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No.
Instead, the next thing I heard was the otherworldly sound of Thorn crying out in terror. I heard not a sound from Nox, and internal sirens of danger rang out loudly in my psyche. The worst had clearly happened, and I was back to square one. I had to get out of that window.
My palms were sweaty, and my arms and legs aggressively shook with the understanding that I was not going to be saved. Either I was going to save myself by climbing out the window, or I was going to die under the teeth and claws of a shifter drunk off his latest kill and hungry for flesh.
“Come on, come on, come on,please,” I urged the window as I returned to being propped between the window and the side of the tub, awkwardly trying to find enough leverage to shove against the glass. Finally, I felt the glass budge. It was just a smidge, but it was enough to give me a second wave of strength and energy to shove it the rest of the way up. I took a deep inhale and pressed upward as hard as I could just as the sweat gathering on my palms created a perfectly slick surface. As my weight leaned into my palms, I lost friction and fell straight forward, smacking my face on the windowsill with a catastrophic bang.
My face surged in pain as I felt blood gush from my nose and drip heavily onto the floor, staining the pearly white tile with a violent red puddle. I pulled off the oversized t-shirt I had been doing yoga in and tenderly held it to my face to try to catch both the blood and the tears I could feel welling up involuntarily. I curled up in the space between the bathtub and the wall as the sound of an approaching Ruse outside the bathroom continued.
I clenched my eyes shut as hard as I could as the bathroom door was smashed in, but as I heard him take a deep inhale and smack his lips like the smell wasappetizing, I knew I didn’t want to die like this—cowering on the floor with a ratty old high school t-shirt covering my face. As a last-ditch effort to advocate for myself and for the person I knew I wanted to be, I rose to my feet and turned to face my attacker.
Ruse was still stuck rotating between forms. Every limb of him looked like something else entirely, all put together like an action figure whose pieces were fished from the bottom of a forgotten toy box. His back was arched forward like a buffalo as he stood on two human legs. One of his arms was a long, thick tentacle while the other was something between a hulking lobster claw and a praying mantis’ bladed forearm. His face was back to his human form, the one that I’d met many times, with his long pin-straight white hair hanging heavy in front of his ears, both of his eyes still black as the night sky. I watched his form and his appendages rotate their appearance like a Vegas slot machine. They’d bubble and change. Pause. Then bubble and change again.
I braced myself for his attack, for him to unleash a fury on my comparatively frail human body, but it didn’t come. He just stood there for several moments, almost looking like he wassuffering. Something about the writhing, panting creature heaving over himself on the brink of exhaustion made me feel pity. So much of my self-preservation instincts screamed in protest as I decided to approach him with a calm, outstretched hand, trying to will him to relax.
“Shh,” I hushed as he brought his constantly evolving form to an even higher posture. “I don’t know what the hell is going on with you, but you’ve gotta take a breather andchill.”
I took another slow step toward him with extreme caution. I was Daniel in the den of lions fighting for my life—fighting for his, too, it felt like.
“No,” Ruse hissed before his jaw, shaped like a crocodile’s now, snapped down on my outstretched hand, giving me only half a second to withdraw before his teeth clenched together with a forceful crunch. I had made a grave mistake, but I didn’t want my final moments to be me cowering in fear, so I willed every shred of bravery I could find to help me stand my ground. The shifter took one giant step toward me, and I dropped my t-shirt that was still pressed against my face. Something about the visual of my face covered in blood, or perhaps the unencumbered scent flooding his nostrils, shoved him over the imaginary edge he was hovering over. Ruse pounced on me then, and I hit the tile hard, bouncing the back of my head against the ground.
My head rang from the impact, and I closed my eyes in pain. Ruse’s saliva dripped onto my chest, which was just barely covered with a lounge bralette, and I could feel the sticky-sweet drool dripping toward my clavicle as it ran down my breasts. The heat from Ruse’s breath covered my face, and the coppery smell of blood was strong. He pushed all his weight into me, but still never brought his teeth to my throat or his claws through the soft flesh of my stomach. I desperately wished he would just get to whatever he was going to do because the roller coaster of emotions as my guard rose and fell was almost as draining as battling the concept of my demise.
