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“Now what?” she says.

“We wait out the storm.” I want to sit on the bed beside her. Want to breathe in her scent again. The idea of killing Nicholas Wolrath has me antsy. Excited, actually, and I keep thinking about the way Penelope slid down on my cock while she held a knife to my throat. How it was better than killing her, in that moment.

My blood is up, that’s the problem. Despite the snowstorm blowing in outside, my body is burning me alive.

“I would have been in Clifwell by now,” she says, dropping onto her back again. I don’t move from my spot by the window, even though the dry, sickly heat from the vent makes the bloodlust worse. “If you hadn’t boobytrapped my car.”

“I suppose I should apologize for that.”

Penelope laughs. “I genuinely didn’t expect you to.”

“It’s the polite thing to do.”

“Oh, so you’re not really sorry, then?” She smiles coyly, like she already knows the answer. No, of course I’m not sorry. I’m actually glad it happened, glad I was able to sink into her, to bite at her skin, to feel something other than numbness and bloodlust for the first time in decades.

“No, I’m not,” I say. “I kind of liked how things turned out.”

Penelope’s eyes glitter. I can’t read her expression, which is strange and flat and mask-like. But I can read the emotions she’s trying to hide. The caution, the little wriggling worm of fear.

The desire.

It pulses in time with my own desire, which is also knotted and confusing, the reason why I feel so off-kilter. Penelope’s not Mary. But looking at her reminds me of how it felt to look at Mary. Another human woman who isn’t afraid of me, even though this one knows what I am and where I come from.

Plinking against the window. The snow’s falling harder, churning on the wind. We really did just make it in time.

It’s freezing outside.

It’s boiling inside.

And I feel like I’m going to erupt out of my skin if I don’t do something. And since I can’t kill Penelope⁠—

Won’t kill Penelope

—I do the only other thing I can.

I stalk away from the window, crawl onto the bed, grab her face between my hands, and kiss her.

13

VICTOR

She doesn’t stab me with that knife of hers, which I know is still on her person somewhere. I kind of expected it, honestly. Maybe even kind of hoped—not that I particularly want to die anymore. Not with a mission waiting on the other side of the snowstorm.

She doesn’t stab me, though. Nor does she push me away. She kisses me back, moaning a little into my mouth as her tongue presses against mine. I didn’t actually kiss her properly when we were in the woods yesterday; it was a different kind of foreplay that got my blood up.

That got her blood up, too. The fighting in the cabin, the knife at my throat. It was almost like fucking a Hunter.

Heat surges into my cock, up through my belly, into my chest. I shove her down on her back with a roughness I never used on Mary, a roughness that makes my jaw ache. Penelope squirms beneath me, our mouths still devouring each other, and I shove my thigh up between her legs, pinning her down. Even through her pants, her pussy’s like a furnace.

“Fuck!” She breaks the kiss and pushes me up, although she doesn’t try to throw me off her. “You shouldn’t be so good at that.”

“Why?” I don’t know why I ask. I don’t want to talk, not now. I want to consume her. And so before she can answer, I scrape my teeth along her neck and then bite down. She groans and grinds down on my thigh.

“You’re a psycho that lives in a gas station in the middle of nowhere.” The words come out jagged and breathless. “You slashed my tires and locked me in a fucking cabin.” Her spine arches, pressing her breasts into my chest. I keep biting at her neck, running my tongue over the flutter of her pulse, which is getting faster with every word she speaks, just like her cunt is getting damper. “You were going to murder me.”

“All that’s exciting to you,” I mutter against her skin, running my hand up along the curve of her waist. “Isn’t it?”

I squeeze my hand around her breast, perhaps a little too roughly. Or not. Penelope groans and grabs me by the back of my head and then kisses me again, jamming her tongue into my mouth with an eager, hungry forcefulness. She rocks her hips, riding my leg, her blood quickening toward an orgasm.