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I’ve never encountered a human like this before, and it’s only heightening my attraction. Enough so that I can’t even feel guilty about it.

“I’ll kill you,” she snarls, bucking against the ground, grinding up the leaves and the pine needles and the dried-out ferns.

“Do you really want that?” I grab at her knife-wielding wrist with one hand and pin down her hip with the other, my body wedged between her legs so that I can feel the heat of her cunt. “I can smell what you really want right now.”

She freezes. We both freeze, actually, because I can not believe those words came out of my mouth. They’re true, of course, but I’m not supposed to notice something like that. I’m not supposed to be attracted to a Mary.

There’s something wild out here in the woods tonight, something making me act like this. I can feel it, lurking in the shadows.

“What I want is to kill you,” she snarls.

More heat surges between her legs.

“But then you couldn’t fuck me,” I tell her.

There it is. The truth. Not just her truth, which makes her blanch with embarrassment. But my truth. The truth I don’t want to acknowledge.

I want to fuck her. I don’t want to kill her and then kiss her chastely on the forehead. I want to know her, like I did the first Mary.

She’s a victim, I tell myself. She’s not for fucking.

But god, my cock is straining for her.

“What makes you think I want to fuck you?” she shoots back. I notice she’s gone still. No more squirming to get away. I press myself against her and rub my erection between the seam of her legs, acting on some instinct that seems to lie outside me. That presence in the woods, watching us.

It can’t be my family’s old gods. They abandoned me decades ago.

The victim clenches her jaw shut even as her eyes go wide and lust flares up into the dark, glimmering twilight.

“That,” I whisper, my breath warm in the mask. I don’t know why I’m doing any of this, but I can’t stop myself. Her arousal is as evident as mine, and I don’t want to let her go. “I can feel that.”

“Fuck you,” she snarls.

“Those are your choices,” I rasp, the words spilling out almost in a panic. “Fuck me or kill me.” I know she’s going to kill me. I hope she kills me. If she doesn’t, then I’m going to fuck her, and I’d rather spend a few months in the void than deal with whatever this terrible confusion is. This horrible pull I have toward her, this Mary-who’s-not-a-Mary. This Penelope.

All I know is I can’t kill her. I don’t know why, but killing her feels wrong. The idea of fucking her feels right, but I can’t do that. I don’t fuck victims.

Better then to just let her win. I just hope she knows where to stab me with that knife to get it over with quickly.

She stares up at me, breathing heavily. Penelope. Her name sings on my thoughts as I let her wrist go and then slide my weight off of her. She reacts immediately—jerking up into a defensive crouch, her knife pointed at my chest. Her eyes bore into my mask.

I breathe out, thinking of the dirt.

When she leaps on me, I go limp, letting her knock me back into the damp autumn leaves. She straddles me at my waist, her hot cunt searing through our clothes, and desire surges into my belly. I tell myself I will not hold onto this image of her while I drift into the void, her wild eyes and tangled hair and sweat-sheened skin, even in the cold.

Kill me, I think, even as my cock strains upward, desperate to be inside her.

Penelope shoves the knife up against my throat, just under the place where the gas mask seals against my skin. The blade is cold, the way blades always are. But she doesn’t split my skin open. Just stares down at me, her chest heaving, her lips parted, her skin flushed. The scent of her arousal is everywhere.

I wait, my cock throbbing behind the cushion of her ass. When she shifts forward, it tugs on the fabric of my jeans, and the pressure against the sensitive tip of my cockhead makes me gasp.

She’s still got her knife to my throat. She’s still staring down at my mask, like she’s trying to see through it to get a glimpse of my face.

I brace for death.

It doesn’t come, though. Instead, she lifts her hips, snakes her hand between her legs⁠—

And unzips my fly.