I forced my eyes open to get a visual on Ruse and found that he had settled on a stable form—at least from what I could see. Hovering just over my head was the rugged human face he defaulted to, and the cascade of pure white hair fell on either side of my head. I could feel one of his hands against my stomach holding me down, and it definitely felt human as well. His bottom half was heavy against the bare skin on my legs that my athletic shorts didn’t cover, and that half, I could tell, was definitely not human.
Ruse’s upper half was held so firmly against mine as he pinned me to the tile floor that I couldn’t lift my head to witness with my own eyes what I knew were thick tentacles writhing over my lower half, creeping slowly but surely toward my most erogenous area.
All my adrenaline burst from me at once as my body went into survival mode. I wriggled an arm free from under the weight of Ruse and bashed him in the mouth with the heel of my palm.
“There’s the fight I expected to see,” Ruse snickered as he licked at the tiny sliver of blood pooling at the center of his busted lip. “Though you should be thanking me for not slaughtering you and feasting on that—” His eyes rolled back as he took another deep inhale. “On thatsweet, sweet blood of yours.”
As he finished speaking, he gripped my jaw with one of his firm hands and sensually licked up my neck, chin, and over my lips, where the blood from my nose had poured out. Once his taste buds ran across the evidence of my injury, I could feel his cock—if that’s even what it was—harden, and I gasped at the sensation. It wasn’t like what I knew a human man’s felt like, and I tried to crane my neck to get a glimpse.
“I know you’re curious,” Ruse said in a whisper against my ear.
The sound of his voice and the feeling of his breath gently caressing my ear created a juxtaposition with his hands holding me down and his raging member rubbing against me. The opposing sensations sparked an ember of want within me.
“It’s why I haven’t killed you,” he laughed darkly. “At least not yet.”
“You can’t kill me,” I snapped venomously. “The others will end you, and besides,” I glared at him, trying to will as much fire in my eyes as possible. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“You’re not afraid of meyet,” Ruse said as he raised his posture, freeing both of my arms and sitting firm on my thighs, which were still trapped under his weight. “When I’m done with you, you’ll be screaming—begging like a baby for your boyfriends to rescue you, but they won’t.” With his weight off my chest, I was able to look down and see what was happening between his legs to feed my own curiosity, but he was covering himself with his hands, or struggling to.
I tried to hold my voice steady and pretended like I didn’t try to sneak a peek. “What did you do to them?”
“Oh, they’re both still alive and well,” he insisted. “They’re just both piss-pants scared of me when I’m like this.”
“Like what?” I asked through gritted teeth. “A psychopath?”
“Essentially,” he said as his grin spread across his face and his teeth pointed down like a wolf. “Killing, feeding, changing, hunting—the whole game of achieving a kill does wretched things to me. Makes me wild. Like the pre-kill Ruse and the post-kill Ruse are two different creatures.”
He reached over and snapped the front of my left bralette strap with one long clawlike nail while pinning me to the floor again by my neck. “Only two things can bring me down. More killing, or—” He flicked my stiffened nipple through what weak covering I was wearing. “Or fucking.”
As he spoke, his dark eyes gave me a look that soaked my panties. I had no control over my body’s reaction to his words, to the thought of what he was hiding from me between his legs, to the feeling of his powerful hands holding me down.
If my choices were to resist and let this creature kill me from my own slowly growing fear, or to give myself permission to give into these shameful desires and rise to his challenge, I knew exactly what I would choose. If Ruse was going to try to break me with his threats and his touch, he would have to do a lot worse than anything he’d done so far. I decided I was going to break him, first.
I was going to be the scariest motherfucker in this mansion.
