“Oh, God.” I moaned.
My body tightened. Quickened. Pressurized.
His mouth found my ear, biting my lobe all while his haggard breathing revealed how lost he was in me.
Gem no longer existed.
Just this creature he’d created. A creature who only existed for this manic kind of pleasure.
His fists landed by my ears, squelching into the mud as he rode me harder, deeper, brutal and unkind.
And that was my trigger.
The release of an orgasm that convulsed and cracked me. That didn’t just clench my core but annihilated it. It poured gasoline in my womb and blazed with shooting stars down my pussy.
I came around his cock.
I came for a man who I didn’t even know his name.
I came harder and more spectacularly than I’d ever come before.
His back tensed. His hips switched from fucking to rutting.
He chased my release. He howled as he buckled over me, crashing his mouth to mine, choking me with his tongue, feeding every inch he had into my body.
His spurts within me went on and on.
He well and truly claimed me in that storm, ensuring I had no other master, lover, or friend.
I was his.
Entirely and irrevocably.
For that night only.
CHAPTER TWENTY
HOW DID ONE EXPLAIN insanity?
Was it doing something again and again, expecting different results?
Was it believing in something completely false and refusing to see the truth?
Was it surviving hell and thinking you deserved happiness at the end of it?
Or maybe...it was this.
This madness smeared in mud. This woman who’d not only concussed me but also made me forget. Forget that sex had always meant shame and poison, molestation and abuse. There were places on my body I could no longer touch nor look at because the memories were always there, just lying in wait to drown me. Scars did their best to whisper what I’d done and been subjected to.
Yet...
Her.
She’d given me something no one else ever had.
She’d given me peace in her violence. Connection in her fight. She’d met my rage with her own, not just letting me fuck her but fucking me right back. Forcing me to take her harder. To snatch up every morsel she offered. To let myself feel for the first time in my sorry excuse of a life.
Feel wanted. Feel desired. Feel powerful when I’d been so successfully stripped of everything since I was a kid.
Wedged on my elbows, looking down at blond hair now caked with mud and a pretty face now streaked with rain and midnight, I struggled to stay with her.
To not let my past sweep me away from the most perfect, most wonderful moment I’d ever had.
She didn’t move, even though most of my weight pinned her into the dirt. Her pussy continued to ripple around my cock, echoes of her pleasure.
Pleasure.
She’d found pleasure...with me.
She’d hurt me like they had. She’d left wounds on my body like them. But she’d given me so fucking much in return. She’d shared herself with me. We’d burned together. We still burned together—our skin pressed tight, our heartbeats quick, our bodies twitching with the aftermath.
And I didn’t know how to deal with that.
Closing my eyes, I shook my pounding head. My temples felt as if pokers stabbed inside me, drilling into my skull. My forehead had swollen, a throbbing bump thanks to her whack with the shovel.
She cleared her throat, wrenching my eyes open again.
Only this time, it wasn’t the girl who’d trespassed in my valley. Not the woman brave enough to fight me—truly fight me. To meet me in the madness and battle for her life or mine.
It wasn’t Gemma.
But Quell.
The girl who might’ve grown up to look like Gemma with her blond hair and hazel, flickering eyes. A girl who’d wiped away my tears after I’d been raped. A girl who I’d rocked as she’d sobbed in my arms. A girl who’d been utterly destroyed, like all of us.
And fuck, the guilt.
The motherfucking guilt...it crushed me, ravaged me.
I was supposed to keep her safe.
Instead, I’d fucked her in the dirt all because she’d dared stand up to me.
No!
Withdrawing from her wet heat with a wince, I swooped to my feet and almost tripped over my sodden pants still clinging to my ankles.
My heart rate exploded.
Trapped.
You’re trapped.
A snarl crawled up my throat as I bent and tore my feet out of the slacks and threw them as hard as I could. They slapped against a tree, tangling in the branches in the rain. Needing to move, to assure myself I was free, I paced.
I stalked the clearing and dug hands into my hair. I massaged a head that was full of rocks and cotton. Sharp edges and foggy corners, memories and realities, heavens and hells.
Nyx’s blood oath came and went. Wes’s suffering. Jareth’s conditioning. Elise’s initiation. Zanik, Maliki, Sarez, and Neo. Every Fable kid entered my mind and reminded me why I was alone. Why people were dangerous. Why this woman, who’d successfully made me hope, was the most dangerous of them all.