Page 175 of What We Burn

“Motherfucker!”

I don’t hear it. I feel it, tearing out of my chest, and the blade is already moving. Into his side. Out. In. His throat. His chest. Out. In. In. In.

This is for them.

For the women at the rest stops.

For the women who reported and were ignored.

For every woman who thought she was safe.

This is for me.

Never again.

I’m not even aiming anymore. I’m just stabbing, screaming, his blood hitting my face in hot arcs, his body jerking with every impact, and underneath my screaming there’s a sound he’s making—wet, bubbling, wrong⁠—

I stop.

The knife stays raised. My arm trembling.

His one good eye is open. Staring at me. Wide with horror. It blinks. Once. His mouth works, blood bubbling at the corner, and nothing comes out but a sound like a tire deflating.

“Dale,” I whisper. “Can you hear me?”

The eye doesn’t answer.

Is he dead? I don’t know. His chest might be moving. It might not. There’s so much blood I can’t tell—it’s on the carpet, the bedspread, my hands, my clothes, soaking through to my skin. I can’t tell if the pulse hammering in my ears is mine or his.

Then he rocks forward.

“Oh no—no, no⁠—”

I drop the knife and reach up to catch him, both palms flat against his chest, pushing. Squelching. He’s two hundred and fifty pounds of dead weight and gravity doesn’t negotiate. He tips like a felled tree and lands on top of me, full length, crushing me into the carpet.

The air leaves my lungs in one hot gust.

His face is against my neck. His blood pools beneath us, sticky and warm. I shove at his shoulders, his chest, his hips—nothing moves him. My legs are pinned. My ribs are compressed. Every breath I manage is shallow and smells like copper and him.

Okay. Okay.

I just killed a man. Again. But this time there are no five masked men to pull me off him. No Knox to make a body disappear. No Holden to control the scene. There’s just me, a dead rapist using me as a mattress, and a motel room that looks like an abattoir.

“Fuck,” I wheeze at the ceiling. “The guys are going to be so mad at me.”

FORTY-FIVE

MILO

Iopen my eyes the second the front door clicks shut.

Here’s the thing about my kitten: she thinks I’m the easy one. The fun one. The guy who comes four times and passes out like a golden retriever after a trip to the dog park.

Honestly? Fair assessment. I sell that brand hard.

But what kitten doesn’t know—what none of them fully appreciate—is that my brain doesn’t have an off switch. Never has. It’s why I don’t do drugs. I’m already running at a frequency that would fry a normal person’s circuitry. I’m high on life and have an apparently superhuman capacity for semen production, and no amount of post-orgasm exhaustion is going to knock me out when the woman I love has been googling “rest stop locations US-101 corridor” and “how to minimize blood splatter” on her phone for the last week.

She thought she was being subtle. Bless her murderous little heart.