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“They brought us together,” I rasp against Penelope’s throat, smearing her skin with my blood.

She moans, tilting her head back, and hikes her leg up around my hip to thrust her cunt against me. She doesn’t ask who. She doesn’t need to. Because I have no doubt she feels them in the darkness as well as me.

“I think you be right,” she pants. Then she grabs my hair in her fist and shoves me down to kneeling, my nose nestled between the seam of her legs.

“Now make me come,” she snarls.

26

PENELOPE

Ishouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t be out here in the woods, my legs spread, shoving my pussy into Victor’s face because if he doesn’t do something, I think I might fucking die.

I shouldn’t want him, much less need him. And I need him right now. I knew it the moment I saw the reflective light of his eyes watching me in the dark, that undeniable proof that I ran and he came after me anyway.

“Give me your knife,” he says, kissing over the scratchy fabric of leggings, his hands hoisting up the hem of my sweater.

“If you kill me, I’ll haunt you until you go into the ground for good,” I snarl, bucking my hips into his face.

Victor laughs. “Why the fuck would I kill you?” He pushes back against my grip on his hair so he can look up at me. “But you have clothing in the way of what I want.”

I pull on his hair, hard—a warning. An invitation to fight. He grins. “Where is it?”

“My purse.” I tilt my head to a patch of ferns where I dropped the purse along with my phone, the light still fanning up, giving just enough illumination for me to see Victor crawl over and dig out the knife. When he pulls it out of his holster, the blade shines silver, and I suck in my breath at how beautiful it is.

How beautiful he is, especially in the dark and the forest. A predator in his natural habitat.

I shouldn’t want him. But he’s the only one I fucking want.

I’ve spent the last hundred years trying to find another Mary, and the only thing that put a stop to it was you.

No one has ever said anything like that to me in my life. And the insane thing?

I believe him.

Victor slides up between my legs again, slicing up through my leggings with the practiced ease of any killer. The fabric makes a spidery tearing sound as it drags the hole open, revealing my silken panties to the night air. I thrust toward him, desperate to feel his mouth on my cunt.

“Careful,” he says warningly. “I have the knife this time, my love.”

My love. Forget the fucking knife. Those two words cut through me worse than any blade. I pull hard on his hair.

“Eat,” I snarl.

He laughs, and I feel it more than I hear it, a brassy rumble against my thighs.

Then I feel the cold steel of the knife sliding between the fabric of my panties and my aching pubis. The blade is millimeters from my clit. Less than that.

“Careful,” he breathes.

He slices outward, and my panties fall open to either side. There’s a moment where I think this might be it. That I ignored my instincts and he’s going to plunge that knife straight into my pussy and slide it up to my belly, and that’ll be the end of me. Another Mary, after all.

Instead, I hear a soft thump as the knife hits the ground.

And then Victor’s mouth is on my cunt.

He devours me whole, spreading my lips wide with ringers and then shoving his tongue up inside me to lap eagerly at my G-spot. He forces my legs wider, knocking me a little off balance, and I have to brace against the tree to keep from falling over.

The heat of his mouth consumes me, especially in contrast to the cold, smoke-scented air, and it’s so much easier to just lay my head back against the tree and give in to the pleasure of his mouth. I moan and tangle my fingers up in his hair to shove his face against my cunt like I’m punishing him. It felt like a betrayal when he told me about Mary in the car, but right now it doesn’t matter anymore, because she’s dead and I’m not.