks, our throats and our souls. Every inch filthy and ruined.
Once again, our eyes locked in the raining gloom.
And once again, the world shifted.
A cosmic shift.
A transcendent punch that said he was more than just a bastard. He could be more to me than any other male, and how absolutely tragic that somewhere in his broken soul, some part of him spoke to some part of me, whispering that we could be perfect for each other.
That this blistering, bulldozing connection wasn’t fate but fucking lunacy.
“Get off me!” I turned mad. I fought like a feral wolf.
And his blood ran quicker from my keys.
His blood showed he was human. His anger revealed he was not. He was both monster and man, and suddenly, I wasn’t cold anymore.
I was hot and heavy and so full of rage, so pissed off at life and luck that I screamed. I screamed to expel the unfairness, the grotesqueness, the rightness even while we dueled to the death.
“Die!” I screamed the single word. The word he’d whispered to me as his fingers had suffocated my body when we’d first met. Back then, in his house of horrors, he’d won. Out here, in the rain of shame, I would.
“Fuck’s sake!” He arched away, ducking away from my keys, doing his best to subdue me. “Just stop!”
We rolled again. We fought faster, crueler.
“I’ll never stop because I won’t let you hurt me!”
“Your very presence crucifies me!”
“Too fucking bad!”
We both lost any rules and guidelines of how a man and woman were supposed to treat each other. He grunted as my knee landed in his ribs. I moaned as his hand pulled my hair. We groaned as we rolled and tumbled, kicked and bruised.
We panted and gasped, one winning, the other losing, the roles reversing with each breath.
Until finally, he played dirty.
He slapped me, making my head ring. Then, in a wave of power, he rolled me until I slammed onto my back. His legs clamped over my legs, bringing his hips hard against me. His arms shoved mine away, giving him a heartbeat’s chance to grab my throat.
The second his fingers wrapped around my neck, I lost something inside me.
Sanity?
Humanity?
The very core of who I was.
He wanted to take my life?
Well, I would take his pain with me.
My hands shot downward while his squeezed tight around me.
My fingers dived between us, unzipping his soaking trousers and slipping into the damp heat of him.
I wrapped both hands around his cock and balls. My right around his hard shaft, my left around the soft vulnerability of his testicles.
And I motherfucking squeezed.
I squeezed as hard as he squeezed my throat.
He buckled over me.
He strangled a cry.
His fingers loosened around my neck.
And then, as if all of this had been some twisted, tangled foreplay, raw, savage desire blackened his face.
There was no pause.
No thinking.
His mouth slammed against mine.
His tongue speared past my lips, bringing rain and pain, mud and darkness.
His fingers switched from strangling me to clutching me as if I was his savior and seducer all in one.
My mind blanked.
My fingers continued to torture him, but his kisses were a different kind of torment. He kissed me as if he was the one suffocating. He bit my lip and swept his tongue deep into me—tasting me, feeding me his need—as though kissing me was the only thing he lived for.
I choked on his lust.
I twisted his cock and fisted his balls.
I delivered agony to him.
And all he did in retaliation was kiss me.
He raked his fingers through my mud-soaked hair and opened his mouth so wide, he poured everything into me. Every inch of his tragedy. Every second of his trials.
He gave me all of him.
He tilted his head and stroked my unwilling tongue with his, but it wasn’t until a warm droplet kissed my cheek instead of cold rain that whatever mania infected him infected me.
A tear.
A single tear from a murderer.
A man who I held by the balls. A man who I squeezed so damn hard he’d probably never have children. And instead of striking me. Instead of strangling me like he’d tried to do so often, he surrendered.