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* * * * *

I start awake to a loud thump echoing through the dark.

I sit up, heart racing, and hold still, my ears probing the darkness and finding nothing.

It’s probably just a dream. Or residual trauma. You know, from being held hostage and threatened with a horrible, torturous death by men who definitely would rape me multiple times before murdering me.

And then probably rape me again afterward just for good measure.

Satisfied that the thump was just my terrible past bumping up against my present, I reach for the nightstand and grab my phone and make a note to find a therapist. That’s what a responsible adult would do. Process that shit. Move on.

Then there’s another sound.

Quiet. Almost nothing; the careful nothing that is actually something and sends my mind right into serial killer central.

I go still.

The therapist leaves my head, which is the exact opposite of what a therapist should do.

That bitch.

Then… there it is again — a faint metallic scrape, like a key that isn’t quite the right key being coaxed into doing something it doesn’t want to do. A click. Another scrape. The particular patient sound of someone who knows how to do this and has done it before.

The doorknob turns.

By itself.

The door opens.

I have my phone in my hand. One button — one — and I get Evan, or Breaker, or Rabid, or any of the Devils, and someone with actual fighting skills and probably a gun shows up and handles this before it becomes a thing. I know this. I am aware of it as a concrete, available option.

The best option.

What I should do.

What a responsible adult would do.

Then he steps through the doorway and the ambient glow from the streetlight outside catches his face, and I know exactly who it is.

Wraith.

Dylan-fucking-Mercer, who I haven’t seen in it-hasn’t-been-long-enough, who I used to love with a particular desperate stupidity that I am not proud of, who is more than partially responsible for the worst stretch of my life, who has a lot of nerve — a staggering amount of nerve — to pick the lock on my door at whatever the hell time it is in the middle of the night.

A spark sets something alight inside me. But the fire that moves through me is not fear.

It is incandescent vengeance.

I don’t call Evan.

I look at my phone in my hand, feel the weight of it, and throw it at his face as hard as I can.

“Eat shit, you needle-dicked asshat.”

It catches him square in the eye — my aim, for once in my chaotic disaster of a life, is perfect — and the sound it makes is this deeply satisfying dense thwack, like a rock hitting a melon, and Wraith makes a noise that is not a cool, composed, predatory noise at all. It is a surprised, pained, undignified noise, and he claps a hand over his eye, and for a moment he is just a man standing in my doorway with one hand over his face making wounded-animal sounds.

Yes.

I don’t wait.